Erdogan seeks to create the image of an Islamic civilization on the rise once again with the Turks acting as the vanguard of this revival.

Giulio Meotti The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books.. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary. More from the author ► The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books.. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has a great passion for mosques. Since he took power in Turkey, Mr. Erdogan has built 17,000 Islamic prayer sites. The largest in the world stands on the Camlica Hill, dominating the Asian side of Istanbul, where the East, in the words of Cocteau, extends to Europe “its old bejeweled hand”.

The Turkish president is committed to the construction of mosques in European capitals as well.



In the words of Erdogan, “the minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks.”

Erdogan seeks to create the image of an Islamic civilization on the rise once again with the Turks acting as the vanguard of this revival. Ten mosques have been financed by the Turks abroad, from Mali to Moscow; five of them in the past year. Ten more are in the planning stage, including one in Cambridge, UK.

Next summer, Mr. Erdogan will be in Amsterdam at the opening of the famous “Westermoskee”, the mega mosque in the Dutch city. 2,500 people will pray there every Friday. For twenty years the work has gone on among lots of controversy, especially after the Netherlands was shocked by the murder of Theo van Gogh. The minaret of 42 meters will dominate the Amstel River that traverses Amsterdam. “It will be the most beautiful mosque of Europe”, proudly says Selemi Yuksel, one of those in charge of it.

Recently, Erdogan financed the largest mosque in the Balkans in Tirana, before flying to the US to inaugurate a mega mosque in Maryland. In Gaza, Erdogan has personally pledged to rebuild Palestinian Arab mosques damaged during the war between Israel and Hamas and used by the terrorists to fire rockets into Israel.

The Turkish government is also financing thirty places of worship in Switzerland. In Bucharest there is a controversy about the great mosque that the Turks are funding in the Romanian capital.

To build these mosques, at home as abroad, Erdogan has expanded the Diyanet, the Ministry of Religious Affairs of Turkey, which has a budget of two billion euro, equal to twelve ministries combined, and 120,000 employees (they were 72 thousand in 2004).

As revealed this week by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Turkey controls 900 mosques in Germany. These mosques and imams have a big influence on German public opinion (see Jan Boöhmermann’s case, the comedian on trial for offending Erdogan).

In December, the Qatari television Al Jazeera screened a film on the “Mosque of West Amsterdam”. A pair of Dutch elderly persons passes in front of the building under construction and says, laughing: “It is beautiful. Our church is closing”. And since Erdogan also has a great sense of irony, the Turkish president decided to build the mega mosque in Amsterdam copying the famous Cathedral of St. Sophia, that remote sentinel of Western civilization, the heart ripped from Christianity when Instanbul fell into Turkish hands in 1453.

In the words of Erdogan, “the minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks.” Europe is the new land of conversion.

Why not start building a mega mosque in Vienna too, where the Turks were defeated by a Christian army in 1683?