Turkey

Palestinian news sources reported earlier this month that Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised $300 million to the Gaza-based terrorist organization Hamas. If true, this pledge would cover nearly half of Hamas’s reported $769 million budget next year, and would make Turkey its primary benefactor.

An interesting bit from White House reporter Tangi Quéméner's latest pool report from the G-20 in Cannes, France:

The soft-Islamist Turkish government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development party (known by its Turkish initials as the AKP) has expansive foreign-policy ambitions.

Russia and China’s October 4 veto of a U.N. -Security Council resolution on Syria elicited a strong response from U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice. “The United States is outraged,” said Rice, “that this Council has utterly failed to address an urgent moral challenge and a growing threat to regional peace and security.” 

Jerusalem—Jeffrey Goldberg reported last week that former defense secretary Robert Gates thinks that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “ungrateful” for all that Washington has done for Israel. The purpose of the story, leaked by senior administration officials, is to blame Netanyahu for the rift in U.S.-Israel relations.

A bipartisan group of members of Congress has written a letter to Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, asking to "help work out a mechanism with Israel to allow legitimate humanitarian assistance to go to Gaza without provoking a needless confrontation."

Turkey is a member of NATO, and as such might have been expected to participate fully in the military campaign to curb Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s brutal repression of his rebellious subjects. But from the beginning of international talks on Libya, the “soft-Islamist” Ankara government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Justice and Development  party (AKP) has followed an ambivalent course. Rather than joining in the anti-Qaddafi effort, Erdogan has offered a series of unhelpful “alternatives” to it.

Speaking to more than 10,000 supporters in Duesseldorf on Sunday night, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was once again the source of some controversy across Germany when he called on his “compatriots” – many of whom hold German passports and were born there – to strongly resist assimilation and to make sure that their children master Turkish before they learn German.

Israelis have always lamented that Moses led the ancient Israelites to the one patch of land in the Middle East bereft of energy resources. It turns out the sea offered more promise. At the end of December, a huge natural gas discovery was confirmed in the Eastern Mediterranean inside Israel’s territorial waters. Once referred to as an “energy island” that not only lacked energy reserves itself but was also cut off from the huge energy resources of the nearby Arab nations, Israel may well become over the next decade an energy exporter.

Foreign leaders, rivals and allies, often find it useful to take anti-American positions, but Turkish prime minister Recep Tayip Erdoğan has taken the rarest of steps in threatening to sue the U.S. State Department in both national and international courts for defamation. At issue is the insinuation, laid out in U.S. diplomatic cables purloined by WikiLeaks, that Erdoğan is corrupt.

Lee Smith writes in Tablet:

Some U.S. policymakers believe that Turkey is the future of Islamic democracy and that no political institution better exemplifies the desired hybrid of Western practice and religious values than the country’s ruling Justice and Development Party.