Where Does Erdogan Leave Off and ISIL Start?

"We were just walking up to the station and there was a loud bang and a guy, someone, crashed a car and took some pedestrians out."
"They were just laying there and then the whole crowd just surged around the corner by the gate just opposite Big Ben. A guy came past my right shoulder with a big knife and just started plunging it into the policeman."
"I have never seen anything like that. I just can't believe what I just saw."
Rick Longley, London, England

"As part of long established and well-rehearsed plans, Parliament was locked down and the Met responded in line with our plans for a marauding terrorist attack."
"That response included uniformed and specialist trained firearms officers."
Mark Rowley, head of counter-terrorism, Metropolitan Police Service, London

Nearby, police could be seen holding a gun to a man on the cobbles inside the grounds of the palace. BBC

"Turkey is not a country that can be pushed and shoved, whose honour can be toyed with, whose ministers can be ousted, whose citizens can be dragged on the ground."
"These developments are being watched in all corners of the world. If you continue this way, tomorrow no European, no Westerner anywhere in the world will be able to step onto the streets safely, with peace of mind."
"The European Union is provoking] a struggle between the cross and crescent."
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President of Turkey

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ramps up his anti-European rhetoric on Wednesday, warning that the safety of Western citizens could be in peril if European nations persist in what he described as arrogant conduct.   (Yasin Bulbul / The Associated Press) 

If anyone ever doubted the malevolent mind of Turkey's president -- complacently viewing Turkey as the portal from Europe to the Middle East, a former Islamist hegemonic power known as the Ottoman Empire, ruling over the Islamic world that transitioned at the turn of the last century into an Islamic-style democracy bridging the gap between East and West, Islam and Christianity, Sharia and western justice, secularism and sectarianism -- his threats against a European civil-political-trade coalition that his nation aspires to join, should make it abundantly clear his nation represents an ill fit for NATO.

Turkey, under the Islamist governance of the Justice and Development party led by Erdogan is a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, an admirer of the Brotherhood's terrorist offshoot Hamas, a partner of Iran, and a more discreet supporter of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. It has not been beyond Erdogan and his minions to threaten Europe and blackmail it into submission for fear he will unleash the release of additional tens of thousands of Syrian refugees to breach the shores of a Europe already inundated with earlier floods of migrants and refugees.

This is a leader whose irascibility and volatile temperament is set aflame time and again when he sees his plans foiled. He views Turks who have lived for generations in Germany, Holland, France, United Kingdom and elsewhere as loyalists not to the countries in which they are now citizens but to Turkey. He intervenes in the affairs of other countries, insisting that expatriates have rights consonant with Turkish values. And in his rage with Europe, he has advised Turks living abroad to practise jihad through increasing the numbers of children they bear, to overwhelm their host countries.

He incites Turks to protests and to violence against the governments to whom their loyalty, as citizens of Europe and elsewhere should take priority, based on his apoplectic rage over foiled plans to convince expatriate Turks to vote in a referendum that would hugely expand the powers he holds as president or Turkey, further enfeebling its fading democratic values. His conflict with his own Kurdish population infamously pits Turks against that significantly-sized minority whose aspiration is to achieve a sovereign land mass on their own authentic heritage geographic region.

While other democratic nations express their solidarity with the United Kingdom after the terrorist attack that killed three innocent people and injured up to 40 others, many of them foreign visitors to London, some critically wounded, Erdogan crows that Europe has brought this type of terrorism on itself by failing to acknowledge Turkey's greatness and Erdogan's superior position as a leader of a great nation entitled to expectations of appeasement and agreement with all of his demands.