Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president and the country’s most famous stand-up, has confessed he feels “isolated’ politically but world leaders actually envy him because he says what he thinks. If that is not enough to challenge the best psychologist in the world, he also stated, “I don’t care about being alone in the eyes of the world. What matters is how the people view me,” referring to voters who he thinks are thrilled at their leader being snubbed. The Turkish Cihan News quoted him as telling journalists during a tour of Latin America:
We saw [how people see me] during the presidential election that people sided with me. And there’s no isolation when you consider other countries’ people as well.
Maybe there is an isolation on the level of leaders, but it’s nothing other than envy. Erdoğan said he once had great relations with President Barack Obama but just can’t understand how things went sour. He dumped Israel in 2009, ran into the waiting arms of Iranian President Mohammed Ahmadinejad and Iranian ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, at the same time Washington began to finally understand that the Iranian nuclear threat was real. So what is Erdoğan’s conclusion about his relations with Obama?
We had one-on-one meetings. After all these talks, we see that things started to develop in a different way, which I could not understand.
And does Erdoğan, think that President Obama envies him? Does Obama play golf better than Obama? The Turkish president recently has had a bit of criticism of Obama and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Obama’s sin, according to Erdoğan, was that he did not call last week’s murders of three Muslims in North Carolina an attack on Islam, even though the three Muslims who were shot and killed did not appear to have stemmed from a long-running parking dispute and without any link to religion. Erdoğan also cannot understand why the world “is not speaking out against” al-Sisi, whose regime has sentenced to death 183 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of Erdoğan’s favorite friends, along with Hamas. Erdoğan said, “When you speak out about these issues you are left alone, but not in the eyes of the people,” which says a great deal about the man on the street in Turkey.