A cardinal maxim of political speech is, don’t make comparisons to dogs and don’t use the image of Adolf Hitler as a reference point. On December 31, 2015, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President of Turkey, was unwise enough to ignore this and to make another one of his questionable and absurd statements. Since his election as president, which he won with 51 per cent of the vote in August 2014, he, like some U.S. presidents, has wanted to rule as a strong executive. This condition, he insisted in December, can exist in a unitary state: “There are already examples in the world. You can see it when you look at Hitler’s Germany.” This utterance, among other things, does not augur well for any Turkish friendship with the State of Israel. Perhaps, as his spokesperson explained, Erdogan did not mean to glorify Hitler, but nevertheless earlier comments by the ambitious political leader are questionable, if not duplicitous. In a speech at Marmara University on October...(Read Full Article)