Obama’s “best friend,” Recip Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who wants to revive the universally-hated Ottoman Empire, says that Muslims discovered America.

Oddly enough, the same claim is made by Spain and Italy, who think it was Columbus in 1492 -- but that is not Politically Correct these days, so it’s taboo to say. Still, the Chinese are another popular option in pseudo-history today. Louis Farrakhan thinks it was the mother ship from outer space, which is destined to destroy the White Devils and bring the black peoples of Chicago back to rule the world.

Claims for discovering America have been made for the Vikings, the inhabitants of the lost continent of Mu, and of course, the Siberians who cross the Bering land bridge beginning 12,000 years ago, and who gave birth to Amerindian tribes --- who now speak 700 different native languages throughout the Americas.

The Siberian hypothesis has the advantage of being true, with a Polynesian admixture. So does the Columbus hypothesis.

Then there are the Irish and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, a popular idea among early Mormons.

But let’s get back to our neo-Ottoman “friend” Erdogan, about as malignant a “friend” as America has ever had.

Like other Islamofascists, Erdogan wants Islam to rule the world, by infiltration and sabotage if possible, and by massive decapitation and slave-taking if the infidels don’t surrender. In Sweden and France, there’s a good chance they will surrender and obviate the necessity for mass slaughter, but who knows? Europe may find its own identity again -- which was forged in opposition to Islamist invasions from the south and east starting with the Song of Roland.

Having said all that, Erdogan’s mythopoeic claim is genuinely important today -- not because it’s true, but because it represents the delusional world of increasing numbers of Muslims. Obama directly encourages this mass delusion by claiming that “The United States has been Muslim from the founding.’ Whether Our President shares Erdogan’s delusion, or whether he knows he is lying is always up for grabs with Obama. Make your own guess. As the man has said, “You know, sometimes I believe my own bullshit.”

The Israeli anthropologist Raphael Patai makes the case in The Arab Mind that fantasy-prone thinking is the single most important feature of traditional Muslim thought.

The Muslim world is always swinging between modernity and reactionary regression to an imaginary past, the world of the four Righteous Caliphs who followed Mohammed’s death, and who brought their empires to the height of spiritual perfection. Proof of which is that three of the four caliphs were assassinated. For the greater glory of Allah, of course.

All good reactionary Muslims want to go back to that imaginary past, just as they want to recapture Andalus, the brief flowering among half-tolerant Muslims and Jews (but not for Christians), a pause in centuries of warfare between imperialistic Islam and Christianity.

The trouble with today’s huge Muslim Reaction to the Fantasy Past is that it kills people (mostly fellow Muslims so far). It results in enormous oppression of women wherever Shari’a law is implemented, including the City of London, the Swedish town of Malmoe, and some suburbs of Paris.

Islam has always, always been violently imperialistic, from the time Mohammed conquered Mecca and Medina, slaughtering and slave-taking wherever he went. Mohammed himself sent demands for surrender to the mighty Byzantine and Persian Empires, who laughed him off as a desert barbarian. But in the next several generations the Righteous Caliphs managed to conquer both of those great empires, wiping out their religious beliefs of Christianity and Zoroastrianism on the way.

Both Christian Europe and the fast-expanding Muslim empires believed that God was on their side -- Allah in the case of the Muslims.

Islam often zigs and zags between some variety of modernism and reactionary desert fanaticism. Kemal Ataturk modernized Turkey after the death of the Ottoman Empire in 1924, forcing his country to become secularized by the sword -- an inversion of Muslim practice before then. A wave of modernization swept the Muslim world after Ataturk’s reforms, so that Arab nationalism and secular fascism took over, along with some examples of democratic regimes such as Lebanon, for example.

The major cities of the Arab world began to look a little like Paris and New York from the time of Arab nationalist Nasser and his successors, Anwar Sadat (who signed a forty-year peace treaty with Israel but was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood), followed by Hosni Mubarak (also overthrown at the instigation of the Muslim Brotherhood and Obama), and now General Abdel El Sisi.

In the Muslim world it is the generals who tend to be modernists -- something the Left never understands, because they instinctively hate men in uniform. But it is a profound truth: Ataturk used the military to fight the throwback religious fanatics, and so did Nasser, Mubarak, and Sisi today. The exact same pattern occurred in Pakistan, Jordan, and other Muslim countries. Saddam Hussein and the Assads in Syria did the same.

The rule in the Muslim world is that the military and police provide the only modernizing force that beat the religious establishment, which lives in the permanent fantasy of Shari’a law.

Starting with the permanently deluded Jimmy Carter, Western politicians have sided with the religious throwbacks of the Islamic world, rather than the modernizing armies in Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan. It was the EU that insisted on the rise of Erdogan the fascist against the guarantor of political liberties in Turkey, the army and police. As soon as Erdogan came to power he purged the army and police, and ever since he has built up Neo-Ottoman power in Turkey. Iran and Turkey once had friendly relationships with Israel, the test of sanity in the Middle East. But now they are fanatical enemies of Israel -- for the sake of Allah, of course.

Obama likes religious fanaticisms for some reason, and always makes the religious throwback regimes his “friends,” every single time. Obama’s friends in the ME are never the modernizing forces: They are always the mullahs and imams, the “sheikhs” and emirs of the fanatical religious kinds. Obama actually likes Neo-Ottoman Erdogan, the desert sheikhs of Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan) that assassinated Anwar Sadat, the greatest Arab peacemaker in the 20th century. Obama is always trying to make friends with the religious fanatics for no particularly sane reason. But there’s no doubt about it.

Which brings me back to the Thousand-and-One Nights fantasy world of Islam, which keeps half a billion women in complete subjection to men. Islam is the one remaining ruthless patriarchy in the world, yet “feminists” like Naomi Wolf happily work for Al Jazeera, owned lock, stock, and barrel by the desert patriarchs of Qatar -- who also fund ISIS, the most evil Islamofascist religious gang to emerge so far.

When it comes to mass delusions, since the rise of the Boomer Left in the Western world, we, too, have become fantasy-driven.

And this is why Erdogan’s passionate belief that Muslims discovered America is important. It is on par with Obama’s equally deluded idea that Muslims helped to found the United States. All that isn’t quite up to Louis Farrakhan’s Mother Ship hovering in space to throw out Whitey and bring inner-city blacks to power in America, but it’s halfway there. Delusions are powerful, especially in the service of totalitarian regimes.

Every single radical Muslim group today lives in cultlike fantasy. They all distort reality, and teach it to their converts and their children. The constant warfare of the Muslim world goes back to that one single fact -- the imams spread hateful fantasies about the Jews, the Christians, and the return of the Righteous Caliphs, and after particularly hot Friday sermons, the mobs go out to burn and kill. This has been going on for a thousand years or more. It is why in Europe, parts of the major cities are now no-go zones for the police and the kuffirs.

There is a hopeful side to this. When Freud’s “Reality Principle” returns to the Muslim world, this great reactionary swing to the fantasy past will start to break down. It happened before with Ataturk and Nasser. Among millions of deeply deluded people, there are modernizing elites who understand what is happening, and who opt for modernity whenever they get a chance. In Egypt, those are the people who overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood when Morsi started to bring in Shari’ah law. They naturally included the military led by Abdel El Sisi.

Obama is the oddest man to ever inhabit the White House, because he views religious Muslim throwbacks to the fantasy past as a “progressive” element. The radical left seems to do that anyway, as part of their love for Noble Savages -- who are mostly miserable barbarians, as we can see every day in ISIS snuff videos.

When Thomas Jefferson sent the U.S. Navy and Marines to the shores of Tripoli after the Barbary Pirates, he knew who the enemy was. They were religiously inspired barbarians, who would kill and take slaves in American merchant ships without a moment’s doubt.

Between Jefferson and Obama, we have totally lost the plot. Obama is himself a fantasy-prone person, who has, for some reason, adopted the fantasy world of Muslim fascism. That is how he can confidently say plainly false things like “Muslims helped to found the United States.” This is not sheer blithering idiocy. It shows how deeply Obama is immersed in cult fantasies.

In that sense Obama is not even a modern person. Since the Italian Renaissance, modernity has come through science, evidence-based medicine, and scientifically-based technology, along with humane tolerance for many different points of view, free speech and free thought, respect for the individuals and a diversity of beliefs. Five centuries of Western and now worldwide progress has emerged that way, as historian Niall Ferguson makes clear in his book Civilization: The West and the Rest.

In the last century those Renaissance and Enlightenment values finally triumphed in China, India, and China.

But not in the Muslim world, which went back on one of its periodic regressions to the fantasy past. The worst thing is that the Islamic Reaction to the past has been supported by Western politicians -- Jimmy Carter did it with the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran; Bill Clinton failed to get Bin Laden at least four different times; and now Obama, worst of all, consistently tries to make “friends” by religious maniacs in Qatar and Turkey, in the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran.

This is crazy, of course. But Obama is also the most mentally stuck person ever to occupy the presidency. He will never change.

The coming presidential election will therefore mean do or die for America and the world. We must find political leaders who are not delusional. It seems like a pretty basic idea, but twice in the last six years Americans have voted for a fantasy-driven person -- supported by a fantasy-driven media.

As the Iranian Bomb will soon teach the world, mass fantasies have a way of cracking under the pressure of facts.

It’s better not to wait for that to happen.