NATIONAL REVIEW
by Daniel Pipes
September 23, 2014

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, appeared at an hour-long on-the-record event at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York yesterday afternoon. The complete — if not entirely coherent — transcript of the English-language simultaneous translation can be found here. I attended the meeting along with many other members (so many attended that an overflow room was needed) and I offer some responses and reflections about him:

The Council hosts its fair share of heads of state and government, all of whom arrive surrounded by bodyguards and aides, but Erdogan had a far more massive entourage than any I’d ever seen; by my estimate, they numbered 35, nearly all of them young men in dark suits. Odder yet, they took up the first three rows, where they sat spellbound to their leader’s every word, as though they had never heard any of it before. Even before he spoke, then, the profusion of fluttering staffers conveyed an aura of grandiosity — as was no doubt their intended purpose.

The Council rarely permits teleprompters but Erdogan relied on one, although it’s unclear why it was necessary, given that he spoke in Turkish and gave his standard attack-dog speech berating many of Turkey’s neighbors and going after such current favorite targets as Fethullah Gülen, the Moody’s and Fitch credit-rating agencies, and the New York Times……

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