Turkey’s ‘doorman complex’

The photo featured happy faces – Turkish and European. Last week, three EU bigwigs were in Ankara: Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign affairs chief; Johannes Hahn, a chief enlargement official; and Christos Stylianides, commissioner for humanitarian aid and crisis management. The happy-faced trio was seen with two Turkish happy faces: Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu and EU Minister Volkan Bozkır.

Literally impressed by the “family picture,” Mr. Bozkır called on the EU to “make visible” the dialogue between Ankara and Brussels by “inviting Turkish leaders to EU meetings and taking them into EU family photographs.”

After examining the smiling faces in the family picture, this columnist wrote in the Gatestone Institute’s journal (“Turkey and EU: The Kodak-Moment,” Dec. 14, 2014): “The truth is, Turkey’s longer-than-half-a-century journey to full EU membership offers volumes of thick picture books full of similar smiling faces, most of them no longer alive. But both the club and the applicant know that Turkey has been dragged planets away from the EU in terms of culture and socio-politics. Turkey is too un-European in political culture; sometimes even hostile to Europe.”

“Only a week before the EU bigwigs arrived in Ankara, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan accused western [Christian] states of ‘not liking us [Muslims],’ for ‘loving oil, gold, diamonds, and the cheap labor force of the Islamic world,’ and for ‘wanting us [Muslims] dead and liking seeing our children die.’

“The EU cannot slam the door in Turkey’s face for many geopolitical reasons … While the Europeans wasted their time in self-deception – that Turkey’s Islamists were in fact pro-EU, post-Islamists...