Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a joint statement to the media in Baghdad, Iraq, April 22, 2024. Photo: AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/Pool via REUTERS

The world was once a series of empires. The British Empire, at its peak in 1922, covered about a quarter of the Earth’s land and ruled over 458 million people. The Russian Empire once covered about 8,800,000 sq/mi, roughly one-sixth of the world’s landmass, making it the third-largest empire in history, behind only the British and Mongols. An 1897 census recorded 125.6 million people under Russian control. Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire, while short, was the largest contiguous empire in history.

The Ottoman Empire lasted from 1301 to 1922, and at one point, included parts of Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, Hungary, Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon. It was, in some ways and at some times, a relatively benign occupation of other people, though decidedly not for Greeks, Armenians, or Kurds.

Why does it matter? We don’t do empires anymore. Do we?

That depends. Turkey now, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is projecting its next empire — a scary combination of ISIS-related religious extremism, nationalist prejudice, and Western weaponry.

Erdogan gave a speech last week. The key paragraph is this:

Turkey is much bigger than Turkey as a nation. We cannot limit our horizon to 782,000 sq/km, Just as a person cannot escape from his destiny by fleeing it, Turkey as a nation cannot flee or hide from its destiny. We must see, accept and act according to the mission that history has given us as a nation. Those who ask, “What is Turkey doing in Libya, Syria, and Somalia?” may not be able to conceive the mission and the vision.

And, if you couldn’t “conceive the mission,” Bilal Erdogan, his son, clarified for you. At a massive rally, he exhorted the crowd: “Yesterday Hagia Sophia (once a Church in Istanbul), today the Umayyad Mosque (Damascus), tomorrow Al-Aqsa (the site of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem).”

Today, Turkey illegally occupies a large swath of northern Syria, claiming only to have in interest in defeating the PKK –– considered by Ankara to be a Kurdish terror organization. [For the US, the Kurds were an essential partner in defeating ISIS in Syria and northern Iraq, and remain an ally.]

Between October 2019 and January 2024, the Turkish military carried out more than 100 attacks on oil fields, gas facilities, and power stations in Kurdish-held areas. According to the BBC in October 2024, Ankara cut off access to electricity and water for more than a million people.

Turkey has operated in northern Syria in conjunction with HTS, the ISIS-adjacent group that has been on the US terror list, but now appears to be seeking legitimacy as the ruler of Syria. According to a Turkish news source, as a new Syrian military establishment begins to take shape, “Turkey will actively provide consultant-expert support to the restructuring process of Syria’s sea, air, and land forces. In addition … Turkish military presence will be included in five different points of Syria.”

The new force will number 300,000, according to the Turkish report, including 40,000 fighters from HTS, and 50,000 from the Syrian National Army (SNA). The latter is actually an auxiliary of the Turkish Armed Forces. SNA forces have been deployed by Turkey as a proxy in Libya and elsewhere.

Ankara also hosts leadership of Hamas, earning a  rare rebuke from the US State Department in November 2024, and Hezbollah. It should be noted that the dismemberment of Hezbollah by Israel was understood as a defeat for Iran, Turkey’s regional rival.

Turkey’s relations with Hamas, Hezbollah and the emerging Syrian military all threaten Israel. Turkey’s direct attacks on Israel — both rhetorical and military, going back to Turkish sponsorship of the Mavi Marmara flotilla in 2016 but increased after October 7 — also pose threats.

Turkey operates across Africa, as Erdogan noted in his speech. In January 2020, Turkey sent military forces to Libya in support of the Government of National Accord, the Tripoli government, followed by as many as 18,000 soldiers of the Syrian National Army (SNA — see above), which included child soldiers. Turkey has defense agreements with Somalia, Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Ghana. Turkish drones have been recently delivered to Chad, Togo, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger.

Like many empire-driven military adventures, this one appears to have two purposes: first, to secure access to natural resources, and then to serve as a launching point for Turkish social and religious interests. Turkey has built 140 schools for 17,000 students, while 60,000 Africans are studying in Turkey.

Turkey has made clear its intention to play as a world power. It is coming up against Russia and China in Africa, and Iran in the Middle East (Iran is injured, but not defeated). While there is no mechanism for the Western countries to remove Turkey from NATO (that requires a unanimous vote, and Turkey won’t vote itself out), the United States and its allies in Europe and the Middle East should be very skeptical of Turkey’s intentions and leery of its capabilities.

Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly magazine.

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The “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Columbia University, located in the Manhattan borough of New York City, on April 25, 2024. Photo: Reuters Connect

When I was studying International Affairs and Middle East Studies at an American university, I took many courses on the conflict and the history of the Middle East. These courses inevitably involved extensive discussions of Israel, which often led to debates surrounding its right to exist.

I sat in classrooms and learned from scholars who, perhaps unknowingly, infused their teachings with fundamental biases against Israel — and, at times, against Jews and their right to a homeland.

While they may not have been as ruthlessly vocal as Joseph Massad, their anti-Israel agenda was present nonetheless, and they were educating a large, international group of students with it. Many of these students knew nothing about the conflict, and took what the teachers said (teachers the university told them to trust) at face value.

I sat alongside peers from around the world, and witnessed how this bias led them to learn fundamentally incorrect facts about the complex history, territory, and conflict in the Middle East. This further entrenched a bias that some had against Israel, and contributed to their outspoken hatred of the country.

When the October 7th attack occurred, and our peers and co-workers began to side with the terrorist group committing mass atrocities, I was not surprised. It was the result of these teachings, which gave them the belief that Israel is the oppressor (and always will be), and that anything it does to defend itself is wrong — a crime against humanity.

Joseph Massad called the October 7 attacks “awesome” and “astounding” — and now Columbia is letting him teach a course on Zionism. Joseph Stalin would be proud.  It actively enables and supports the creation of more antisemitic and anti-Zionist attitudes and mindsets.

Massad is just another university professor using his position in a prestigious academic institution to instill this one-sided way of thinking in his students — a mentality that discourages discourse, critical examination, and promotes hatred.

The response we have seen in the West since the war began is the direct result of these teachings.

In the past, we often slept through this. We disagreed, but we did not challenge. We did not fight back. This cannot — and will not be the case — if Israel (and American Jewry) are going to survive.

Alma Bengio is a Northeastern University graduate with a Bachelor’s in International Relations, and a Master’s in Project Management from Harrisburg University. Follow @lets.talk.conflict on Instagram.

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November 2023: An Israeli soldier helps to provide incubators to Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza. Photo: Screenshot

More than a year has passed since the hate-fueled encampments and rallies targeting Jews became fixtures on college campuses and in cities across America. Over time, the emerging narrative centered on the assumption that those participating in sowing the antisemitic chaos were confined to specific industries, such as Hollywood and academia, or were among an ignorant cast of undergrads steeped in an ecosystem of radical progressivism. 

Unfortunately, in a disturbing phenomenon plucked directly from a Nazi-era playbook, a troubling rise of antisemitism in the medical community is now manifesting as an alternative and potentially deadly avenue through which Jew hatred is spreading across the US. 

In its first published study of “Antisemitism in American Healthcare: A Survey Study of Reported Experiences,” the Data and Analytics Department of StandWithUS, a Jewish civil rights group, surveyed 645 self-identifying Jewish healthcare professionals, 74 percent of whom are physicians. The study found that nearly 40 percent of respondents recounted direct exposure to antisemitism within their professional or academic environments. 

The results of the survey confirm an underacknowledged reality — that the healthcare arena is emerging as a new and dangerous stronghold for antisemites to exert their influence. If left unchecked, this movement will rupture the integrity of America’s medical professionals. 

The rise of anti-Jewish attitudes in healthcare stems from several factors, including the decision made by some medical schools to supplant critical instructional time with toxic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs that supposedly focus on cultural inclusion and social inequities. 

Unsurprisingly, when combined with a deterioration of academic standards, medical students educated in this pedagogy prove prone to gravitating towards a framework that designates Israel, and by extension, all Jews, as privileged colonialists.  

It is a paradigm that advances Nazi-like boycotts of Jewish medical professionals, which is precisely what happened this year when “anti-racist” therapists in Chicago attempted to organize against Jews working in the mental health field. 

It bears mentioning that tactics deployed by antisemites in medical circles to intimidate and ostracize Jews echo strategies planted by the Nazis in the 1930s. One of the first industries the Nazi party took over was medicine.

Research published in The Israel Journal of Health Policy Research details how Jewish healthcare professionals were often the first to lose their jobs, with “forty-five percent of German physicians” choosing to join the Nazi party compared to “seven percent of teachers in Germany.” 

The American Jewish Medical Association (AJMA), a non-profit organization of “Jewish physicians, fellows, residents, medical students, public health, and healthcare professionals,” was formed in the wake of the October 7 massacre in Israel to address the issue of the growing systemic bias against Jews in healthcare. 

Dr. Steven Roth, who practices anesthesiology at the University of Illinois Chicago and co-authored a study on antisemitism in the medical community, revealed that “it has been suggested that DEI, and ‘anti-racist’ curricula in particular, present in some medical schools, is related to the antisemitism that flared after October 7.” 

Roth maintains that “nearly all universities today have DEI frameworks, and all medical schools do as well.”  

Efforts by the AJMA to lobby members of  Congress and urge them to insist that medical schools and journals adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism remains crucial to the institution’s platform of encouraging lawmakers and colleagues to confront antisemitism in the healthcare space with the level of urgency that the current moment demands. 

Apart from pushing for medical institutions to abide by the IHRA definition of antisemitism, AJMA’s Founder and President, NYC-based plastic surgeon Dr. Yael Halaas, also notes that the meetings they are doing with lawmakers include discussing AJMA’s project to create a “new antisemitism curriculum,” which the organization is developing and plans to pilot at certain medical schools.  

Unsurprisingly, medical workers launching a campaign of intimidation against Jews masquerade as opponents of Israel.

According to Congressman Ritchie Torres (D-NY), former University of California San Francisco (UCSF) professor of internal medicine Dr. Rupa Marya suggested earlier this year that students in her class had the right to be concerned about sitting in the same classroom with Israeli classmates. Marya’s growing list of outlandish assertions concerning Jews ultimately led to her suspension, and she is one of several seasoned antisemitic medical workers curating a path forward for younger cohorts that polling shows is drifting against Israel. 

Once counted as responsible stewards of America’s healthcare system, a youthful cadre of aspiring healers are revealing themselves as unprofessional disruptors who don keffiyehs and promote antisemitic screeds at medical school commencement ceremonies. Just this week, the group StopAntisemitism said it had identified a nursing graduate, who was exposed for tearing down hostage posters in New York City. 

A few hours south in Washington D.C., The Times of Israel unveiled several physicians in training at  Georgetown University Medical School and the George Washington University School of Medicine who were posting vile antisemitic content on social media in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre. 

Today’s unserious era is enveloped with students marinating in a political and educational climate under which false claims made by progressives and leftist radicals accusing Israel of practicing medical apartheid are legitimized by a host of medical journals publishing distorted accounts of Israeli actions in Gaza. 

It’s not unreasonable to assume that episodes such as the one that occurred in London, where a student nurse allegedly refused care to a Jewish patient, could one day soon appear in America. Healthcare professionals who find it acceptable to unleash their antisemitism with a stroke of the keyboard may one day justify withholding critical medical information or tampering with a treatment plan for a Jewish patient. 

Sadly, recent developments involving the growth of antisemitic incidents in medicine reinforce the fact that no industry is safe from the scourge of antisemitism and that perhaps, for the time being, Jewish Americans should navigate their healthcare needs with an extra dose of caution. 

Irit Tratt is an American and pro-Israel advocate residing in New York. 

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