When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently described Hamas not as a terrorist organization, but as a liberation group fighting to protect Palestinian lands, Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs quickly reacted, declaring that "Israel wholeheartedly rejects the Turkish president's harsh words about the terrorist organization Hamas" and calling Hamas a "despicable terrorist organization worse than ISIS."
Retired Army Lt. General Jerry Boykin, an original member of Delta Force who now serves as executive vice president of the Family Research Council (FRC), is not surprised by the Turkish leader's comments.
"You need to understand that Recep Erdogan has two ambitions in life. One is to create a caliphate. The second is to be the caliph," Boykin asserts. "Compare that to what he just came out and said. Well, that's part of his mindset. He wants to be just like it was in the Ottoman Empire, and I think that reestablishing the Ottoman Empire has been one of his ambitions from the time he became the president of Turkey."
The terrorism expert also warns that Erdogan has much to lose if his support for Hamas and Hezbollah goes too far.
"They're going to throw him out of NATO. They have to," says Boykin. "If he does this, they have to throw him out of NATO. That has to be the end of it."
His loss, then, would be the revenues that the U.S. pays him for providing the U.S. with bases or other materials.
"This guy's got to be watched, because I think that is his ambition," Boykin concludes.
As for the October 7 attacks on Israel, a human rights advocate who spent many years in China says Hamas had the full permission of Communist China to do that.
Pick any terrorist group, rogue regime, or horrific conflict in the world today, and Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, says it can be traced back to China.
"You see China's hand in all of this," he submits. "Every time a conflict like this breaks out … you look back, and you see that a few weeks before, the leaders were in Beijing … because they wanted their supporters, their patron -- the Chinese Communist Party and Xi Jinping -- to greenlight their invasion."
A few weeks before Hamas invaded Israel, Mosher recalls that Palestinian and Iranian leaders were in Beijing "getting a greenlight for this attack." And once it took place, the Chinese propaganda machine geared up.
"The Chinese social media just lights up with vicious, antisemitic rhetoric comparing the Israelis to Nazis," he notes. "We know who the Nazis are in this equation. It's not the Israelis; it's the people in Hamas who want to drive all of the Israelis into the sea and behead as many as they can in the process."
Mosher suggests China, which has no particular animus against the Jewish people, hopes to draw the United States into another protracted war in the Middle East.
