Erdoğan and Israel's Muslim Brotherhood Trick
The Muslim Brotherhood label has a long history of doing political work. Israel is now reaching for it against Turkey, while the Brothers it nominally describes die in Egyptian prisons.
On 11 April, after a Turkish prosecutor sought sentences of more than 4,596 years for Benjamin Netanyahu and thirty-five other Israeli officials over the interception of the Sumud flotilla to Gaza, Netanyahu posted on X that Israel would continue to fight Iran's terror regime and its proxies, unlike Erdoğan, who accommodated them and had massacred his own Kurdish citizens. Hours later, Israel's defence minister Israel Katz went further. Erdoğan, he said, was a Muslim Brotherhood man, who massacred the Kurds. The phrase travelled the way these phrases now travel, repeated across Israeli media, picked up by Iranian outlets pleased with the symmetry, recycled in Turkish nationalist circles for the opposite reasons.
Two weeks before Katz spoke, the Foundation for Defence of Democracies (FDD) in Washington published a paper title…
