There may or may not have been a coup in Turkey engineered by its president. It collapsed rather quickly for a coup and was followed even more quickly by the suspension of civil liberties, the arrest of more than 10,000 people, the firing of more than 60,000 civil servants including judges, policemen, school teachers and professors. The move by the president was so quick the lists must have been compiled long before the coup. Little wonder that commentators have raised the specter of the Reichstag fire in 1933 which the Nazis used to monopolize political power and start Germany on the road to totalitarian ruin.

The media has been further muzzled, Erdogan’s dissenters suppressed, and reports circulate of captured military officers being raped by police. Luigi Visconti’s The Damned is now playing on the movie screen that is Turkey, but the would be sultan who runs the country, the very same man who champions Islam as one and indivisible, blames western racism for jihadist attacks and slams Zionism as a crime against humanity gets nary a warning from the U.S. State Department. Instead, its spokesman, John Kirby, sees fit to condemn the Israeli government for planning to build housing units in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo. Clearly, the world is going to hell in a handbasket faster than it was when President Obama took office eight years ago.

Should one be surprised? Probably not. The man who gave the Muslim Brotherhood unprecedented access to the White House and embraced its takeover of Egypt just endorsed his former Secretary of State as Democratic candidate for President, the very woman who had as a chief aide the sister to one of that Brotherhood’s top leaders in Egypt. And what was his regret in his speech to the Democratic National Convention? That in eight years he had not had enough time to complete his work, not enough time to transform America into that model of European Social Democracy which has brought Islamic terror to its cities and fecklessness to its political elites. But in eight years he did have time to establish a friendship with Turkey’s neo-Ottoman president while working to undermine democratic Israel’s prime minister.

The Democratic Party has just adopted a platform that is not as supportive of the Palestinian cause as its many delegates, especially Sanders delegates, would have wished. Mr. Kirby would have approved, for it repeats the litany of the two-state approach which Mr. Kirby feels is being undermined by Israel’s determination to keep Jerusalem as its undivided capital. But anybody who has ever visited Jerusalem and knows something of its recent history can readily see that a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital is only a slogan for idiots and a recipe to bring more Muslim terror to the streets of Jerusalem than already occurs. If Turkey wants to keep its country resolutely Muslim and receives U.S. support for doing so, why should Israel not want to keep its country resolutely Jewish without U.S. lectures about how to do that? Unless, of course, some allies are more allies than others.

It is pathetic to see how many intelligent people continue to misread the Middle East and especially the situation in which Israel finds itself. It is even more pathetic that they continue to do so even as the vicious attacks Israel continues to endure have now reached the cities of the democratic West, replete with all the fantastic claims and sexual depravity that accompany these attacks. More than ten years ago I wrote a book that dealt with all this. Any publisher whom I approached found reasons not to take it on. Since then, everything I predicted has come to pass and everything I wrote about has only gotten worse. If you want to understand our current predicament I recommend you buy it and read it. I have retitled it and put it on my website: Ten Years And Counting And Truer Than Ever (That awful mess in the Middle East and what we can learn from it). Click on the title to read more about it and order it.