Citing evidence found on YouTube, Turkeyâs Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, claimed on Tuesday that Israel was behind the military takeover in Egypt last month.
In remarks broadcast on Turkish television, Mr. Erdogan scolded Western democracies for failing to condemn the military coup that deposed Egyptâs elected, Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, and blamed Israeli influence. âWhat do they say in Egypt? âDemocracy is not the ballot box.â Who is behind this? Israel,â the Turkish premier said.
Telling his listeners, âwe have evidence,â Mr. Erdogan cited comments made two years ago by the Algerian-born French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who âis also Jewish,â as supposed proof of a longstanding Israeli plot to deny the Muslim Brotherhood power in Egypt, even if they won elections. Mr. Erdoganâs office later confirmed that he was referring to the YouTube video of Mr. Lévyâs remarks during a discussion of âIsrael and the Arab Springâ with the Israeli politician Tzipi Livni at Tel Aviv University in 2011.
As can be seen in an edited copy of that video posted on YouTube last week with Turkish subtitles, Mr. Lévy did say in that forum, which was moderated by my colleague Ethan Bronner, that the Brotherhood should not be allowed to take power in Egypt.
Responding to a question about how he would view an election victory by the Brotherhood, Mr. Lévy compared such a possibility to the kind of âdemocratic coupâ that allowed Hamas to take power in Gaza in 2006 and Hitler to become Germanyâs chancellor 1933. Decrying the âarchaic, pre-fascist ideologyâ of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Lévy said, âdemocracy again is not only elections, it is values.â
Asked directly, âif they were to win a legitimate election, you would urge the military not to allow them take power?â Mr. Lévy said:
I will urge the prevention of them coming to power by all sorts of means, yesâ¦. I said that in Algeria and I donât regret it. It opened a terrible period of disturbance, chaos, murders and so on, but I believe it would have been worse if we had let them come to power.
Although YouTube remains officially blocked in Turkey, Turks who followed their prime ministerâs advice found it easy to access the clip on Tuesday.
Given that there are credible, recent reports that Israeli officials are waging a âdiplomatic campaign urging Europe and the United States to support the military-backed government in Egypt despite its deadly crackdown on Islamist protesters,â it is not clear why Mr. Erdogan chose to put so much weight on dated comments from a French philosopher who holds no official position in his home country or in Israel.
The response to Mr. Erdoganâs remarks in Cairo was predictably testy. As the journalist Menna Alaa reported on Twitter, a spokesman for the interim president installed by the army replied that âWestern agents shouldnât be giving lessons in patriotism to Egyptians.â
The Cairene blogger who writes as Zeinobia noted that the use of the philosopher known as BHL as a Zionist bogeyman seemed to come straight from a Mubarak-era playbook.
The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported that Mr. Erdogan âalso criticized Gulf countries that have provided financial aid to Egyptâs military government,â ostensibly to make up for threatened reductions in financial aid from the United States and Europe.
In a speech this week, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi went out of his way to thank the monarchs of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Jordan and Bahrain for supporting his overthrow of Egyptâs democratically elected president.
On Tuesday, however, the activist filmmaker Aalam Wassef remixed video of General Sisiâs speech to show leading members of each of those royal families with senior Washington officials â" highlighting what he called the irony of Egyptâs American-backed military rejecting criticism from the United States but welcoming support from five kingdoms that depend on the Pentagon for protection.