Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey has long coveted the Greek Aegean islands in the disputed waters between the two countries, and now it has made its claim official.
The flagship newspaper of the Greek-American community, The National Herald, reported Wednesday that Turkey “has provoked Greece by submitting a map to UNESCO claiming parts of the Aegean Sea – which has been the primary point of contention and discussions between the countries during a period of calm.”
The UNESCO map was a manifestation of Erdogan’s “Blue Homeland” doctrine, which includes Turkey’s claims to sovereignty over various lands that once belonged to the Ottoman Empire. Erdogan refuses to recognize the Treaty of Lausanne, which ceded the Aegean islands in question now to Greece, despite the fact that the Republic of Turkey duly ratified the treaty on Aug. 23, 1923, as well as the fact that Turkey and Greece are both members of NATO, and thus are supposed to be allies.
Erdogan appears to be calculating that he will not get any pushback within NATO for claiming the internationally recognized sovereign territory of another member state, and he is likely right about that. This isn’t the first time he has claimed Greek territory, and almost certainly will not be the last, yet Turkey doesn’t seem to be in any danger of losing its NATO membership.
That should change. NATO member states have already had to take action to counter Turkish aggression against Greece. Turkish dissident Abdullah Bozkurt reported in Nordic Monitor on April 28, 2025 that “Turkey’s contingency war plans against Greece — particularly targeting Western Thrace and the Aegean islands — have suffered a serious setback due to the expanded military presence of the United States and France in support of Greek defense.” This Franco-U.S. action prompted “a wave of sharp criticism from Turkey’s increasingly frustrated leadership, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in recent years.”
Turkey’s “military strategy for a potential incursion into Greek territory, particularly Western Thrace, was designed to exploit a narrow window of opportunity, which Turkish generals anticipated would close quickly with swift intervention from the US and Europe following any Turkish offensive.
With tensions thus running high, Greece’s response to Turkey’s UNESCO map was carefully muted. Greek officials pointed out that the map had no legal force, but noted that they were “monitoring” Turkey’s actions. Greek government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis charged Turkey with trying “to exploit, to appropriate areas that do not belong to it, and this is obvious and against international law and reality itself.”
Why would the Turks do such a thing? The answer is simple and obvious: because of Islam. The Qur’an says: “Fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is all for Allah” (Qur’an 8:39). The jihad against non-Muslims will continue until everywhere on earth, “religion is all for Allah.” Jihadis and jihadist entities such as Erdogan’s Turkey demand this territory or that, and all too often, clueless infidels, ignorant of the larger goal, decide to negotiate and give them part or all of what they demand, hoping that there will then be peace. Instead, there will just be more demands. If Turkey gets Greece’s Aegean islands, it will next be demanding part or all of the Greek mainland. And then beyond.
This is “Islamophobic” speech according to our self-anointed moral superiors, but it’s also simple fact. The twentieth-century Pakistani politician and Islamic scholar Maulana Maududi stated: “The purpose for which Muslims are required to fight is not, as one might think, to compel the unbelievers into embracing Islam. Rather, its purpose is to put an end to the suzerainty of the unbelievers so that the latter are unable to rule over people. The authority to rule should only be vested in those who follow the True Faith; unbelievers who do not follow this True Faith should live in a state of subordination.”
Majid Khadduri, an internationally renowned Iraqi scholar of Islamic law, explains that “the Islamic state, whose principal function was to put God’s law into practice, sought to establish Islam as the dominant reigning ideology over the entire world. … The jihad was therefore employed as an instrument for both the universalization of religion and the establishment of an imperial world state.”
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In his 1994 book "The Methodology of Ijtihad," Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, an assistant professor on the faculty of Shari’ah and Law of the International Islamic University in Islamabad, quotes the twelfth century Maliki jurist Ibn Rushd: “The primary goal of the Muslim community, in the eyes of its jurists, is to spread the word of Allah through jihad.”
Iran’s former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said: “Have no doubt … Allah willing, Islam will conquer what? It will conquer all the mountain tops of the world.”
So today it’s the Greek Aegean islands, and Israel, and Armenia. Tomorrow it will be the Greek mainland, and Spain, and eastern India. And so on and on, while the infidels, of NATO and elsewhere, slumber on.
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