"Go live in better neighborhoods. Drive the best cars. Live in the best houses," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a rally in Eskisehir the week before last, addressing not his immediate audience but the 4.6 million-strong Turkish diaspora in Western Europe. "Make not three, but five children. Because you are the future of Europe. That will be the best response to the injustices against you."
Erdogan has been providing plenty of fodder lately for that fringe of people who believes Europe is in danger of Islamization. The threat is overblown, but it serves the Turkish president's political agenda to provoke European leaders into paroxysms of outrage.
Earlier this month, Erdogan accused the EU of starting "the war of the cross and the crescent" after the European Court of Justice allowed employers to demand that workers not wear Muslim headscarves.