Akif Beki, one of the rare pro-Justice and Development Party (AKP) columnists of Turkey’s top daily, Hurriyet, wrote an interesting op-ed June 30 titled “The plan to isolate Erdogan.” The piece was a critique of the die-hard pro-Recep Tayyip Erdogan “public intellectuals” who lashed out against every criticism against the great leader.

“If there is really a plan to isolate Erdogan as it is argued, and if there is really a demonic ‘mastermind’ behind this heinous plan,” Beki argued, “those who cling tightly to Erdogan these days, supposedly to protect him from the warnings of his own [ideological] neighborhood, must be working precisely for this goal. These low-life executioners who attack all sorts of people with repulsive insults, and who have no common sense, are the agents the mastermind must be using to isolate Erdogan behind a defense line of barbed wire.”

Then Beki explained his own past of solidarity with Erdogan, which went back to the late 1990s. According to him, the newly formed cadre of apparatchiks around the president, who try to isolate him “in a world of delusion and apprehension,” were just charlatans.

The next day, one of the people who Beki probably anonymously targeted, Cem Kucuk, columnist for Star, an unabashedly pro-Erdogan daily, fired back. The real “sly, demonic” people are people like Beki, Kucuk argued, who behave like “belly dancers” because they began to blame Erdogan right after the setback in the elections.