Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's latest off-the-cuff remarks that compared the killing of 34 Kurdish civilians in December last year by military jets to abortion has sparked fierce debate in the country and left many Turkey-watchers utterly baffled. The Internet was immediately awash with cartoons depicting Erdogan wearing a dunce cap and images of F-16 fighter jets entering a woman’s vagina that read "state warning."
Andrew Finkel, a foreign correspondent and author who has lived in Turkey for over 20 years, described the comments as "mystifying" and wrote on his New York Times blog, Latitude: “Is the prime minister of Turkey losing his grip? Normally he has one hand on the pulse of the people, the other on his opponents’ jugular.”
