Excerpt:
When tanks entered the streets of Istanbul and Ankara last summer in an attempt to overthrow the Turkish government, people swarmed the streets to fight them off. At the urging of their president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, they pushed back against the coup, some waving Turkish flags, others waving guns. "What else would you do?" a friend in Istanbul asked me some months later. "When your government and your country are attacked, you fight back. It's to be expected."
Less expected, however, were the crowds of Turkish-Europeans who also took to the streets in cities like Rotterdam, where dozens demonstrated on the city's Erasmus Bridge, waving Turkish flags and, in some cases, crying out "Allahu Akbar." For many non-Turkish Europeans, the action felt almost threatening: Were these people Turkish or European? Could they reasonably be both? Or did they represent a fifth column, aiming to overtake Europe from within?