>>1243The near east was not historically part of Europe, the word Asia was crated to describe Anatolians and the Roman province of Asia was western Anatolia.
Organisations like that aren't really a good basis for such an argument, it's like arguing that Australia is European because it's in Eurovision, and that would probably be a better argument because you could argue that culturally they are European.
Turks are quite separate from Europe in numerous ways, religion plays a part but is not the be all and end all here, the bigger aspects are language and culture. The Turks are a Turkic people, they don't speak an Indo-European language, they don't even speak a Semitic language(like those in the rest of the middle east do), they speak a Turkic language, they are foreign to the entire region. Of courses Finland, Hungary and Estonia also don't speak an Indo-European language yet they are considered European and while that is true they have also been heavily subjugated by European nations for a long time to the point where they culturally are European, if you had asked somebody 1000 years ago whether the Finns were European or not they would probably say they were not.
The culture of Turkey(and the Ottoman empire) simply is not European and very little about it could ever be considered to be so, there were no palace Harems in Europe, that was eastern, there was not caste of slave soldiers in Europe, that was eastern, the cloths the Ottomans wore, were eastern, the food they ate was eastern, the military traditions, weapons and tactics, were eastern, etc. They simply are not European.