No Red Carpet Tratment for Erdogan’s Visit to Los Angeles
No airport welcome, no VIP photo ops, no City Hall visit. Not for Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
He is, by all accounts, set to attend the World Cup match between the United States and Turkey at SoFi Stadium on June 25th.
His aim is clear: to hijack the World Cup as a political platform to normalize Ankara’s state-sponsored intolerance, repression, violence, and genocide denial; to cover up his crimes and rehabilitate his reputation; and to elevate himself at the expense of Los Angeles’s standing as a global beacon of diversity, tolerance, and inclusion.
This is classic sports-washing: using the goodwill, global attention, and unifying spirit of international sport – the world’s most celebrated athletic competition – to distract from his government’s abuses and burnish the image of his authoritarian regime. This is hardly new. Erdogan has repeatedly used major sporting events – from international football tournaments to Formula One races – as opportunities to divert attention from his government’s repression at home and aggression abroad – including military and material support for Azerbaijan’s genocide of Artsakh’s Armenians.
The leaders of the City of Angels – and the State of California—must be clear in refusing to let themselves be used as props in Erdogan’s political theater.
We must not allow international sport to be weaponized as a platform for propaganda. The World Cup should bring people together across nations and cultures, not provide authoritarian leaders with a platform to launder their reputations, obscure their abuses, and advance agendas fundamentally at odds with the values of Los Angeles.
Very simply, our civic leaders should neither embrace nor endorse him.
He should be shunned by city and state leaders.
No red carpets. No staged smiles. No photo ops.
Instead: principled distance, public accountability, and moral clarity.
We cannot – must not – let Erdogan abuse Los Angeles’s legendary hospitality to promote his ugly brand of hatred and intolerance.
