Turkish President (for the time being) Recep Tayyip Erdogan sat down for an extended interview with Al Jazeera on Wednesday (watch in Arabic, running time: 37:31), where he discussed surviving a coup, before getting to the one subject he is truly passionate about, which of course, is Egypt. “The people of Syria and Egypt are passionate about democracy,” Erdogan said. “Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi has nothing to do with democracy. He killed thousands of his own people.” There is no mention of Egypt or El Sisi in Al Jazeera’s truncated English dub of the interview (7:18), or the accompanying article.

Meanwhile, the former director of Al Jazeera news channel, Wadah Khanfar, said to Turkey’s state news agency Anadolu on Wednesday: “I doubt that such a coup could be made without first consulting — or at least informing — the Americans…. In my estimation, the Americans knew of the matter [i.e., the coup attempt] but they didn’t overtly embrace it.”

Egypt’s foreign affairs ministry issued a statement (Arabic) in response to Erdogan’s comments, which read in part “The [Turkish] president continues to confuse issues and to lose his sense of judgment, which reflects the difficult circumstances he is going through. Among the issues which the Turkish president confuses the most is the ability to differentiate between a full-fledged popular revolution where over 30 mn Egyptians went out calling for the armed forces’ support and military coups by definition.”

Erdogan announced a three-month state of emergency during a televised press conference on Wednesday night, the Guardian reported. The entirety of the country’s academics were also slapped with a work travel ban, as potential accomplices were perceived as flight risks. All 1,577 deans of public and private universities have resigned at the state’s request. As for what motivated the coup plotters, “Intelligence sources say many of the officers who took part in the coup were on a list of some 600 high-ranking military personnel accused of Gulenist ties that was submitted by the national intelligence… The officers were facing dismissal in August,” the Guardian notes.

In response to Turkey’s numerous requests for extradition of cleric Fethullah Gulen, US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Wednesday that he had told Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu “Please don’t send us allegations, send us evidence.”