I'm not in favor of adultery myself, but to make it a criminal offense is just one more step toward Sharia ... in "secular" Turkey, a state that has survived only by making innumerable concessions, large and small, to political Islam over the last few decades. Note that this time the law is designed to make Turkey more acceptable to the European Union. I guess they know a dhimmi when they see one. From Reuters, with thanks to Ali Dashti:
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkey's government wants to make adultery a crime, the justice minister has been quoted as saying -- a proposal that has outraged the main opposition and women's groups.Although the legislation would also apply to men, a previous adultery law abolished six years ago was used mainly against women.
The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which traces its roots to a banned Islamist movement, wants to include the adultery ban in an overhaul of the penal code, promised as part of reforms aimed at meeting European Union criteria.
The main opposition party has threatened to vote against the entire penal code reform if the clause on adultery is included in the bill and brought to parliament.
"We believe that adultery should be a crime, because society also expects this," Justice Minister Cemil Cicek was quoted as saying by newspapers on Monday.
Turkey's top court struck down a law penalising adultery in 1998 and said in its ruling that the law had been mainly used against women, leading to gender inequality.
There they go, sliding inexorably back to the gory glory days of the Ottoman Empire. This is one instance where Chiraq is right, and Bush/Blair are wrong: Turkey should never, ever, be allowed into the EU.
I'm suprised they didn't wait till AFTER they got into the EU to pull this stunt. It won't pass - for now.
Erdogan has been dismantling very slowly, and very systematically, as much of the Kemalist constraints on Islam, or laws that violate Islamic views, when and how he can. He has very cleverly played on the fact that the earlier generation of Turks, those who understood how hard-won werethe conditions that permitted a class of secularists such as themselves, to develop, are dead. Their children, their grandchildren, take the secularism of Turkey for granted. They do not draw any lessons from the way in which the leftists and secularists in the line of "weepy Mossadegh" were outmaneuvered by Khomeini. They allow themselves to be tricked by Erdogan at every step. Currently he is using the application to the EU as an excuse to weaken the power of the army, the only guarantee of Kemalism that is left. But without Kemalism, Turkey will become more like -- the Islamic Republic of Iran, or Iraq, or Egypt, or Syria. For there are still far more Believers than there are "secularists" born into Islam, in Turkey, and the latter must wake up. They should understand that Turkey will NOT be admitted to the EU and they should understand the reasons why -- not in the future, not when it happens, but now. And so should all those who wish to keep Kemalism and to keep Islam constrained in Turkey. That should include the American government, which foolishly has supported Turkish admission to the EU, which would not only aid in the islamization of what is becoming Eurabia, through the new mobility afforded 60 million Turks throughout Europe (new mosques, new madrasas)-- those who like to complacently assure themselves that "the Turks" are secular appear not to understand that they are "secular" at home, where the mosques are still monitored and the Turkish army still powerful. Abroad, as in Germany, the Turks are far more radical, more Muslim and less secular, than they are in Turkey. Why should anyone think it will be different when they can spread out across Europe?
And, of course, it will not only be Turks, but other Muslims, moving through Turkey, finding it far easier to move into the EU from a member state, and then -- the Atlantic's the limit.
There is news recently from Kurdish Media of how
Turks are cutting off the heads of Kurds with grisly abandon. Do we really want 70 million more
Muslim beheaders/Jihadists in Europe? A leopard
doesn't change its spots anymore than an Ottoman
Turk yelling 'Allah is Great' as he slits your throat in traditional way... Bush & Blair are foolish to have promoted Turkey as EEC candidate in the first place but I believe EEC countries will oppose Turkey's entry. There are too many countries now in Common Market with horror memories of what life was like under Islam...