But will the EU dhimmis really care if Turkey raises its Islamic profile? From Taheri in Arab News:
As the European Council prepares to decide on Turkey’s membership of the European Union, the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan is also trying to heighten his country’s Islamic profile....Now, however, there are signs that the “moderate-Islamist” government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan intends to build up an Islamic policy in parallel with the pursuit of EU membership.
Last June Turkey hosted a meeting of foreign ministers of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), signalling its intention to play a more active role in shaping pan-Islamic policies.
The new two-track policy was further highlighted this week when Turkey hosted the second Joint Forum of the European Union and the OIC.
Turkey has also initiated diplomatic moves to gain control of the so-called Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Committee of the OIC which plays a key role in shaping the policies of Muslim nations toward Israel.
The Turkish leadership, however, is clearly divided on how far should Turkey go in search of an Islamic leadership role.
Some Cabinet members, including Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, argue that a Turkish leadership role in the Muslim world would enhance its chances of joining the EU.
“At a time that people are talking of a clash of civilizations, Turkey is a natural bridge of civilizations,” Gul says. “All we are trying to do is to use our position to bring Islam and the West closer together.”...
Last June’s ministerial meeting in Istanbul gave Turkey an opportunity to launch two ideas.
The first was that Islam needs to promote currents of “enlightened moderation” against obscurantist movements that have led parts of the Muslim world into violence and terror. To coordinate efforts in that direction a Commission of Eminent Persons will be set up to recommend ways in which Muslims could meet the challenges of the 21st century. The second idea launched by Turkey concerns relations with Israel.
At present only 11 of the 57 members of the OIC have diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. Turkey was the first Muslim nation to recognize Israel in 1948 and to establish relations at ambassadorial level. At the time Israel’s recognition was popular in Turkey where many believed that the Arabs had stabbed the Turks in the back by joining a British-led revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Turkey also regarded Israel as a potential ally against Arab states which pursued territorial claims against the newly created Turkish republic.
From the 1970s onward, however, Turkey began to develop important commercial interests in the Arab world. At one point almost a million Turks worked in Arab countries, principally Libya, while Turkey’s dependence on Arab oil and transit trade continued to grow. Although trade with the Middle East represents no more than 15 percent of the Turkish foreign trade, it is growing faster than trade with the European Union.
The Turkish argument is that relations between the Muslim world and Israel must be handled by a country that has normal relations, and no history of enmity, with the Jewish state. In that context Turkey is the ideal go-between.
The principal task of the Al-Quds Committee, chaired by Morocco, is to prevent measures that could alter the character of the disputed city or do damage to Islamic edifices there. This necessitates a permanent dialogue with Israel which occupies the Arab part of the city. It also means visits to the city and, if and when necessary, initiating repair projects there. All of that requires Israeli consent, which only Turkey is in a position to obtain without compromising the broader interests of the Muslim world in the city....
Between Europe and Islam, Turkey hopes to forge a synthesis but runs the risk of becoming an outsider to both.
Maybe, but it looks as if the Turks -- that is, both Ataturkists and radical Muslims -- are a shoo-in for EU membership, no matter what they do.
Even Chirac & Co are getting nervous and talking about a 'Referendum.' E U Committee have just upped their requirements with a 'Brake Clause' so if a country doesn't keep on track [Turkey] it won't be automatically admitted. Should like to know why this secular Islamic state still has troops in Cyprus - one of the first demands by E U should have been to withdraw them immediately!
Aren't millions of Europeans made nervous by the prospect of yet more Muslims moving in? I would be!
It may seem the easier course not to turn Turkey down flat, but to string it along, hoping that something will happen to allow a more graceful way of preventing full Turkish membership. This would be a mistake. It would string along all sorts of secularists, too, in Turkey, and they need to come to grips with their own failure to support the constraints on Islam that one can identify by the name "Kemalism." It is important that this "war of civlisations" nonsense be nipped in the bud. There is no "war of civilisations" just as there was not in 770 A.D., or 840 A.D., or 1453 A.D. For that phrase hides the real truth: not a group of distinct interests -- the Christian and post-Christian West, divided into Catholic and Protestant, the Orthodox, Sinic, and Hindu civilizations (all noted by Huntington). No, it is simply the ancient war of Islam against all non-Muslims. If that war has here and there died down, even for centuries, it is only because the forces of Islam lacked an enemy they could defeat. It was not for want of trying -- for a thousand years Muslim raiders went up and down the coasts of Europe, and in Africa, for a thousand years, seized black African pagans for enslavement. It conquest of India was a Muslim Jihad.
Even in the last two centuries, there have been Jihads -- not named as such by non-Muslims, but clearly called that, and regarded as that, by Muslims. There was the Emir in West Africa in 1804; Abd el Kader,"l'homme des deux rives" as an exhibit last year in Paris dared to call him, in North Africa, and in West Africa, the Mahdi of Khartoum, and the Last Cavalry Charge at Omdurman, and "Chinese" Gordon, and the Fuzzie-Wuzzies, and "The Four Feathers," and Kipling's "We have the Gatling gun, and they have not." The war against Israel is a classic Jihad, only since 1967 more or less tarted up as a "nationalist" crusade so as to win Western affection (and, not incidentally, to help fool the Isaelis themselves, who have been eminently foolable). The war to kill Christians in Indonesia, to persecute the Copts in Egypt, to murder or mass-murder the non-Muslims in the southern Sudan, to murder 1 million Christians in the Biafran War (1967-1969) are all examples of Jihad.
It was not that Jihad somehow went away. It is just that we, the non-Muslims, failed to recognize what was going on. We failed, and many fail still, to see the ideological roots of Muslim behavior -- a behavior that is remarkably similar in time and space in its treatment of non-Muslims, and it would be surprising were it otherwise, for the texts, Qur'an and hadith and sira, have remained the same, in time and space. What would surprise would be if Infidels were treated differently, say, in conquered India from the way they were treated in conquered Persia, or Mesopotamia. Everywhere, the choices: immediate death, immediate conversion, or dhimmitude, were the only possiblities. And if today the Muslim populations in Western Europe and North America pay lip service to pluralism, it is only in order to take advantage of that pluralism, until such time as they fell strong enough to pull off the mask, and deal with Infidels as their belief-system tells them to believe with Infidels. Those who, like Gilles Kepel, appear to believe that some other development, some "new Euro-Islam," will emerge, should be asked to explain just how. Why was there never an emergence of a "new Islam" over 1400 years, in all of the varied lands that Islam conquered -- even in Indonesia, where initially, because conquest was not military but through Muslim missionaries and traders (also missionaries, as all Muslims must be), it seemed that in the East Indies, something softer, more syncretistic, might emerge. But we see quite the reverse happening: the more established Islam has become, the fiercer it is with non-Muslims. It was only the Dutch rulers who, for a time, and with the advice of such canny officials as the Orientalist Snouck Hurgronje, who managed to tame or constrain Islam -- a taming, a constraining, that left with the Dutch, and the effects of their rule have by now worn off. Look at all the Christians killed in East Timor, in the Moluccas, in Ambon.
Learning from history is not a bad idea.
The majority of turks voted in Edrogan whose past is steeped in radical islamism, and whose current party is essentailly islamist and would be much more so if the turkish military wasn't watching their every move.
JUST WAIT TILL EDROGANS ISLAMIST PARTY IS LOOSE IN EUROPE AND HAS THE TURKISH MILITARY OFF ITS BACK!!!
The fact that in open and free elections the large majority of turks shunned the secular parties in favor of what everyone knows is an islamist party means the majority of turks support and have an islamsit agenda...that agenda won't stop when the islamists are let through the gates into the heart of europe. Constantinople fell to islam partly because a christian soldier left open the city gates by accident, the current europeans are opening the gates of europe to the islamists out of ignorance and stupidity.
If the turkish islamists have their way secular european civilisation will, in a hundred years, be a museum piece/exhibit.
"Hey mummy what is place on the old map?"
"Oh dear, that was a place that was once called the eu. Now it is called eurabia."
Why did the europeans get the works?
The reason is due to no-one but the turks.
I should have said
"Why did the europeans get the works?
The reason is due to no-one but the (islamist)turks."
The secular turks I can trust, it is just a shame they are such a minority now in Turkey.