"Turkey's Erdogan said to employ Islamists," from the Middle East Newsline, with thanks to the Norwegian Kafir:
ANKARA -- Turkey has been employing thousands of Islamic fundamentalists in violation of its secular constitution.An opposition parliamentary faction has accused Prime Minister Recep Erdogan of enabling the employment of thousands of Muslims who oppose Turkey as a secular state. The faction said the Islamic fundamentalists have entered all areas of government, including the Education Ministry.
"We can say that thousands of anti-secularists have been employed by the state in accordance with the government's wishes," Ali Topuz, deputy chief of the opposition Republican People's Party, said.
At a news conference on April 11, Topuz cited Omer Dincer, the undersecretary of the Prime Minister's office. Topuz said Dincer has called for the toppling of the secular Turkish republic....
During the Cold War Turkey was our necessary ally. Turkey contributed troops who fought bravely in the Korean War. Listening posts in Turkey and airbases in Turkey helped keep Soviet Russia under control. We were interested in defeating the "Soviet" part of Soviet Russia; the Turks more interested in defeating the "Russian" part, for Russia was and remains a historic enemy.
But that Cold War is over. Turkish listening-posts, airbases on Turkish soil, are no longer so necessary. Yet the same attitudes that were formed during the Cold War seem to have lingered, and the new Turkey -- in which those nice friendly Kemalist army officers in Ankara, who make such a good impression on their American counterparts, are less and less powerful -- needs to be recognized.
It is the power of Islam, which has a hold over men's minds, and is continually resurgent, and must be held in check, in Turkey, both by force (the historic role of the military) and by the actions of the beneficiaries of Kemalism, those secular Turks, possibly 25% of the population, who should not be misled into underestimating the malevolence and cunning of their homewgrown Islamists, should not take Kemalist constraints for granted, and instead of joining in the new chorus of anti-Americanism, which has them absurdly abandoning the defense of secularism in a shrill desire to echo the sentiments being played on by Erdogan (anti-American means anti-Infidel, anti-Infidel in the end means the defeat of Kemalism and the promotion of Islam as a political and social force). The secularist left in Turkey is being played upon, in a way not dissimilar from the way the Mossadegh left was appealed to, and so cleverly used, by Khomeini in making common cause (so that left thought) against the Shah.
Turkey today is a cautionary example for American and other Western policymakers. Of course there is little to be done except keep Turkey out of the E.U. (Turks in the West tend to become more, not less, fervent in their faith, and are therefore a permanent danger to the Infidel societies in which they have settled).
Let's see how easily Orhan Pamuk, for example, who may have been one of those to think the secularists permanently dominated Turkish life, handles the threats against him for merely mentioning the genocide of Armenians. One wonders if he will go one step further -- and relate that genocide not to specifically Turkish malevolence, but to the doctrines of Islam, the attitudes toward non-Muslims that inevitably arise from them.
What he says further, and what treatment may be meted out to him, will be instructive.
Turkey = Trojan Horse.
Ataturk (inadvertently?) = Achilles (his 'heel', Islam)
Paris = Paris. (sic)
Europe = Troy.
Moral:
Beware of 'multiculturalists' bearing gifts.