De-Kemalization of Turkey Alert from the Washington Times, with thanks to Twostellas:
NICOSIA, Cyprus -- An escalation of warnings about a growing Islamic threat in Turkey is putting new pressures on the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, possibly damaging its role as Washington's key ally in the area.In increasingly bitter verbal exchanges with President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, Mr. Erdogan rejected charges that he is leading Turkey away from its secular system toward Islamic fundamentalism.
Mr. Sezer's latest broadside was a statement to the War Academy that "religious fundamentalism has reached dramatic proportions." Islamic fundamentalism "is trying to infiltrate politics, education and the state, it is systematically eroding values," Mr. Sezer said.
"Religious people also have a right to politics. ... If you want to keep the faithful out of politics, the people will never forgive you," Mr. Erdogan said in response.
Read it all.
OT - Euro Arab Dialogue
If anyone was in any doubt that the Euro Arab Dialogue is the figment of the fevered imagination of Islamophobic jihadwatchers, a new forum will be taking place next week at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.
http://www.forumeuroarabe.org/english/index.html
The speakers listed are here:
http://www.forumeuroarabe.org/english/speakers.html
Amre Moussa, secretary general of the League of Arab States, who declared later that "the people who carried out the Sept. 11 attack do not represent Islam, just as the Baader Meinhof doesn't represent Germany or the Red Brigade Italy."
Saleh Al Tayar http://altayar.info/english/profile.php
A chap named Mr Hamza BEÏT AL MAL, Associate-Professor for Communications, Faculty of Communications, King Saud University (Saudi Arabia)
A google of this name turns up the following:
Beit El-Mal Holdings (A.K.A. Arab Palestinian Beit El-Mal Company from this site listing terror suspects:
http://www.sec.state.ma.us/sct/sctter/teridx.htm
Any relation?
the common people of France voted no on their constitution and not leting Turkey in the EU. these people have more common sense in their little finger than the whole body of politicians in the EU!
too bad the common people in France, by the time issue comes to a referendum, will be muslims.
With key allies like Turkey, who needs enemies.
To ally with Sharia is one of two things, you pick:
1) A belief in Unicorns,or
2) An stupid attempt to finesse a known enemy
Either way, humans lose. There is a third alternative, but that is verboten.
For half-a-century Bernard Lewis has written, and more recently given advice, on the assumption that Kemalism -- by which one means here the series of measures that together were aimed by Kemal Pasha, or Ataturk, at systematically depriving Islam in Turkey of much of its political and social influence. In some ways it worked. Possibly as much as one-quarter of Turkey's population was able to become secular. But those secular Turks were not sufficiently grateful, nor sufficiently vigilant, and they were willing to limit, for all the world like liberals in the Western, Infidel lands, the power of the army. But secularists in Turkey could not afford to be like liberals in the Infidel lands. They were dealing with Islam -- quite a different matter. Some of those secularists have begun to retreat from that secularism, have begun to re-discover wondrous Islam, in rally-round-the-Qur'an fashion. Others (see Mustafya Akyol) have tried to present seemingly plausible (to them) but utterly cockamamie, ideas about how to "reform" Islam -- Akyol thinks all one has to do is throw out the Hadith and Muhammad's biography, and then that inoffensive Qur'an will turn those threatening Muslims into those non-threatening Muslims that they were back in -- oh, back in 680 or 700 A.D., before the Hadith, and before that biography of Muhammad.
Bernard Lewis thought that Kemalism was permanent. He turned out to be wrong. He was too impressed with those westerized Turks he met, those fellow Ottomanists. He kept mistaking the exceptions for the rule. The Bush Administration did the same in Iraq, taking such unrepresentative men as Chalabi and Allawi and Kanan Makiya and all the others who had spent between 20 and 45 years abroad, as "representative" of the "Iraqi" population.
The Cold War also helped in the miscomprehension of Turkey. Those Turkish generals in Ankara, and those brave Turkish soldiers in the Korean War, and those listening posts and airbases, so useful in the Cold war -- well, they gave many in Washington the wrong idea. They did not understand Islam in any case, except as a "bulwark against Communism" (which it was, but it was also a "bulwark" against liberal democracy, against the Bill of Rights, against the rights and wellbeing of Infidels everywhere), and they did not understand that Kemalism was not permanent -- Islam was, and Islam is. It can be tied down, as Ataturk wanted to tie it down, but constant vigilance is required to see that it does not escape from its box -- as it has so obviously under Erdogan the sly.
Nor did it help when some in Washington, just a few years ago, were registered foreign agents and lobbyists for Turkey. The Turkey they were lobbyists for was already on the way to becoming a phantom. Now it is blockbuster movies that depict American soldiers in Iraq as Nazis (or as one leading Turkish parliamentarian said, "worse than Nazis"), and a Jewish doctor as a Mengele-like figure, harvesting organs of dead Iraqis, and then there is the best-selling "Mein Kampf" in Turkey, and so much else.
Foreign policy must be made not on the basis of what Turkey was, or at least was becoming, but what it is, and what it is becoming. It cannot be allowed into the E.U. Whether or not the secularists in Turkey -- who of course would like Turkey to be admitted, so that their own problem with the Islamic parties would be diluted, so they calculate, by such entry, and the problem would be one for all Infidels in Europe -- will have to prepare themselves mentally for that rejection. And then they must plan to use it to strengthen themselves, and not Islam.
How to do this? Blame Islam, blame the "Arab" Muslims, blame the "other kind" of Muslim, blame Erdogan and his own antics. And make sure that the masses, the primitive masses who might otherwise be devout Muslims, will learn to blame too much Islam, and the "image problem" of Islam caused by the behavior of all those too-devout (and especially non-Turkish) Muslims, for that rejection. In other words, begin planning now to use it, for it will happen, to weaken Islam and not, as Erdogan and company will try to do, to increase Muslim resentment of Europe as a "Christian club" (nonsense, of course -- the only religion-based club is the O.I.C., and Turkey shows no signs of quitting that).
Turkey today is not what it was in 1980, or 1960. It is not to be trusted by the Infidel world. In NATO, when secret meetings take place to discuss worries about local Muslims rising in the army and security services, or possibly getting their hands on political power and therefore on NATO weaponry, there will have to be discussions without Turks present.
How will this be done? Perhaps it is time to begin thinking of finding a way to ease Turkey out of NATO. Erdogan's clear sympathies, and his behavior, should provide all the justification that is needed.
These matters have to be discussed now -- not in five years. Rumsfeld and Company owe it to our future safety to start thinking about this, deep within the Pentagon, and the State Department, before a change in the party running things (which, if it happens, should be blamed on the refusal of this obstinant and confused administration to recognize that Iraq is a tarbaby, and the Americans should come unstuck as quickly as possible) prevents such discussions and new ways of looking at things from even beginning to be contemplated.