In a long piece at FrontPage, Andrew Bostom cuts through the fashionable nonsense of the "illustrious Ottoman Empire" and the myth of Islamic tolerance, revealing a sobering and more or less unbroken record of persecution and oppression. Here is a summary of the piece:
Ignorance about the plight of Jews under Turkish rule—past, including Ottoman Palestine, and present—is profound. In lieu of serious, critical examination one finds whitewashed apologetics concocted to promote dubious geo-political strategies—even the morally bankrupt denial of the Armenian genocide, as promoted, shamefully, by public intellectuals and major US Jewish organizations who abet the exploitation of their co-religionist Turkish Jews as dhmmi “lobbyists” for the government of Turkey. These strategies have “succeeded”, perversely, in further isolating Jews, while failing, abysmally, to alter a virulently Antisemitic Turkish religious (i.e., Islamic), and secular culture—the latter perhaps best exemplified by the wildly popular, and most expensive film ever made in Turkey, “Valley of the Wolves” (released February, 2006) which features an American Jewish doctor dismembering Iraqis brutally murdered by American soldiers in order to harvest their organs for Jewish markets. Prime Minister Erdogan not only failed to condemn the film, he justified its production and popularity.The ruling AK (Adalet ve Kalkınma) Party’s resounding popular electoral victory July 22, 2007 over its closest “secularist” rival parties is further evidence of Turkey’s steady re-Islamization. Indeed this trend dates literally to the first election during which Turkish voters were offered any option other than one party rule under Ataturk’s CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Party)—in 1950, when Menderes’ Demokrat Party (DP) pursued a successful electoral strategy by pandering to an Islamic “re-awakening.” Upon election, the DP supported religious schools, and a mosque construction initiative; it also allowed Sufi orders to reappear, and many of their followers then actively supported DP candidates in elections. Already by 1952, Bernard Lewis warned, presciently, about the open re-emergence of Islam in Turkey with the 1950 ascent of Menderes’ DP just twelve years after Atatürk’s death.
Ataturk’s regime and the CHP-lead Republican governments of his successors manifested their own discriminatory attitudes towards non-Muslims, generally, including specific outbursts of antisemitic persecution—most notably the Thracian pogroms of July, 1934. But since 1950, both the Turkish press and Islamic literature have steadily increased their output of theological Islamic antisemitism—founded upon core anti-Jewish motifs in the Koran, hadith, and sira. This theologically-based anti-Jewish animus grew steadily in stridency, and during the 1970s through 1990s, was melded into anti-Zionist and anti-Israel invective by the burgeoning fundamentalist Islamic movement under Necmettin Erbakan—the former Turkish Prime Minister, and mentor of the current AK Party Prime Minister, Tayyip Recep Erdogan, whose own Islamic fundamentalist (see here, and here), and virulently Antisemitic leanings are well-documented. For example, in 1974, Erdogan, then serving as president of the Istanbul Youth Group of the Islamist National Salvation Party (founded by Erbakan), wrote, directed, and played the leading role in a theatrical play entitled Maskomya, staged throughout Turkey during the 1970s. Mas-Kom-Ya was a compound acronym for “Masons-Communists-Yahudi [Jews]”, and the play focused on the evil, conspiratorial nature of these three entities whose common denominator was Judaism.
The steady recrudescence of fundamentalist Islam in Turkey since 1950—epitomized by the overwhelming re-election of the AKP—does not bode well for either the dhimmified vestigial Jewish community of Turkey, or long term relations between Turkey and the Jewish State of Israel. But the plight of Turkey’s Jews and the other vestigial non-Muslim Turkish minorities reveals a more profound challenge which modern Turkey has failed to overcome since its origins under Ataturk in 1923—steering a truly progressive course between the Scylla of autocratic secular Kemalist nationalism (whose often racist theories are still being taught), and the Charybdis of a totalitarian, politicized Islam.
I went into a synagogue in Istanbul in the late 1990’s. In it I saw a menorah with an Islamic star and crescent sculpted over it.
The Jews there already knew what their place was.
I have never met a Turk who did NOT tell me that 'Hitler was good because he killed the Jooozzz' and that the only thing wrong with him was that 'he didn't finish the job'-
This is the truth, and my personal experience - and yet, when I posted this on some forums I got banned for it.
Strange world.
But the Koranimals make no beef about it, they keep hammering the message into the skulls of their fanatical followers and make sure their kidz suck the hatred in with the mothers milk.
All this and more while our looney lefties indoctrinate our children with stuff like 'its all our fault' and the kumbaya walz.
Its a long way before reality bites, what does it take?
sheik yer'mami, I HAVE met Turks who didn't say that kind of stuff, but I see what you mean. A country where the likes of Mein Kamph and Protocols of the Elders of Zion dominate the bestseller list time after time isn't the most Jew-friendly environment. Then again, they DO have excellent beer in Turkey, so I suppose they ain't all bad.
Well there are many signs all around Turkey to show the dhimmi's where they stand. Minarets surrounding the Agia Sophia is the most obvious one that grace images of Turkey worldwide.
Somehow the entire world seems to miss the point when viewing these images of how it is a blatant image of repression.
The few Jews and Christians left in Turkey are simply a testimony to the effectiveness of the Turkish secular programs at dismantling all other cultures.
The Borg, oops I mean the Turks are the masters of oppression and making outsiders believe there is an enlightened version of the Mohammedan.
sheik yer'mami, it is a strange thing to see how these comments about Turks less than 2 years ago drew the ire of many on forums, and now we see the opposite.
I had to go over it twice, the first time reading it aloud . . .not an easy essay to follow. Much of the material corroborates Bat Ye'Or's works on dhimmitude.
I had not heard of the Donme (jewish/muslim hybrid) before. A repulsive yet understandable alternative to the peaceful - no compulsion clause of islam.
This material should be taught in every social studies course. Olmert, the msm - especially the Newsweek staff should be forced to address this material as well.
Nem, NEM! SOHA! ( No, no! Never again!) In any language from any of the many cultures ravaged throughout history by islamic hegemony . . .Islam, delenda est!
"steering a truly progressive course between the Scylla of autocratic secular Kemalist nationalism (whose often racist theories are still being taught), and the Charybdis of a totalitarian, politicized Islam."
I'm not so sure that it's possible to steer a course between Islam and anything. Islam is a virus. Whatever it touches, dies.
Thanks so much Robert, for pointing us to Mr Bostom's article. I have taken the liberty of copying it.
You see, I have a friend who is the daughter of a survivor of the Shoah. She is also a priest in the Anglican Church. She teaches at a theological college in my hometown. And there she has to put up with colleagues who have blindly swallowed the lie that under the Turks in 'Palestine' everything was a lush golden paradise of inter-faith tolerance, peace and harmony, until those evil Zionists came along and spoiled everything. She suffers great pain when she hears these ignorant fools shooting their mouths off - one of them even wrote a hideous little propaganda letter in our diocesan newspaper, accusing Israel of 'ethnic cleansing' and hinting at a genocide charge.
I will hand her Mr Bostom's piece - chockful, as it is, of original eyewitness accounts - and tell her to circulate it next time she encounters someone rabbiting on about how 'intolerant' and 'oppressive' the Israelis are, or accusing them of genocide.
It is blazingly clear that the Israelis have treated the Arab Muslims within their jurisdiction one thousand times better than the Turkish or Arab Muslims EVER treated either Jews, or Christians, in 'Palestine', or anywhere else within the Empire of Islam.
Can such hatred continue without end without somebody of importance in the MSM and major governments of the world denouncing it with heart filled passion. I guess not.
Why is it that the "modern,secular Kemalists"
deny the holocaust of the Armenian people
perpetrated by the islamist Ottoman Turks ?