Now Turkey has provided a particularly chilling example of another way to shut down independent voices -- a fine of $2.5 billion that appears to be designed to put a major media company out of business....The media group, Dogan Yayin, is a widely respected conglomerate of newspapers and television stations including the Turkish-language version of CNN. Dogan journalists have not shied away from stories that the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's iron-willed prime minister, does not like.
Is that the adjective that best fits? "Iron-willed"? Other adjectives come to mind: "despotic" or "cunning" or "ruthless" or "calculating," or such adjectival phrases as "sinister in his single-minded determination to free Islam from the restraints placed on it by Ataturk."
The Times continues:
Aydin Dogan, an owner of the media group's parent company, is one of Mr. Erdogan's most vocal critics. That makes it all the more suspicious that the Erdogan government levied a tax penalty on the Dogan group that is almost much as the value of the entire company.
So far so preachily on-the-side-of-the-angels good.
But then the editorial ends with this paragraph:
Turkey has made important strides in the last decade, amending its Constitution, outlawing the death penalty and bringing Turkish law more in line with European standards. Steps like this undermine that progress.
That last paragraph -- about all the "progress" Turkey has made by changing its laws over the past decade, when Erdogan and the AKP have been in power -- should be held up for inspection. For aside from ending the death penalty, most of the "reforms" that the editorial staff of the Times applauds are in fact designed not by civil libertarians who are desirous of emulating the freedoms of the West, but by Erdogan's schemers, who are using the claimed need to comply with the E.U. to put in "reforms" that, as all the threatened secularists in Turkey understand, are really designed to weaken the power of the Turkish army and the power of the Turkish judiciary to uphold the secular order and the Kemalist restraints on Islam.
The E.U. bureaucrats are members of the same political class that all over Europe has shown itself willfully ignorant of Islam, and thus ignorant of the internecine war being waged within Turkey between the secularists and Erdogan and his followers. The latter know exactly how to use claimed pressure from the E.U. to change the laws. What seems to editorial writers in New York to be real "reforms" are in fact attempts only to weaken the secularists. Any seeming expansion of civil liberties has been the result of the desire by the most relentless enemies of the individual rights guaranteed by the advanced Western democracies to pretend to uphold those rights, and then to consolidate power and destroy the power of the centers of secularism - the university rectors, professors, judges, journalists, and above all the military.
Ataturk faced great opposition with the forces of black Islamic reaction in his attempt to push Turkey westward. But he had been a successful general, even a war hero during World War I, and he used his prestige, and every other weapon he could find, to transform Turkey as much as he could. He was also ruthless. He understood the power of Islam and the power of those who, in his view, wanted to keep Turkey mired in an Islam that, Ataturk understood, had been the cause of Turkey's backwardness and near-ruination. He was not a civil libertarian. And the secularists in Turkey today understand that, but have trouble spelling this out for people from outside, who have never had to deal with the threat of a resurgent Islam.
About ten years ago I went to a dinner party in Istanbul. The Turkish hosts and other guests were all assuredly secular. Some sent their children to school in the U.S. When at one point I asked why the Turkish government did not return Hagia Sophia to being a working church, since it was the first place so many Christian tourists went, and what would be the harm, my Turkish companions looked at me with surprise and pity, their expressions showing they had not realized how naïve I was, for, they all told me: "If we did that, we would have a revolution." They then explained that to allow the Hagia Sophia to again be a church (it had been used as a mosque until Ataturk turned it into a museum) would so enrage Muslims -- the "real Muslims" -- that it could never be contemplated. Until then, I had not understood how difficult was their situation, and how, even after 80 years of Kemalism, how great was the danger of backsliding. And the backsliding came, as the AKP won its election, and as the bonds that bound up Islam as a political and social force were undone, almost as systematically as they had once been put in place.
I doubt that the Editorial Board of the New York Times would understand the plight of the secularists, who understand, as we in the West do not, that the kind of solicitude for civil liberties that we in the advanced non-Muslim world take for granted would be counterproductive in the Turkish context, the context of Erdogan and the assault, using every conceivable weapon, on the secularists of Turkey by those pushing for Islam to come back in every sphere of life. Those on the Editorial Board of the Times do not think of Turkey as a place with a history, and a problem, and an attempt (by Ataturk) to ameliorate if not to solve that problem. Instead, they think of it merely as one more nation-state that should pull up its socks. Pulling up its socks means to adopt the kind of guarantees of rights, and limits on power, that can be found in the countries -- all of them non-Muslim -- of the E.U.
Turkish secularists have a problem. They cannot adequately convey the threat of Erdogan and of the primitives who follow and support him. They cannot explain, at least to the satisfaction of the bureaucrats of the E.U. or the editorialists of the Times, why certain freedoms cannot be immediately granted -- why the army, for example, or the judiciary, should be allowed to retain their power, a power required by the threat of Islam and those wishing to bring it back by undoing what Ataturk achieved.
But somehow they have to do this. Otherwise, one can imagine, in ten years, or twenty, a very different Istanbul in a very different Turkey. Imagine the cafes and bustling bookstores of Istiqlal Caddesi shuttered. The shuttered bookstores would include those that sell books by Bernard Lewis, and the antiquarian bookshops, the ones that always seem to be selling off the impressive collection of Turkica or Ottomanica that had been collected by some heir-less German Jewish refugee who ended up in Istanbul just before or during the war. The hijab, and all that it implies, would be back, and then bits and pieces of the Shari'a, as Turkey regressed, and became more like an Arab state, or like the Islamic Republic of Iran.
If you wish Turkey and the people who live in Turkey well, how could you wish the secularist, the hope of Turkey, to have to endure all that?
I have a friend of Turkish extraction who told me Turkey would never slide back into Islamism. But every time Turkey shows up in the news, it's in a bad way, usually Erdogan-related shenanigans.
Erdogan briefly visited his compatriots in Germany. He held several speaches, which were clearly aimed at creating strife between Germans and Turks. His most famous line was:
"Assimilation is a crime against humanity!"
I don't want him to visit this country again and I hope the EU leaders will come to their senses and not admit Turkey to the EU. Well, if Turkey did return the Hagia Sofia to the orthodox christians, I could change my mind.
A fine article from Hugh who asked an interesting question about the the Hagia Sophia, although I doubt if the response was much of a surprise to him. Clearly the status of the Hagia Sophia is the major landmark symbol of the Islamic conquest of the Byzantine West by Islam. It's last near chance of going back to Christianity was after WWI and the fall of the Ottoman Empire but the Greeks could not manage it and the West was not nearly as self-consciously Christian as in the days of the Crusades and had other things on its mind. Too bad. Being a museum is about the best that can be hoped for.
As long as Western governments refuse to see themselves as in a war against Islam itself (as they once did against the spread of Soviet communism), fundamentalist Islam will grow both in Turkey and the West under cover of the "moderate Muslims" who enable westerners to rationalize that there is no real threat from Islam itself - just a problem with a few radical nuts. This in turn allows the European politicians (who don't really want to study Islam because they sense it is not in their selfish interests to really know Islam) to sell out their European culture and institutions bit by bit for the Muslim vote in the name of wonderful "diversity", sensitivity, and multicultural good will. Meanwhile the populations are just frogs in slowly heated water.