New report says that Erdogan encourages antisemitism

How are the worst enemies of Muslims the Jews?

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Islamic Community

Kemalism was an attempt to systematically constrain Islam, formulated and executed by a war hero who, furthermore, came to power at a time when the Ottoman Empire was collapsing and Turkey itself was on the ropes. Furthermore, it was a time when Islam appeared everywhere, to the keenest Muslim minds, in danger of collapse and in need at least of reform (see Abduh and Afghani) and, for Ataturk, in need of being tied up in knots. And tie it up in knots he did.

But Islam didn't die. And the secular class that the measures undertaken by Ataturk to limit the political and social power of Islam, and its hold over the minds of men, did not continue to further the work of Ataturk. Instead, some of them -- not all, but some -- became self-satisfied members of an economic elite that thought Kemalism was forever, and they could entrust to the army the task of monitoring those who would bring Islam back, and through intermittent coups, restore the old order. It was not enough; it was a kind of ingratitude, not realizing the difficulty of what Ataturk had miraculously wrought, and not recognizing sufficiently the need never to let one's guard down, because, as it turned out, Kemalism is temporary, and Islam is forever. And now Islam is back, and the university rectors, the writers and journalists, the professors, the people who make one think, in Turkey, that one is dealing at least with some people who exist more or less on something like the same moral and intellectual planet (until one says something, to reveal an abyss of which you were previously unaware) -- all these are under constant pressure, all these are being intimidated, threatened with loss of jobs, influence, money, everything. And who is helping Erdogan in his campagin? The bureaucrats of the E.U., who in imposing restrictions on the Turkish army's freedom of movement, are restricting the one institution still capable of standing up to, and even squashing, Erdogan and his sinister, but obvious, program.

Remember those "ring around the collar" television ads in the sixties? No matter what the faithful housewife did, that pesky "ring" remained on her husband's shirt.

Islam and the assault on liberty by sociopathic dictators will always be with us. As long as a Qur'an and Muslim with an Ak-47 are present, Islam will never die. And as long as humanity ignores the evil that sociopaths create, tyranny and injustice will prevail.

Time for us to grow up.

Turkey's case is a very complex case. Turkey really has a unique place in Islamic world. It is a state which is the transformed immediate heir of a big empire with a multi ethnic identity. In fact to be a Turk does not mean to be a Central Asian by necessity. Turks of real Central Asian descent are only a fraction of the 'ingredients' constituting today's so called Turkish people. A big part of the people are from peoples of Anatolia who 'Turkicized' by Islam's pressures on the Dhimmis. So, it was very natural to have an opposition against a strictly Sunni Islam between them (Mustafa Kemal himself was maybe the most characteristic case illustrating this reality - a blond Balkan muslim from Salonica). Even the original Turks of Central Asia never felt at ease with strict Sunni Islam in their history. There were major uprisings initiated from them during the Seljuk and Ottoman era.

Kemalism's pressure against the elements of the central ideology (those of chaliphate and religion centered state) of the old Ottoman heritage was a very strict one however. So that resulted in the creation of a new militaristic elite which in the name of preserving the secular state against sharia become another kind of tyranny itself. In this the role played by its focusing on nationalism (for filling the left void of religious identity) made a quasi totalitarian regime with only a democracy of ornamental value. Today's events are nothing other than an explosion of the decades (and in some sense centuries) old forced burial of a collective identity complex.

In short, todays Turkey is a country with a solutionless dilemma: the quasi totalitarian system of the military or Sharia (even in a ''light'' version). A very considerable part of the people does not want anyone of those but is found in a dead end situation, given that its traditional faith is Islam and the human being can not live without a referance point in the transendent (let atheists' naivety say whatever needs to convince itself :-). Really, it is a strange phenomenon to meet contemporary Turks who say 'I believe in God' but want to hear nothing about Sharia. It is indicatory of the mentioned deadlock the fact that even many liberals and atheists are backing the Islamist government with the aim of overthrowing the military control and getting a healthy democracy.

It is very interesting to see where the things will lead in Turkey, indeed.

“..even many liberals and atheists are backing the Islamist government with the aim of overthrowing the military control and getting a healthy democracy." -- from a posting above

If this accurately conveys what “many liberals and atheists” in Turkey are doing, then they are as self-deluding about the appeal, and power, of Islam, and the real intentions of those in Erdogan’s camp, as were those Iranian secularists and leftists (those who visited the grave of Mossadegh) who, in 1977 and 1978, could think only of the corruptions of the Shah, and his courtiers, and Savak, and the rest, and chose to make common cause with Khomeini and his camp. For those Iranians assumed that, because they were the morally and intellectually advanced elite, they would be able to handle the primitive fanatical faithful, and besides, Khomeini’s views and intentions were not fully, nor widely, known at the time. So they took to the streets against the Shah, and the setting fire to the Rex Cinema by Muslim fanatics – with more than 400 burned alive inside – did not dissuade them. They didn’t read carefully what Khomeini had for three decades – just go back to his 1942 rant about the essence of Islam being war-making against the Infidel – and chose to think of the Shah, vainglorious and stupid, as the bigger threat, misread the situation. Comical it is, or perhaps tragical, or best of all perhaps tragicomical, to realize that the Iranian left, just like the Shah it hated, misread the nature of Iran and its populace. For as he, the Shah, had not understood how his reforms, and his spreading of oil wealth was not leading to progress but rather to an unhinging of much of the populace, so the Iranian left-wing opposition to him misread the primitive rural masses, and even many in the cities who were deeply devoted to Khomeini and a Return to Islam as the Simple Solution To The Universe. He had spent large periods of time among the gilded set, ever since he attended Le Rosey in Switzgerland. Soraya, then Farah Diba, and all the hoveydas and tabatabais of the ancien regime, some of them good, some of them bad, many of them simply the kind of scamps that such a court naturally attracts and rewards, did not make clear to the Shah the effect of the oil money that, in the end, through corruptioin and through economic change, the one causing fury, the other causing unsettlement, brought down the man who thought that that money would cause Iran to become, in a matter of a few years, “the second industrial power in Asia.”
And the Iranian left thought if the Shah were removed, they could handle Khomeini and his henchmen. How wrong they were. Where are they now, how did they die, or where are they perhaps in exile, such people as Abolhasan Bani-Sadr, the man whose face was often on American television in 1979 and 1980? What happened to chatty Ghotbzadeh? And who exactly, at Khomeini’s behest, murdered Shahpour Bakhtiar , one of the noblest and best of the Iranian political figures, in his Parisian exile? Why, compared to the secret services of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Soviet secret services, that managed to have Trotsky killed in Mexico City, and managed as well to kidnap a White Russian general, was not nearly as deadly.

The Turkish secularists, leftists, and so on do not realize the precariousness of their own situation, and why they should never, not for “democracy” or for any other reason, support those who want to Bring Back Islam. They will use the support of the left to tie the army in knots, if they can, but they will then turn on that left, and do not exactly what happened in Iran -- there are too many secularists to be dealt with so cruelly and mericlessly -- but something disturbingly reminiscent what happened in Iran.

PLEASE MR. ROBERT CAN YOU EXTRACT THE F.M "islamic community" FROM THIS PAGE ? PLEASE,PLEASE, DO IT..

THIS IS A gift for "islamic community": A PEACEFUL VERSE FROM HOLY KURAN: "Seize them(infidels) and slay them wherever you find them: and in any case take no friends or
helpers from their ranks". 4:89

Hugh my friend, I do understand very well what you say and mean... I am well aware of all these. I do agree with you nearly in all that you say. Yes, really, I too do believe that the liberals, atheists, leftists etc do not know what they do. They simply are ignorant in some essential matters.It is as in the case of the Marxist who the only thing that sees is economy relations and the strife of the classes. He/she is blind to every other thing in the world. He/she does not even imagine that there may be other serious parameters also playing role in the shaping of things in this life. The problem with Turkey however is that its people longs for democracy and the army too is not a solution. Just this is the reason I said that it is a big question where the present situation may lead this country.

I know... there is the solution of coming out and say bravely to all Turks 'begin by leaving Islam'... But, is it so easy either... :-)

"indirectly incites and encourages anti-Semitism"? So sponsoring, promoting, and failing to apologize for a frankly antisemitic tv programming is "Indirect"? Isn't it a clear statement? They're still bitching about midnight express, while financing hatred tv series... But hey, when it comes to Jews and Armenians, it's not holocaust, it's funny time in the lands of allah's followers...

The Turks, Persians, Egyptians, etc. believe in Allah. That's game over, too big a hurdle to be anything but sick or sicker.

Smithers... yes, the thing you say maybe is a rough ascertainment about a fact. But the question is what may be proposed to do so that the situation be confronted the best way possible. Saying to Muslims 'all you believed' for a thousand and a half years was nothing other than a lie, a totalitarian ideology aiming at justifying by means of religion even the most unecceptable things' is an easy thing to do but very difficult thing to have results. Collapsing of Islam means the collapsing of a collective imaginary mindframe of some more than one billion people, rooted in a one and a half thousand years' time span.

Further you have to propose a very serious void filling alternative. Those are not easy things and as it seems their coming to history's surface denote a difficult even to imagine, as to its existential depth, need of turning page in our whole worldview as human beings. The problem of Islam knocking our door is a reminding of our need for a very serious and vast civilizational recollection about our route. When someone sits down and dare to think of the present situation, without going to 'cheap' solutions realizes that we are, as humankind, in the verge of a cosmogonic turn that even its thought gets a feel of immense awe.

I think one of the main things to do is to make Muslims question their beliefs. Awaking their sleeping but existent critical mind. Nowadays most of Muslims are not even aware of questions put about their faith as those Robert and others put forth. This is the first step to go. It is a peaceful way too. And... building on a peaceful foundation is the only way to succes, no need to say.

There are many other things to do while that questioning of their own beliefs proceed. We don't have the time to wait; the world-wide aggression against non-Muslims -- the Jihad, of terrorism, conventional combat (qitaal), deployment of the Money Weapon, well-financed and carefully-targetted nonstop campaigns of Da'wa, propaganda and pressure from Muslims within and without Dar al-Harb to prevent non-Muslims from taking the most elementary security measures (including a halt to Muslim immigration, and an interdiction of Arab money that pays for those mosques and madrasas, those those campaigns of Da'wa, those propagandists for Islam)-- is in full swing.

But we can prevent Muslim states and peoples from acquiring WMD or, in the case of Pakistan, deploying or using that WMD. We can cease to train Muslims in the sciences, since again and again Muslims have used that training against non-Muslims. We can tax the use of oil and gas so as to force down its use and to recapture the oligopolistic rents of OPEC. We can stop Muslim immigration, and make it impossible to receive aid from rich Arabs abroad so that the building of mosques and madrasas halts. We can use zoning laws to prevent minarets, and close any mosques found to be places deemed "of danger" because vigilant monitoring has shown that violence against non-Muslims, or hatred of non-Muslims, is openly preached or, as in many mosques in Europe, false papers, weapons, even explosives are found on the premises. We can make it extremely hard for Muslims to return to the countries of Dar al-Harb once they leave to visit their home countries. We can immunize many against Islam -- for example, the Lost Boys of Sudan could be given work lecturing widely on, for example, Slavery in Islam, both as they know it, and through the centuries. Every occasion should be taken to familiarlze the public with passages from the Qru'an, Hadith, Sira, and the details of Muhammad's life, the life of the Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil, repeated endlessly, and related to present-day life (for he is a model of all time). Thus, the marriage and intercourse with little Aisha when she was six, should be mentioned, and then the lowering of the marriageable age of girls to six by that learned theologian Ayatollah Khomeini.

We should do nothing to prevent the natural fissures within Islam, the Camp of Islam, from working themselves out. Instead of trying to prevent conflict -- as in Iraq between Sunni and Shia, or Arab and non-Arab -- we should do nothing. There is no need, and it would be foolish to try, to encourage such conflct. 80% of the world's Muslims are non-Arab; the most advanced among those non-Arabs know, or can find out if the translated texts (such as Anwar Shaikh's "Islam: The Arab National Religion") are made available, about all the ways -- most quite obvious -- that Islam is a vehicle for Arab supremacism, beginning but not ending with Arab linguistic and cultural imperialism.

Finally, and possibly most important, the non-Muslims of this world should be made to realize all the ways in which the political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures of Muslim states and peoples, is a result of Islam itself. And when that understanding has been thoroughly grasped, and when many non-Muslims are able to speak about that, articulately, including those in the class of people whom I have called "those who presume to protect and instruct us" -- the members of our political and media elites - have been finally shamed, or mocked, or required by events that can no longer allow them to deny what has become so obvious to those whom they think they are leading (but who are getting fed up with the mediocrity and unresponsivenees and mixture-as-beforeness of their leaders or of those "taking a leadership role" to use the hideous but apt business-schoolish phrase), to tell something like the truth about Islam.

If enough people speak, intelligently and repeatedly and unanswerably, about these matters, all over the West, or rather all over the non-Muslim world, if this becomes accepted and grasped, then Muslims will, perforce, have to hear this talk, and somehow respond to it, and their response will be so unconvincing, and weak, even to many Muslims, that they in turn will become demoralized, as demoralized about Islam as were some a hundred years ago, when they saw the problem, and tried in their own ways, through writing about "reforms," or having a Constitutional Convention here or there, or even ending up with Kemalism in Turkey, to do what they could to curtail the power of Islam that, the most advanced Muslim thinkers (between roughly 1900-1940), or to find what they thought might be variations on the theme (cf. the birth of Ba'athism), that might allow Muslims to progress. Of course Muslims did not "progress" in any important sense. What happened is merely that the discovery of oil and of a use for oil, by non-Muslims, allowed Muslim members of what OPEC to reap fabulous sums, to gain huge influence, thorugh money and what money can buy, not through any real economic development, but simply through an accident of geology. Since 1973 alone, the Muslim members of OPEC have received more than twelve trillion dollars. What have they done with the money, aside from the palaces, the private 747s, the surpassing vulgarity of their hollow thrusting skyscrapers in pointless cities, the planeloads of food brought from Fauchon and Hediard, and, off the coast of southern Spain and southern France, the boatloads of callgirls who are ferried out to the waiting Arabs on their yachts, just as soon as the burqa'ed wives and children have been off-loaded for a day's shopping on the mainland. They have bought businessmen, politicians, journalists, they have paid for Arab-controlled "Centers of Muslim-Christian Understanding" and academic departments of MIddle Eastern studies, they have corrupted and continue to corrupt, our politics, our energy policies (why was Italy's nuclear program shut down nearly forty years ago? why is it so hard to make people understand how taxing oil at the wellhead, and gasoline at the pump, can allow us to keep down the OPEC price, not raise it, and to return to ourselves the revenue collected, while demand for oil is dampened, and investors in other forms of energy of an ever-increasing price of oil? What have the Saudis been doing in Washingotn, what did Prince Bandar do, for decades while we watched helplessly?).

And why do our governments, over the wishes of the peoples in whose names they claim to rule, continue to send vast sums to Muslims who do not have oil -- Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen the "Palestinians" -- on the unproven theory that if the people in these countries are less poor they will also be less Muslim, when all the evidence suggests that when Muslims weere poor (as in the Arabian peninsula) they were little threat, when they had to endure hardscrabble lives, they simply chewed their Qat or plied their dhows or engaged in their raiding parties or were glued to their hubble-bubble pipe, and did not disturb us, because they lacked the ability to do so. The more money we send them, the more the more able they are to acquire the means -- through television and Internet cafes -- to receive the messages of hate being spread, through television and the Internet, by their co-religiionists world-wide. And that is what, in the main, they hear; they do not hear the criticism of Islam, for the sounds are as yet too muffled. And the vast sums being transferrred to the Muslim oil states are thus supplemented by the vast sums being sent to the non-oil Muslim states, by the tens of billions annually, wherever we think there is a "problem" -- and we have allowed the dopes who rule over us to repeat that the "real problem" is "poverty" or "the lack of jobs" and that, if that problem is amerliorated, so will the threat from local terrorists, who are still seen as somehow little more than employers of last resort, and the appeal of Islam, to the well-off Muslims for example, is ignored. Was Saudi Arabia a threat to us in 1940? More than the threat it is in 2010? What about Libya -- more of a threat in 1940, or today? What about Iran? More of a threat in 1920, or more of a threat, with the oil money the Islamic Republic of Iran is now putting to use in weapons-building that we have all heard about, now? We keep ignoring Islam, Islam, Islam.

Why do we train Muslims in aspects of science that can then threaten us? Why, even, did we allow Arabic to be a usable script language on the Internet, which makes things easier for those plotting terrorism, or spreading propaganda to whip up those who are Muslims to do more? The Western world keeps inventing things that are then appropriated by Muslims and used against them. Some of it, no doubt, cannot be helped: when Khomeini, in his Neuaphle-le-chateau exile, recorded audiocassettes that were then sent back to Iran, and tens of thousands of copies made, to spread his message, there was little to be done. But the Western or non-Islamic world controls all the satellites in space, and could shut down all the Muslim-owned satellite television stations, a great source of propaganda, sometimes obvious and sometimes sly. It could make the use of the Internet by those whose native languages include Arabic and Urdu, for example, far more difficult or even impossible. They could put in place, in all weaponry sold to the Muslim lands, features that could be hidden, and then activated when deemed necessary -- a kind of pre-planned sabotage to make sure the Musilm countries acquire worthless armories, especially since one never knows when a full-fledged terrorist regime will take over from the usual, already hostile, aggressive, and dangerous regimes in place, held back from obvious support for terrorism by the desire of the rulers to continue to enjoy their riches, and not prompted by any sense of morality.

Oh, there's so much more one could say. And it has been said, repeatedly, at this website. It's not very hard to figure out how to weaken the Camp of Islam. But you can't begin to do it, to even think in those terms, if you don't recognize that the threat to the world's non-Muslims, those living in countries controlled by Muslims, and those who live in countries that, they fondly think, are and will always remain non-Muslim. How dangerously complacent and foolish that thought is, demonstrating a lack of knowledge about the texts and tenets and attitudes and atmospherids of Islam, and about the 1350-year history of the conquest, by Muslims, of many non-Muslim lands and peoples, and the subsequent subjugation, and inexorable reduction or even disappearance, of those many different non-Muslim peoples. A lack of knowledge, and also a want of imagination, a failure of imagination: the failure to imagine what could happen. It was a failure that could be observed all over the Western world, but especially in Western Europe, from 1933 to 1939. There were those who were not ignorant, and those who were not ignorant and also not lacking in imaginative understanding, the kind of thing that allows one to foreglimpse the future, however threatening or unpleasant. But they were not listened to, not even until the day before Hitler, having obtained the Sudetenland without a shot, then invaded Poland on some pretext about a border attack on a German radio-station. And today, people with sufficient knowledge and imaginationj exist, and keep trying to make others hear, and are not being listened to, as yet, with sufficient, civilisation-saving attention.

Hugh, I too do put my sign to the things you say. The only thing I want to add to all those thay you so detailedly explain is that whatever we do we have to do without forgetting that Muslims too are human beings. And even if we do get out of our concern the conciously aggresive ones there is a very big portion of the people (the biggest one) that is not aware even of the 'a' of this alphabet. There are children, there are women (who do not even imagine that there may be a different world of the one of so harsh tyranny that they already suffer).

My friend, all we know how we suffer when we get a small, insignificant cut in a finger of ours. Imagine what a suffering a small infant may experience after a bombing resulted wound. I just do want to have always in mind this reality and act accordingly in whatever I do in my life. Just this. I thing it is very easily understandable.

The situation is very grave as it seems. We are in some steps' distance from a terrible catastrophe. So, it is impossible not to think things relatedly to the issue of naked of ideologies human suffering.

I'm not filling any muslim void. Islam is a threat in need of a full spectrum whipping.

Sometimes Islamic hostility to Jews and Judaism takes a backseat to getting flooded with US weaponry to root out "terrorists".
That forges a bloody kind of mutual understanding.
Especially during the 1990's where you had the Israeli's pounding the Palestinians and the Turks pounding the Kurds.
Both unruly people that keep demanding self governance and a form of basic human rights.