"Don't ask. Take it easy."

This could be the motto for survival in Turkey -- for Muslims and Christians alike. We don't understand the pervasiveness of the "Deep State" there and its hold on the populace.

When I lived in Turkey in a city not far from Malatya where these murders took place I was still in my naive mindset (i.e. the reality of Islam and the Turkish character hadn't yet penetrated my brain). I once innocently questioned two Turks about the possible existence of the Turkish Mafia. Neither could venture any reply to me at all, just a deafening silence in which I sensed fear and suspicion.

If there is any collusion here between accused and police, it's reminiscent of the kid-glove handling meted out to the murderer of Hrant Dink by the smiling Istanbul police. Dink, coincidentally, was born in Malatya.

Posted by: Jen at December 9, 2007 8:02 AM

"Christian leaders have said they are worried that nationalists are stoking hostility against non-Turks and non-Muslims by exploiting uncertainty over Turkey's place in the world."
-- from the article above

"Nationalists"?

Is Erdogan, author of, and actor in the play "MasKomYa" (an acronym meaing "Freemasons, Communists, Jews) a "nationalist"? It is true that the cult of Ataturk was an attempt to replace the cult of Muhammad, and that the cult of The Turk (and the "Sun People") was a wierd concoction designed to replace the cult of the best of people, the Muslims, but is it those supposedly Kemalist "nationalists" -- the Kemalism of the primitive, who require a substitute myth, as opposed to the Kemalism of the secularists, who see the usefulness of the cult of Ataturk but no longer share it, as they have gone beyond (but, alas, not gone beyond to see that in Turkey, as in other countries, the vast number of primitives must be led into the light, and that they, as secular beneficiaries of 70-odd years of Kemalist rule, only coming undone in the last decade, did not do enough, are not doing enough, to carry out the Kemalist program further, and foolishly simply assumed it would go on forever, and the Erbakans and Erdogans would not be able, as they so obviously have been able, to undo it, little by sly under-the-radar little). For the army is being infiltrated, at lower levels, and no good can come of this or of the anti-American propaganda that is non-stop in Turkey today -- even though the United States has been the main supporter (wrongly, of course) of Turkish admission to the E.U.

Erbakan and others called "Islamists" (a term that should be used sparingly, for it can confuse) have cleverly used the demands of the E.U. as a way to limit the freedom of the army -- as the guardian of Kemallism -- to take the kind of actions that 30 years ago it would not have hesitated to make. They are able, that is, to use the "rules of the West" (in this case the E.U.) to weaken the only force in Turkey that, in the end, through a coup or the threat of a coup, can stop the steady unraveling of Kemalism, until Turkey begins to look like just another Muslim state, instead of what it once seemed destined to be, not merely a great exception, a state that could properly shackle Islam as a political and social force, and produce, en masse, people whom we in the West could recognize as belonging to the same intellectual universe, people we could talk to, people who were not subject to the hysteria, the unreason, the crazed conspiratorial view of the world, the astounding complacent ignorance of history, even of recent history -- that characterizes Muslims who grow up in societies suffused with Islam, an Islam not checked by Kemalism or some local version of the same systematic attempt to curb Islam's power over the minds of men, while still allowing themselves to be called, to identify themselves as, "Muslims."

This is no different from the use, within the Infidel lands, of individual rights, by Muslims who, if they were in control, would end that solicitude for individual rights once and for all. The exploitation of Western freedoms and Western standards, by those who do not recognize but despite those freedoms and standards, is the same in the case of the cunning apparatchiki of CAIR, within the United States, as it is of Erdogan, and his brand of european-community-made-me-do-it cunning, within Turkey.

Posted by: Hugh at December 9, 2007 10:06 AM

I beleive those poor souls were badly tortured...guts pulled out and stomped on...eyes nose and ears cut off, then throats cut.

Posted by: AmericanTiger at December 9, 2007 1:38 PM

Greetings:

Maybe we can get get Peter, Paul and Mary to change their song to "Where have all the Christians Gone."

Posted by: 11B40 at December 9, 2007 1:51 PM

Chalk up some more casualties for Infidelophobia. But naturally the press never calls it as such because it's busy lecturing us on the evils of Islamophobia, the killer of nothing but common sense.

Posted by: ISLAMSFORLOSERS at December 9, 2007 4:41 PM

There is nothing new in the collusion of police and homicide in Turkey, or any other Islamic country. If you are non-muslim, you have no rights, no protection. Remember, please, the horrifing attack on Christians in Istanbul/Constantinople in the 1950s. Muslims planted an explosive device that harms Muslims in Thessaloniki. The trucks loaded with bats, shovels and picks were already in place when the Turkish papers enflamed the populace with lurid reports of a 'Christian' plot. Christians (Orthodox) were attacked in their homes, their shops, and the streets. Children, women, families were brutally murdered by ordinary Islamic citizens. The police turned a blind eye, assisting no one. The same thing happened in the bloody massacre at Smyrna in 1922. As Islamic communities come to dominate places like Dearborn, Michigan, and the local police forces hire Islamic officers to help in those areas, attacks upon ordinary citizens will go unassisted, unreported, and unprosecuted. The gradual Islamization of America is in progress.

Posted by: thelittlegreekwoman at December 10, 2007 12:48 PM

More encouraging news from the "secular" Turks! If you can't collude with the police to murder Christians, who CAN you murder?! How unreasonably judgemental we western infidels are!

Posted by: HereticInfidel at December 11, 2007 8:47 AM