Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald explains why Turkey should not be admitted into the European Union:
Is it impossible for anyone in the current Administration to understand why Turkey should not be admitted into the European Union? American policymakers have been snookered, including Richard Perle. In his days with Senator Jackson, Perle was a hero; now he is something less: involved up to his neck with Conrad Black of Hollinger and taken in by Ahmad Chalabi and other charming, plausible Shi’a exiles who wanted American forces to overthrow Saddam for them. Perle over the past few days has used whatever prestige and contacts remain to him to push for Turkey in the E.U., which may be explained by two things: first, Perle’s former role as a paid agent of Turkey, during which he acquired a view of Turkey as one of forward-looking entirely secular generals in Ankara, and second, his apparent unwillingness to thoroughly study Islam and to realize just how profound is its hold over the majority of Turks, and how the “secularism” of Turkey is both greatly exaggerated and in any case, on the run — for as with all Muslim peoples, Islam is permanent.
The forces of secularism are constantly being undermined and challenged. In Ataturk’s day, they were not successful because of his ruthlessness. But now that very ruthlessness has been tied down by changes in the law required by the E.U. with which the smiling sinister Erdogan — whom Perle introduced at the American Enterprise Institute a year ago — is happy to comply.
Will those now lobbying for Turkey in the corridors of E.U. power come to realize that their “secular” Turkey is an imaginary one? Will they realize that the “secularism” that was brought to Turkey required eternal vigilance, that the secularist proportion of the population — possibly a quarter of the total — was never sufficiently powerful or perhaps aware enough to solidify its gains, and is now on the run? In some cases it has begun to parrot the anti-Western (i.e. anti-American) line of the Erdogan government. Islam has shown itself to be permanent and more powerful than Kemalism, which needs to be maintained, unfortunately, by an army ready and willing to intervene. The very process of applying for admission to the E.U. gives Erdogan a cover to undo the power of the army and other anti-Kemalist forces. Perhaps those who celebrated what they took to be the permanent change in Turkey — one thinks of Bernard Lewis — will admit that the Turks they met were not representative, and that it is more important to protect Western Europe. Europe already needs to reverse the folly of the mass Muslim migration that has helped make life so unpleasant, expensive and physically insecure for Infidels everywhere in Europe, and will continue to do so unless Muslim migration is halted, and these countries made, not Muslim-friendly, but Muslim-hostile, so that demographic conquest can end and inroads be reversed. It may come to something like the Benes Decree in Czechoslovakia. Surely whatever threat the tolerant Benes-Masaryk government sensed from the Sudeten Germans in 1946, which prompted their large-scale expulsion, was as nothing compared to the threat that a large Muslim population would pose to non-Muslims. Just look at the demands made, every day, by a relatively small Muslim population, pressing here and there and everywhere for changes to be made in the laws, customs, understandings, and freedoms of the indigenous Infidels — among whom these people, bearing not an alien creed, but an alien and a hostile creed, have come to settle. Permanently — they think.
Those who have been lobbying for Turkey, an imaginary Turkey, a Turkey of Taksim Square, and Istiqlal Caddesi, and Hagia Sophia and the hippodrome, and the no-nonsense generals in Ankara who seem pro-Western (“can you recommend a good private school for my son, somewhere in New England?”), and that great deal on rugs — how nice to have an especially knowledgeable Turk go with you, to protect you from the wiles of the friendly family that offers you a thimbleful of mint tea and “only wants you to look, not to buy — just come in and look” — a Turkey of a few million “secularists” out of 70 million, don’t seem to realize that Turkey”s admission to the E.U. would change forever the culture and civilization of Western Europe, at the very time when Europeans seem to be waking up, even if their stupid or unimaginative or bought-and-paid-for ruling classes have not.
The entry of Turkey into the E.U. would be the end of Europe not as a “Christian club” but as a part of Western civilization. It would damage free thought, art, everything else. There is no reason to think that such admission would transform the Muslims of Turkey.
One can understand why, for their own reasons — desperate to dilute, and hoping to reverse — the islamization of Turkey, secular Turks would want, as Erdogan and Islamists also want, for completely different reasons, to be admitted to the E.U. That desire should be resisted.