“Turkey is a secular nation with a majority Muslim population. By welcoming Turkey into Europe we will prove how two cultures can not only exist together, but thrive together, as partners in the modern world.” — from the remarks here by Jack Straw
Turkey is a “secular nation” with a “majority Muslim population”? Turkey is, despite more than 80 years of Kemalism, with its systematic campaign to suppress Islam’s political and social power, not nearly “secular” enough. Islam is back — not that it ever went away — and how. Erbakan, and then Ergodan, and then Abdullah Gul, and all the rest of it. The cunning assault on the legitimacy of the army, the final upholder of Kemalism. The assault from within the universities on secular rectors and professors, and the determination to renew state support for Muslim schools and openness to government hiring of graduates of strictly Muslim schools and colleges. No, Turkey is not what it may once have been — say, in 1940, or even 1950. Islam keeps coming back.
And Turkey does not have a “majority Muslim population.” Its population is 99% Muslim. Does Jack Straw recall just how, over the last century, such a feat was accomplished? Does he know that Constantinople in 1914 was 50% non-Muslim, and that Turkey as a whole was about one-quarter non-Muslim? What happened to all those non-Muslims, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Levantines of every description? Did he forget, or did he never know?
And now he wants to admit this nation of 70 million Muslims, a nation becoming more dangerously Muslim every day — proving that those who count on Ataturks can’t count on very much, for the power of a potentially resurgent Islam never disappears, but always comes back — into the European Union, because this will “prove” that Islam and the West can get along. How does he know? Has he carefully studied, since he’s had time on his hands, the texts of Islam? Has he carefully studied the 1350-year history of Islam’s encounters with, conquest or attempted conquest of, non-Muslim lands and peoples, so that Islam can everywhere dominate, and Muslims rule everywhere? Why does he think it would be different if those 70 million Muslim Turks, reproducing far faster than any of Europe’s non-Muslims, added to the tens of millions of Muslims — Algerians, Moroccans, Egyptians, Tunisians, Somalis, Kurds, Iraqis, Syrians, Lebanese Muslims, and of course “Palestinians” — already in Europe, were allowed to travel freely throughout Schengenland, that is, all of visa-free Europe? What does he think would be the effect of making it easier for other Middle Eastern people, Arabs and Kurds not Turks, to enter the E.U. as Turks? For who, among those checking the borders, will be able to easily separate out the strange Turks from the just-as-strange Arabs, carrying false Turkish passports? A security nightmare, and a civilizational bet that only someone nearly insane would wish to make.
Jack Straw is nearly insane, for he ignores the texts, and the tenets, and the attitudes, and the 1350 years of history, all of which point in a direction opposite to the one in which he is so determinedly faced. Jack Straw — who has never abandoned his National Union of Students worldview — knows nothing of Islam, and is, in general, an ignoramus about the relevant history. Some may ascribe his views to the well-known phenomenon of certain people compensating for their antecedents (as the joke goes, Jewish “only on his parents’ side”). But in Straw’s case it is sheer ignorance, and the negligence which allows the high-and-mighty, once they are high and very mighty, to forego the study of those matters which, in fact, they ought long ago to have thoroughly familiarized themselves with — in Straw’s case, the tenets of Islam has contained in Qur’an, hadith, sira, and enshrined in the shari’a, and the history of the Middle East. He is not alone; anyone familiar with the pronouncements of assorted “Middle Eastern experts” ranging from the egregious David Satterfield, that promoter of the “Arabness” of Lebanon at Taif, and of Djerijian, or of tireless negotiators such as Dennis Ross, knows that these people know nothing significant about Islam, or its well-established rules concerning Infidels and treaties with Infidels. Jack Straw, in his foolishness, is simply a representative of the Western elites that have turned their heads away from the Jihad, focused manically on the “two tiny peoples” business in Israel, and permitted the demographic invasion, and possible conquest from within, of Western Europe (not to mention the massacres of Christians all over the Muslim East, and outside as well, in Sudan, and Pakistan, and as far as Indonesia, where 2,300 churches were destroyed in one year alone).
Esdrujula Explanation. Timidity. Rigidity. Cupidity. And what’s that other one? I keep forgetting, but it’s the most important one of all.
Yes. Right.