Middle East Quarterly has a truly interesting reading about Turkish real situation:
Since their electoral landslide victory in November 2002, Islamists within Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) have camouflaged themselves as “democratic Islamic conservatives.”[1] The AKP claims to be the Muslim equivalent of the Christian-Democratic parties of Western Europe. Such an analogy is false, however. What the AKP seeks is not “Islam without fear,” to borrow the phrase of Trinity College professor Raymond Baker,[2] but rather a strategy for a creeping Islamization that culminates in a Shari‘a (Islamic law) state not compatible with a secular, democratic order. The AKP does not advertise this agenda and often denies it. This did not convince the chief prosecutor of Turkey who, because of AKP efforts to Islamize Turkey, sought to ban the party and seventy-one of its leaders. While the AKP survived a ban, the majority of justices found that the AKP had worked to advance an Islamist agenda and undermine secularism.[3] Nevertheless, the AKP enjoys the backing of the United States and the European Union as well. Through its support for institutional Islamism in Turkey, the West loses its true friends: liberal Muslims.
But as ever, Islamism is always side by side with Judeophobia. And so attacks on Jewish people in Turkey have increased, as a result of Israeli operation in Gaza:
There are people around the clock besieging the Israeli consulate in Istanbul shouting their hatred against Israel and Jewish people. All around Istanbul billboards are full of propaganda posters against Israel like; “Moses, even this is not written in your book” and “Israel Stop this Crime.” On the streets the people are writing such graffiti as: “Kill Jews,” “Kill Israel,” “Israel should no longer exist in the Middle East,” and “Stop Israeli Massacre.”
The week-end before, some people wrote, “We will kill you” on the door of one of the biggest synagogues in Izmir resulted in the closing down of synagogues. Near Istanbul University, a group put a huge poster on the door of a shop owned by a Jew: “Do not buy from here, since this shop is owned by a Jew.” A group put posters on his wall saying that: “Jews and Armenians are not allowed but dogs are allowed.” Some young people are even threatening others with violence if they are seen as pro-Israel in social networking websites such as Facebook and Hi5.
Meanwhile, Erdogan attacks PKK targets, but at the same time considers Israeli operation in Gaza a genocide and says that to Shimon Peres at Davos summit. Erbakan, AKP’s founding father is specially important in this aspect. Contrary to the consideration of Turkey as a friend to Israel and of Jews as citizens, one of the main basis of his ideas was, without doubt, the judeophobia:
During Erbakan’s pre-election campaign stops before throngs of tens of thousands of supporters throughout Anatolia (including cities such as Trabzon, Elazig, and Konya), as well as cosmopolitan Ankara and Istanbul, he reiterated the same virulently Antisemitic statements captured in the July 1 interview, and other interviews.
These interviews and more expansive speeches were rife with allusions to Zionists/Jews (deliberately conflated), as “bacteria,” and “disease,” conspiring to dominate the contemporary Islamic world (“from Morocco to Indonesia,”), as they had attempted unsuccessfully during the 11th and 12th centuries when Jews purportedly “organized” the Crusades, only to be stopped by the Turk’s/Erbakan’s Seljuk “forefathers.” Ultimately, Erbakan claimed, modern Jews/Zionists wished to establish “a world order where money and manpower are dependent on [them].”
Contrary to the normal belief, Turkey has also suffered from antisemitism during its History while last progroms against Jewish, Greek and Armenians took place in 1950′s.
But AKP’s Islamist agenda has worsened the problem, weakening political institutions, specially those whose aim was supporting the secular Turkish state. But the threat of being declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Tribunal made Erdogan see the importance of moving quickly. So he is detaining people, acussing them of plotting an ultra-nationalist plot against the Government, under charges which can be considered as highly irregular:
Most of the latest suspects are from the special operations unit of the police, the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford in Istanbul says.
The unit was set up to fight against terror in the 1980s – and was mainly active against Kurdish separatists. Human rights groups have documented many unsolved murders and disappearances from that time, she adds.
The unit’s former leader, Ibrahim Shahin, was arrested earlier this month, and a map found at his house led police to a cache of weapons buried in a forest.
How someone who has been the leader of an antiterrorist unit has “a map in his house that led police to a cache of weapons buried in a forest”, is at least irregular. But he is not the only one: military men, union presidents, university professors, etc. have incurred in the AKP’s wrath just because they were secular.
The worrying thing is that is not probable that this tendency is going to be modified in the future. The support provided by US and European Union to AKP’s Government, considering them as “moderate“, is just another factor in favour of Turkey’s Islamization.
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