Posted on 07/28/2007 7:18:32 PM PDT by Flavius
We should go Turkey hunting if the Turks want our Kurds and way.
You people are unreliable, opportunistic back stabbing two faced "allies" of passing convenience..
France baited Turkey into betraying the U.S., prior to the invasion of Iraq - and Turkey rose to the bait, only to have France laugh in their face and piss on their paperwork for entry into the EU.
The latest elections in Turkey indicate the nation is backsliding away from the secular republic Ataturk succeeded in securing and back toward an Islamic nation, known throughout history as a brutal, intolerant and barbarian aggressive nation....
The instances of Turkey working within the NATO framework, are clearly offset by those cases where Turkey acted in her own interests and against the welfare of free peoples... Need you be reminded of the acts of genocide against the Armenian and Greeks -- in areas as widespread as Asia Minor, Constantinople (now called Istanbul by the Turks), Eastern Thrace, Imvros, Tenedos, Macedonia, Cappadocia and Pontos.
Most Turks are still in denial they conducted their own Holocaust -- but denial doesn't render it untrue.
Should I remind you of past atrocities by our own government? Americans are in denial about the atrocities in Waco, Texas at the Branch Davidian Church. What about the Trail of Tears? What about the internment of Japanese?
You are clueless about modern day Turkey. Have you ever been there? I love how keyboard commandos rant and rave on the internet about things they know nothing about. Fool.
Those who don't know History, are doomed to repeat it.
"Americans are in denial about the atrocities in Waco, Texas at the Branch Davidian Church. What about the Trail of Tears?
They've not been denied, nor did they rise to the level of genocidal crimes committed in the name of Islam...
The "Trail of Tears" led directly to subsequent oil wealth --- not the slaughter house of the Turks.
"Have you ever been there"?
Yes, I had to in order to see the artifacts of what was once a great Greek Civilization.
"Keyboard Commandos"
You know nothing about me.....and you're running your mouth in ignorance.
"Fool"
I'm sure that a term you hear often...
Hey, interesting information. I didn't know about any Marxist connection, but this
Turkey's military responded in the early 1990s with a harsh state of emergency, under which 3,000 villages were evacuated in a scorched-earth policy, hundreds of thousands were displaced, and abuses included killings and torture.
cannot be much different.
And this certainly is not good
"By killing, shooting, or slaughtering the innocent ones, [the PKK] can't do anything. That's not a solution," says Yalcin. "If they feel themselves to be brave, I suggest the PKK [fight] face to face, not with suicide attacks."
Okay, I have to admit the article is a bit muddy in it's intent - • Next: Ethnic Kurds who say that they are proud to back the PKK.
And again, thanks. - I'll have to research the PKK more. - bill
If other people want to hate Turkey that's their business. I happen to believe however that they should not use false information to justify it and wrongly influence others. It's easy enough to find facts to oppose Turkey -- same for any country.
Turkey's borders were established by Europeans after W.W.I. Had they extended Iraq a little further north perhaps today's problem would not exist.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk said at the founding of modern Turkey in 1923 that if you live within the borders, you are a Turk and you will speak Turkish.
As an English-only advocate I find absolutely nothing wrong with that. Also, as our Mexican border becomes more and more violent with the violence spilling over into the U.S. I would find absolutely nothing wrong with our troops entering Mexico to stop it if necessary.
That absolutely comports with news reports at the time. Thanks.
Reports in the foreign press at the time said that France warned Turkey that if they help us they'd never, never be allowed into the EU.
In fact, the newly elected AKP headed by Gul at the time tried to get parliament to approve letting us use their territory but, if I recall correctly, it was the old, established political parties that defeated Gul's plan.
The Army of the Republic of 1923 was not behind the Armenian genocide. The genocide was under the Ottoman Empire.
If I misspoke, I stand corrected, however, the Army has a history of persecuting Kurds and other non-Turkish minorities.
Yes, one of the minorities is the Islamists. It's the duty of the Army to protect the secular Republic. The last time was 1997, I believe. If the AKP fails to live up to its promise, so far so good I suppose, the next time could be?
As for another minority I'd have to cite the Marxist PKK. Definitely they were "persecuted" for their killings and for trying to foment revolution. I have numerous references to them above.
As for the Kurds in general no doubt many suffered as the Turks built modern Turkey given Her borders were established by the Europeans following W.W.I.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk said at the founding of modern Turkey in 1923 that if you live within the borders, you are a Turk and you will speak Turkish. As a U.S. citizen and English-only advocate I find absolutely nothing wrong with that. The difference is, we selected our borders; Turkey was handed Her borders.
As for other minorities who may have suffered at the hands of modern Turkey for no apparent reason other than "the Turks are just plain mean" I'll leave to others to provide reliable documentation. I am sure there is plenty out there -- I'd be remiss if I didn't confess that I remember the entire Cold War and our valuable ally, modern Turkey.
I am convinced that much of the bitterness against our valuable Cold War ally stems from Soviet disinformation. Just a guess.
For anyone to answer, why don't we keep pounding on modern Germany for the sins of the National Socialists?
It reminded me of the old NY Times articles, I could not find them there however. I found one elsewhere.
[One article follows] SEPTEMBER 24, 1915. 500,000 ARMENIANS SAID TO HAVE PERISHED. Washington Asked to Stop Slaughter of Christians by Turks and Kurds.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 Charles R. Crane of Chicago, a Director of Roberts College, Constantinople, and James L. Burton of Boston, Foreign Secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, visited the State Department today and conferred with Acting Secretary of State Polk and other officials regarding the slaughter of Armenians by Turks and Kurds in Asia Minor. They will attend a meeting of a general committee, to be held in New York within a few days, to devise a plan for appealing to the American people for funds and aid for as many of the unfortunate Armenians as can be helped. It was learned, in connection with the conferences held here today, that general representations have from time to time been made to the Ottoman Government by Ambassador Morgenthau for humane treatment of Armenians. Despite these representations, the slaughter of Armenians has continued. The records of the State Department are replete with detailed reports from American Consular officers in Asia Minor, which give harrowing tales of the treatment of the Armenian Christians by the Turks and the Kurds. These reports have not been made public. They indicate that the Turk has undertaken a war of extermination on Armenians, especially those of the Gregorian Church, to which about 90 percent of the Armenians belong. The Turkish Government originally ordered the deportation of all Armenians, but some time ago, after representations had been made by Morgenthau, the Ottoman Government gave assurances that the order would be modified so as not to embrace Catholic and Protestant Armenians. Reports reaching Washington indicate that about 500,000 Armenians have been slaughtered or lost their lives as a result of the Turkish deportation order and the resulting war of extinction. Turkish authorities drove the Gregorian Armenians out of their homes, ordered them to proceed to distant towns in the direction of Bagdad, which could only be reached by crossing long stretches of desert. During the exodus of Armenians across the deserts they have been fallen upon by Kurds and slaughtered, but some of the Armenian women and girls, in considerable numbers, have been carried off into captivity by the Kurds. The reports that have been sent to the State Department by its agents in Asia Minor fully confirm these statements made in the appeal sent to this country by Viscount Bryce, formerly the British Ambassador to the United States, to try to stop the slaughter of the Armenians. Viscount Bryce stated that the horror through which the Armenians have passed have been unparalleled in modern times. . . . [End of quotes. My emphasis]
It's heartwarming that our new friend and ally, Kurdistan of Iraq, is doing so well. I am proud that they consider the U.S. their friend. But, fair is fair vis-a-vis our long-time friend and ally. The Ottoman Turks weren't the only bastards in those days.
I just gotta comment on this one part.
Apparently state-sanctioned Islamic high schools cannot take college entrance tests and I guess get into (most? all?) universities. "[S]ecularists charge [Islamic high schools] are inferior and train people to follow authority rather than to function as democratic individuals. If there is a change to raise their status, hundreds of thousands of students could enter this system, indoctrinating them into an Islamist-style approach."
A little warning for our universities! So far it's only special privileges; more and more and more all the time.
We should withdraw from Iraq — through Tehran. Here’s how I think we should “pull out of Iraq.” Add one more front to the scenario below, which would be a classic amphibious beach landing from the south in Iran, and it becomes a “strategic withdrawal” from Iraq. And I think the guy who would pull it off is Duncan Hunter.
How to Stand Up to Iran
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1808220/posts?page=36#36
Posted by Kevmo to TomasUSMC
On News/Activism 03/28/2007 7:11:08 PM PDT · 36 of 36
Split Iraq up and get out
***The bold military move would be to mobilize FROM Iraq into Iran through Kurdistan and then sweep downward, meeting up with the forces that we pull FROM Afghanistan in a 2-pronged offensive. We would be destroying nuke facilities and building concrete fences along geo-political lines, separating warring tribes physically. At the end, we take our boys into Kurdistan, set up a couple of big military bases and stay awhile. We could invite the French, Swiss, Italians, Mozambiqans, Argentinians, Koreans, whoever is willing to be the police forces for the regions that we move through, and if the area gets too hot for these peacekeeper weenies we send in military units. Basically, it would be learning the lesson of Iraq and applying it.
15 rules for understanding the Middle East
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1774248/posts
Rule 8: Civil wars in the Arab world are rarely about ideas — like liberalism vs. communism. They are about which tribe gets to rule. So, yes, Iraq is having a civil war as we once did. But there is no Abe Lincoln in this war. It’s the South vs. the South.
Rule 10: Mideast civil wars end in one of three ways: a) like the U.S. civil war, with one side vanquishing the other; b) like the Cyprus civil war, with a hard partition and a wall dividing the parties; or c) like the Lebanon civil war, with a soft partition under an iron fist (Syria) that keeps everyone in line. Saddam used to be the iron fist in Iraq. Now it is us. If we don’t want to play that role, Iraq’s civil war will end with A or B.
Let’s say my scenario above is what happens. Would that military mobilization qualify as a “withdrawal” from Iraq as well as Afghanistan? Then, when we’re all done and we set up bases in Kurdistan, it wouldn’t really be Iraq, would it? It would be Kurdistan.
.
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I have posted in the past that I think the key to the strategy in the middle east is to start with an independent Kurdistan. If we engaged Iran in such a manner we might earn back the support of these windvane politicians and wussie voters who don’t mind seeing a quick & victorious fight but hate seeing endless police action battles that don’t secure a country.
I thought it would be cool for us to set up security for the Kurds on their southern border with Iraq, rewarding them for their bravery in defying Saddam Hussein. We put in some military bases there for, say, 20 years as part of the occupation of Iraq in their transition to democracy. We guarantee the autonomy of Iraqi Kurdistan as long as they don’t engage with Turkey. But that doesn’t say anything about engaging with Iranian Kurdistan. Within those 20 years the Kurds could have a secure and independent nation with expanding borders into Iran. After we close down the US bases, Kurdistan is on her own. But at least Kurdistan would be an independent nation with about half its territory carved out of Persia. If Turkey doesn’t relinquish her claim on Turkish Kurdistan after that, it isn’t our problem, it’s 2 of our allies fighting each other, one for independence and the other for regional primacy. I support democratic independence over a bullying arrogant minority.
The kurds are the closest thing we have to friends in that area. They fought against Saddam (got nerve-gassed), they’re fighting against Iran, they squabble with our so-called ally Turkey (who didn’t allow Americans to operate in the north of Iraq this time around).
It’s time for them to have their own country. They deserve it. They carve Kurdistan out of northern Iraq, northern Iran, and try to achieve some kind of autonomy in eastern Turkey. If Turkey gets angry, we let them know that there are consequences to turning your back on your “friend” when they need you. If the Turks want trouble, they can invade the Iraqi or Persian state of Kurdistan and kill americans to make their point. It wouldn’t be a wise move for them, they’d get their backsides handed to them and have eastern Turkey carved out of their country as a result.
If such an act of betrayal to an ally means they get a thorn in their side, I would be happy with it. It’s time for people who call themselves our allies to put up or shut up. The Kurds have been putting up and deserve to be rewarded with an autonomous and sovereign Kurdistan, borne out of the blood of their own patriots.
Should Turkey decide to make trouble with their Kurdish population, we would stay out of it, other than to guarantee sovereignty in the formerly Iranian and Iraqi portions of Kurdistan. When one of our allies wants to fight another of our allies, it’s a messy situation. If Turkey goes “into the war on Iran’s side” then they ain’t really our allies and that’s the end of that.
I agree that it’s hard on troops and their families. We won the war 4 years ago. This aftermath is the nation builders and peacekeeper weenies realizing that they need to understand things like the “15 rules for understanding the Middle East”
This was the strategic error that GWB committed. It was another brilliant military campaign but the followup should have been 4X as big. All those countries that don’t agree with sending troups to fight a war should have been willing to send in policemen and nurses to set up infrastructure and repair the country.
What do you think we should do with Iraq?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1752311/posts
Posted by Kevmo to Blue Scourge
On News/Activism 12/12/2006 9:17:33 AM PST · 23 of 105
My original contention was that we should have approached the reluctant “allies” like the French to send in Police forces for the occupation after battle, since they were so unwilling to engage in the fighting. It was easy to see that we’d need as many folks in police and nurse’s uniforms as we would in US Army unitorms in order to establish a democracy in the middle east. But, since we didn’t follow that line of approach, we now have a civil war on our hands. If we were to set our sights again on the police/nurse approach, we might still be able to pull this one off. I think we won the war in Iraq; we just haven’t won the peace.
I also think we should simply divide the country. The Kurds deserve their own country, they’ve proven to be good allies. We could work with them to carve out a section of Iraq, set their sights on carving some territory out of Iran, and then when they’re done with that, we can help “negotiate” with our other “allies”, the Turks, to secure Kurdish autonomy in what presently eastern Turkey.
That leaves the Sunnis and Shiites to divide up what’s left. We would occupy the areas between the two warring factions. Also, the UN/US should occupy the oil-producing regions and parcel out the revenue according to whatever plan they come up with. That gives all the sides something to argue about rather than shooting at us.
That leaves Damascus for round II. The whole deal could be circumvented by Syria if they simply allow real inspections of the WOMD sites. And when I say “real”, I mean real — the inspectors would have a small armor division that they could call on whenever they get held up by some local yocal who didn’t get this month’s bribe. Hussein was an idiot to dismantle all of his WOMDs and then not let the inspectors in. If he had done so, he’d still be in power, pulling Bush’s chain.
Check out this interesting article:
Turks & Tolerance
Putting Islamist victory in Turkey in context.
By Joshua Treviño
The ballots are in, and the Turkish electorate this week decisively
reelected Recep Tayyip Erdogan to a second term as prime minister in Ankara.
Erdogan’s Islamist Justice and Development party rose to power — first as
the Welfare Party, till it was forcibly disbanded, and then in its current
guise — amid fears that it would depart from the Kemalist vision that
undergirds the modern Turkish state. (The party is more commonly known by
its Turkish acronym, “AK.”) Certainly it did not help that he was prone to
public statements such as, “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our
helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers,” nor that
he has declared that he seeks God’s forgiveness each time he shakes hands
with a woman. When Westerners envision Muslim leaders with whom they may do
business, Prime Minister Erdogan is not the sort who comes to mind. Still
less, despite his stated ambition for his country, are he and his the men
who will lead Turkey into Brussels’ version of “Europe.”
But if Turkey’s elected leadership seems an unwelcome religious throwback
after decades of familiar generals and gray-suited bureaucrats, and if
Turkey itself has not been a model of pluralist democracy under AK rule,
neither has it slid backward into the much-feared Islamist grand vision. The
popular metaphor for Turkey has it poised between two worlds: Europe on the
one side, and Asia on the other. The media narrative in the U.S. and Europe
would have us believe that Erdogan and the AK party represent the latter,
drawing Turkey away from us in its ambition and program. Their opponents,
therefore, are our friends, or at least are benign toward the West. This
narrative is simple and comprehensible. It is also false.
The reality is that Turkish state and society are precariously balanced
between three distinct visions: the aggressive chauvinism of its Kemalist
founding; the Islamist ambitions of its resurgent religious consciousness;
and the secularist ambitions of its burgeoning entrepreneurial and urban
classes. Each of these strands has its pull, and barring unlikely
catastrophe, none will wholly dominate the others. For all the ink spilled
over the pros and cons of Islamist rule in Turkey, it is the Kemalist
element that represents the most meaningful threat to a Turkey that may join
Europe. Understanding that threat is key to understanding AK’s victory this
past weekend.
The maverick Turkish historian Taner Akçam, in his book From Empire to
Republic, explains the basic premises of the Kemalist worldview. Turkish
nationalism as expounded by Mustafa Kemal, better known as Atatürk, arose in
the context of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire. The empire’s loss of
territory in Africa and the Arab Middle East was discouraging, but not
nearly so traumatic as its dramatic rollback in Europe, where millions of
Turks and Islamized Europeans lived. (Atatürk himself was a native of the
now-Greek city of Thessaloniki.) As the empire tottered and fell, the
Entente powers of the First World War decided to extend the process of
dismemberment to Turkey’s Anatolian heartland. The Allies occupied Istanbul;
Woodrow Wilson advocated an Armenian state on the eastern third of modern
Turkey; France and Italy attempted to carve up southwestern Asia Minor; and
most famously, Greece landed an invasion force at Smyrna (modern Izmir) and
advanced nearly to Ankara in pursuit of a reborn Byzantine Empire. It was
only the organizational and political genius of Mustafa Kemal that saved
Turks from having nothing more than a rump state deep in the interior: He
cowed the Allies into abandoning the country, and crushed the Greeks in a
campaign that ended in the massacre of thousands on the quays of Smyrna.
The lesson that Kemal’s Turkish nationalists drew from the trauma of their
republic’s birth was twofold: first, that religion in public life is a
retrograde force; second, that non-Turks are a tremendous existential danger
to Turkey. This outlook contained in itself its own contradiction: the
definition of a “Turk” in this context is a Muslim who speaks Turkish. Given
the polyglot nature of the Ottoman Empire, this means that those considered
Turks are not all ethnically Turkish: Slavic, Caucasian, Arab, and Greek
blood are all part of the national heritage. Thus, the Kemalist project
attempted to simultaneously suppress faith, and posit faith as the defining
characteristic of national identity. Though the state formally recognized
non-Muslim citizens, it also suppressed and expelled them as much as
possible, in a process beginning with the expulsion of Greeks from Asia
Minor in 1923, continuing with the pogrom eliminating the Greek community of
Istanbul in 1955, and proceeding into the modern day with the slow push to
eliminate the Orthodox Christian Patriarchate in Istanbul. Muslim citizens
of the Turkish state would receive similar treatment if they dared seek
autonomy — see the Kurds for a prime example — but if they refrained, they
were generally left to pursue a quiet existence, as the thriving Arab
population of Antakya, near the Syrian border, testifies.
The baleful effects of this sort of nationalism are on display today.
Religious freedom is severely restricted, and the country has a history of
outright prohibition of missionary activity. As previously noted, the
Turkish state actively seeks to eliminate the patriarch, senior bishop of
the world’s Orthodox Christians, whose place of office has been in Istanbul
since a millennium before the Turks conquered that city. A combination of
legal restrictions and tightening controls mean that the pool of
state-approved candidates for the patriarchate is rapidly shrinking, and
unless these policies change, there will probably be no one left to become
Patriarch before this century ends. The slow ending of an ancient Christian
institution may seem, in the modern media narrative, an ambition of
Islamists, and perhaps it is: but the responsibility here is squarely on
Turkey’s Kemalist heritage, and its legacy of nationalist paranoia.
It is not merely the patriarchate that is under threat: Anyone deviating
from the accepted mode of Kemalist Turkishness is liable to harassment or
worse. Turkish converts to Christianity Hakan Tastan and Turan Topal are
presently on trial under Article 301, a newly drafted (as of 2005) Kemalist
legal legacy that prohibits “insulting Turkishness.” Turkish media fixture
Kemal Kerincsiz, who is participating in the case, has told the press,
“Christian missionaries working almost like terrorist groups are able to
enter into high schools and among primary school students … They deceive our
children with beautiful young girls.” Though this may sound like Islamist
rhetoric, the impetus for the prosecution comes from nationalist adherents
of Kemalism who are vastly more concerned with the protection of Turkey than
the defense of Islam. Kerincsiz himself represents an element of Kemalism so
zealous that he regularly seeks the prosecution of Muslim Turks who do not
hew to the strict Kemalist line: the authors Elif Safak and Orhan Pamuk are
among many hauled before courts in recent years to defend their fidelity to
Turkishness.
For all their misfortunes, at least Tastan, Topal, Shafak, and Pamuk are
alive. Father Andrea Santoro, a Roman Catholic priest, is not: He was shot
dead in the Black Sea city of Trabzon by a Turkish youth motivated by a
mixture of nationalist and Islamist sympathies. An April 9, 2006, Washington
Post story on the killing laid forth in stark terms the perceived linkage
between Turkish patriotism and Islam:
[Isa Karatas, spokesman for Turkey’s perhaps 80 evangelical
Protestant churches], said fellow Turks often ask him: “‘If there is a war,
whose side are you going to fight on?’ I just couldn’t get them to
understand that even though I’m a Christian, my feeling for my country is
the same. They just don’t understand this.”
Behnan Konutgan, an official with the Bible Society in Turkey who
has said every Christian is obliged to spread the Good Word, has been
arrested repeatedly. “When I am preaching,” he said, “people think I’m an
enemy of the country.”
That the consequences of this perceived enmity are dire is illustrated in
more than just Fr. Santoro’s case. This past April, in the city of Malatya,
deep in the eastern Turkish interior, a German minister and two Turkish
Christians were tortured and murdered. A July 12, 2007, editorial in
Christianity Today described the horrifying event: “The two Christians were
bound hand and foot to chairs, and the Muslims began stabbing them, slowly
and deliberately … Finally, three hours after the torture began, police were
called. The captors then slit the Christians’ throats, killing all three.”
The killers’ note explaining the deed was not one of jihad, but of plain
Kemalist nationalism: “We did it for our country. They are trying to take
our country away, take our religion away.” Within days of the killings,
anonymous Turks sympathizing with the murders were reportedly threatening
media outlets in Ankara who dared report on the case.
Finally, the murder of Istanbul newspaper editor Hrant Dink has attracted
some notice in Western media. Dink was Turkish by citizenship, and Armenian
by ethnicity — and as such, he was something of an alien figure to both
milieus. He made his name by challenging the nationalist tropes of both
Turkey and Armenia, demanding that Turkey acknowledge its history of
repression, and asking Armenians to let go of their bitterness. For his
lifetime of effort, he was repeatedly put on trial, and on January 19th of
this year, he was shot dead by a Turkish nationalist youth named Ogün
Samast. The killer was swiftly apprehended by authorities clearly
sympathetic to his blow for Kemalism: on February 2nd, the Turkish
publication Radikal published photographs of Samast in custody, flanked by
smiling policemen as he hoisted a Turkish flag. A mere ten days before, a
hundred thousand Turks had turned out for Dink’s funeral in Istanbul. In the
throng were placards reading, “We are all Hrant Dink.”
The hundred thousand of Dink’s funeral are the hope of Turkey’s future: They
are the third element of the three-way struggle for the national destiny,
mostly young and mostly educated men and women who reject the paranoid
strictures and heavy-handed demands of Kemalist nationalism. This past
weekend, they mostly voted for Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AK party, not
because they are Islamists, but because in the Turkish context, it’s not the
Islamists who have brought repression to modern Turkey. Though it is true
that many of the incidents of Kemalist-inspired repression cited here
occurred under Islamist governments in Ankara, past and present, it must be
understood that the Turkish parallel state, in which the military and
nationalist elder figures assume the role of guardian of the republic,
remains tremendously strong — and the Kemalist ethic is profoundly powerful
and enduring. Even in leadership, the AK party is not able to impose a
non-Kemalist society upon Turkey any more than American Democrats may work
their unfettered will as a Congressional majority.
Our true friends in Turkey are neither the Kemalist nationalists nor the
Islamists, but the post-nationalist secularists who enliven Istanbul’s
trendy districts, populate the Aegean resorts, and produce the literary
genius of the likes of Pamuk. For now, that group has endorsed the AK
party’s Islamists. It is a choice we should respect — even as we hope for
more.
This is not to be naïve or starry-eyed about Erdogan or the Islamists. They
may proclaim their desire to join the European Union, and they may model
themselves after the Christian Democrats in Europe. But Islam and
Christianity make rather different claims on the state and society; and we
should have enough experience with political Islam by now to regard it with
wary skepticism until given reason to trust. And — let us note — we do not
know whether, in a generation’s time, Turkish minorities may still be
repressed, only in Islam’s name rather than Mustafa Kemal’s. This is
regrettably possible, but it is not inevitable. If Recep Tayyip Erdogan
wants to show that it will not happen, than he would do well to begin by
listening to the message of the hundred thousand of Hrant Dink. He could
give the patriarchate in Istanbul its liberty; he could give Hakan Tastan
and Turan Topal their freedom; and he could seek the old Ottoman tradition
of social pluralism over the Kemalist legacy of homogenization. It would not
be an easy thing for him to do — but it would be right.
— Joshua Treviño is the vice president for public policy at the Pacific
Research Institute in San Francisco, California. He has professional
experience in the Muslim world in Asia and Africa. In fall 2006, he led a
delegation to attend the papal-patriarchal events in Istanbul, Turkey.
Well I had the good fortune to have worked a few years both here and almost a year in Ankara with many of Turkey's "post-nationalist secularists." Even more amazing I suppose is that during that almost a year of living in Ankara I met one each of Kemalists and Islamists. But hey I didn't get around that much; but the many people on the streets and in the stores all seemed like "post-nationalist secularists" to me.
Or as I thought at the time, it was as European as Madrid where I'd lived for two years; only, Ankara was mostly lacking in architectural and street beauty but the people were beautiful, Madrid was just the opposite.
Turkey is a country of Muslims; that is, it is not a Muslim country. It is 99 percent Muslim. The article states however that Kemalism can sometimes be "vastly more concerned with the protection of Turkey than the defense of Islam [and can seek] the prosecution of Muslim Turks." Personally I can see me putting America first and "persecuting" extremist "Christian" groups though I consider myself Christian but I eschew organized religion. Couldn't it be that Kemalists have problems with Islamists and not ordinary Turkish folks? They certainly have tremendous reverence for Ataturk, I found that out.
I believe that the hope of the article and others is that in time all will be "post-nationalist secularists;" surprise, the AKP may lead the way. Some name two important indicators of AKP's intentions: who they back to be president and will they try to stop the military from purging Islamists.
Again the article mentions the Kurds without mention of the Marxist PKK atrocities. As I recall, the PKK troubles started in the 1980s and it was then that Ankara began sending additional military and law enforcement personnel to the region to counter the PKK. If that is persecution then so be it. I just hope Washington does likewise here as Mexican drug, and otherwise, violence spills over into our Country.
Again, Turkey's borders were established following W.W.I. Ataturk did not select the borders but he did say that if you live within the borders you will be a Turk and speak Turkish. If that is minority persecution then so be it.
The religious "persecution" is Turkey's business. The article cites some horrible murders but I suppose the author just forgot to type in the links to the government, ya think?
I believe that it is hypocrisy for me to condemn Turkey while favoring English only and if you are a resident of America then by golly you are going to be American. Also, as radical Islam continues to seek to convert and subvert I have absolutely no problem persecuting that religion. Ditto, less radical Muslims who perhaps only want "foot baths" installed in supermarkets, parks, parking lots, playgrounds, . . . .
Perhaps the finest people I've met in my entire life were Turks. Nothing can dissuade me from that experience. They are not going to let their country go to either Kemalists or Islamists, IMO.
read balkan history and you’ll see that the turks were the
cruelest of conquerors.
Thanks for the insight and the great comments.
but they won
oh and actually they were not cruel as long as you converted to islam
just like the bosnian muslims did
so there where perks to convert
so not bad if you turned muslim
THE Muslim Turks were the Hitlerian models for concentration camps and genocide.
The butchered 3 million Christian men women and children...for the crime if not being willing to give up the Lord...people who had been living there for a thousand years before the hordes ever got there.
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