By P. David Hornik on 5.1.07 @ 12:08AM
Europe's non-Muslims evidently would prefer an Islamist Turkey to a secular military one.
With secular Turks fearing a growing Islamic trend in the
country, on Friday Turkey's military -- a staunchly secular
institution that has saved the country from Islamism a few times in
the past -- issued a none-too-veiled threat:
It should not be forgotten that the Turkish armed
forces is one of the sides in this debate and the absolute defender
of secularism. When necessary, they will display their attitudes
and actions very clearly. No one should doubt that.
The concern is that Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul of the ruling,
Islamist AKP party may end up in the presidency, described as the
country's "last bastion of secularism." Gul's wife is a
headscarf-wearer and he himself is considered anti-secular by many
Turks. Though the AKP claims not to be Islamist, it has promoted
religious education, banned alcohol in municipalities, and tried to
remove a ban on headscarves in public places that goes back to the
days of Turkey's pioneer of secularism, Kemal Ataturk.
Hours before the military's warning, Gul failed to win enough
votes in a first round of parliamentary voting that the opposition
boycotted. The opposition is calling for new elections as the best
way out of the stalemate, and on Sunday a few hundred thousand
pro-secular demonstrators in Istanbul demanded that the AKP-led
coalition resign.
The situation, however, led senior EU official Olli Rehn to huff
and puff that it is -- the Turkish military that poses the danger.
"This is a clear test case whether the Turkish armed forces respect
democratic secularization and democratic values," he said Saturday,
and warned that democratic values are "at the core" of Turkey's (in
any case very unlikely) prospects of joining the EU.
Sweden's foreign minister Carl Bildt chimed in: "There can of
course be differences of opinion about which person is the better
suited to become president. But in a European constitutional
democracy the military has no role to play in this process."
Leave it to the EU to blindly apply principles to a case where
they do not fit. In fully developed democracies, military
interference in an electoral process is of course unthinkable. But
given that Turkey is not a fully developed democracy, how much
better a flawed but still functioning, more or less pro-Western
democracy than a country tacking toward Islamism with all that
means for its citizens' freedoms and for its geopolitical
affinities.
Similarly in the Palestinian case, the EU dogmatically applies
principles while seeming to ignore the specifics, pushing for a
state that could only, in reality, be a Muslim dictatorship and a
danger to its neighbors Israel and Jordan. Although the Bush
administration has gotten on that bandwagon by, more than any of
its predecessors, explicitly adopting the cause of a Palestinian
state, the U.S. has an intimate military alliance with Israel and
at least tends to take its security concerns more seriously.
The Europeans, for their part, have warmly embraced the
Palestinian cause since the 1970s when it was represented by a
gun-toting Yasser Arafat then in the prime of his career of airline
hijackings and other terror. Their excuse has always been that
since the Palestinians in the West Bank (Israel having left Gaza by
now in any case) are a majority but lack full political rights,
they have to be granted those rights -- that is, their own fully
sovereign state. Lost is the fact that, since all other Muslim Arab
states are dictatorships and are rife with anti-Israeli,
anti-Semitic, and anti-Western attitudes, there is no reason to
think the Palestinian fruit of these ostensibly moral concerns
would be any better.
Why does the EU sternly upbraid the Turkish military even in a
situation where its power might be essential to saving the country
from Islamism? Why does the EU keep funneling huge sums of aid to
the Palestinians even in the era of Hamas rule? The answers lie in
obtuseness, hypocrisy, opportunism -- and above all, the
dhimmification of a continent that has maneuvered itself under the
Arab-Islamic thumb.
topics:
Education, Islam, Constitution, Law, Military, Israel
