Tag: Ataturk

  • The Gulen Movement: Paradigms,Projects, and Aspirations

    The Gulen Movement: Paradigms,Projects, and Aspirations

    From: <alerts@conferencealerts.com>

    feto GULENfetullah1

    The Gulen Movement: Paradigms,Projects, and Aspirations
    11 to 13 November 2010
    Chicago, United States

    The Divinity School at the University of Chicago, in conjunction
    with Niagara Foundation, as part of its continuous commitment
    to ground breaking research and critical reflection, announces
    an interdisciplinary conference.feto gulen papa elele

    The deadline for abstracts/proposals is 15 June 2010.

    Enquiries: coordinator@chicagogulenconference.org
    Web address:
    Sponsored by: University of Chicago Divinity School and Niagara
    Foundation

    —————————————————————-
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    We aim to provide correct and reliable information about
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  • A Nation of Conspiracies

    A Nation of Conspiracies

    TURKEY2

    The article which states ” In the first, the AKP is a party of religious deception that seeks to bring all elements of the government under its control. Its hidden goal is the eradication of the secular state, the wrenching of Turkey from the West, and, ultimately, the imposition of Islamic law.”.

    Regards
    AHMET SUEbR  [klmaf@hotmail.com]

    President, TASAA (Turkish Society of Augusta and Aiken):

    • WALL St JOURNAL
    • MARCH 13, 2010

    Coup plots and growing extremism. Why the West can’t ignore Turkey’s paranoia

    • By CLAIRE BERLINSKI

    Last fall, having observed that few women in Istanbul took martial-arts classes, I conceived the idea to work with local instructors on creating a women’s self-defense initiative. My project met with initial enthusiasm, particularly among women concerned with the high rate of domestic violence in Turkey. But other martial arts instructors in the city grew uneasy, sensing a plot to swindle them out of their small pieces of the martial-arts pie. Istanbul quickened with lunatic rumors that the initiative was a conspiracy to disparage the other instructors’ martial prowess and steal their students. Martial-arts cliques consumed themselves with plotting and counter-plotting. Secret tribunals were held, covert alliances formed, poison-pen letters sent, friends betrayed. I gave up in disgust.
    No one familiar with the prominent role of conspiracies and paranoia in Turkish social and political life will be surprised. Last month, more than five dozen military officers were arrested and charged with plotting a coup. The detained stand accused of planning to bomb mosques and down Greek fighter jets as a pretext for toppling the government. Whether it is true, I don’t know. But either way, the country is drowning in persecutory theories.

    Turkey’s strategic and economic significance to the West is massive—and American-Turkish relations took a turn for the worse earlier this month when a U.S. congressional committee recommended the full House of Representatives take up a vote on a resolution condemning the slaughter of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide.
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    Turkey is a rarity in the Middle East, a democracy with a secular constitution. It has the second-largest army in NATO; it provides a crucial energy route to Europe. The Incirlik air base is a crucial staging point for the US military. Turkey has made a sizable contribution to the coalition forces in Afghanistan. It has a seat on the U.N. Security Council, and could be a vital diplomatic partner—or a vexed antagonist—to America throughout the Middle East and Islamic world.

    The West, understandably, is concerned about the trouble in Turkey. Particularly disturbing is the growing anti-Israel animus of Turkey’s foreign policy and its growing intimacy with the most extremist regimes and parties of the Islamic world. Turkey’s trade with Iran is galloping. Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was the first international figure to host Hamas. He has called for the expulsion of Israel from the U.N. while offering diplomatic support for the denial of genocide in Darfur.

    Turkey has seen three military coups in the past half century—by definition, you can’t have a coup without a conspiracy. The military, which conceives itself as the guardian of Turkish democracy and secularism, has intervened, most recently in 1997, to unseat prime ministers who have veered too far off the secular rails.

    The ruling Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP, came to power in 2002. Its senior figures rose from the ranks of virulent—and banned—Islamist parties, but the AKP claims to be moderate.

    Almost everyone in Turkey subscribes to one of two conspiracy narratives about this party or its antagonists. In the first, the AKP is a party of religious deception that seeks to bring all elements of the government under its control. Its hidden goal is the eradication of the secular state, the wrenching of Turkey from the West, and, ultimately, the imposition of Islamic law. In this narrative, the specter of the sect leader Fethullah Gülen, who has undefined ties to the party and has taken exile in Utah, arouses particular dread. His critics fear he is the Turkish Ayatollah Khomenei; they say that his acolytes have seeped into the organs of the Turkish body politic, where they lie poised, like a zombie army, to be awakened by his signal.
    The second version holds that the AKP is exactly what it purports to be: a modern and democratic party with which the West can and should do business. Mr. Gülen’s followers say the real conspirators are instead members of the so-called Deep State—what they call a demented, multitentacled secret alliance of high-level figures in the military, the intelligence services, the judiciary and organized crime.
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    Neither theory has irrefragable proof behind it. Both are worryingly plausible and supported by some evidence. But most significantly, one or the other story is believed by virtually everyone here. It is the paranoid style of Turkish politics itself that should alarm the West. Turkey’s underlying disease is not so much Islamism or a military gone rogue, but corruption and authoritarianism over which a veneer of voter participation has been painted.

    The system does not look too undemocratic on paper. Turkish political parties are structured, in principle, around district and provincial organizations. There is universal suffrage, but a party must receive 10% of the vote to be represented in Parliament. Party members elect district delegates, district presidents and board members. Yet Turkish prime ministers have near-dictatorial powers over their political parties and are not embarrassed to use them.
    It is the​party members, not voters, who pick the party leader. Members of Parliament enjoy unlimited political immunity, as do the bureaucrats they appoint. The resulting license to steal money and votes is accepted with alacrity and used with impunity. Corruption and influence peddling are the inevitable consequence. Business leaders are afraid to object for fear of being shut out.
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    Conspiracies flourish when citizens fear punishment for open political expression, when power is seen as illegitimate, and when people have no access to healthy channels of influence. They give rise inevitably to counterconspiracies that fuel the paranoia and enmity, a self-reinforcing cycle. Throughout Turkey is the pervasive feeling that no one beyond family can be trusted.
    The common charge that the AKP is progressively weakening the judiciary and the military is objectively correct, as is the claim that this concentrates an unhealthy amount of power in the hands of the executive branch. Yet the prime minister and his intimates insist that their actions are defensive. “For 40 years, they have kept files on us. Now, it is our turn to keep files on them,” AKP deputy Avni Doğan has said.

    Their enemies voice the same worldview. “When you look at Turkey today, it is as if the country has … fallen under foreign occupation,” the leader of the opposition CHP party Deniz Baykal has said.
    Paranoia is inevitably also grandiose. When the House Committee on Foreign Affairs passed up the recent resolution to describe the massacre of Armenians in the First World War era as a genocide, Suat Kiniklioglu, the spokesman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Turkish Parliament, explained Turkey’s outrage thus: “I think the Americans would feel that same if we were to pass a resolution in our parliament talking about the treatment of [native] Indians in this country.”
    Mr. Kiniklioglu speaks fluent English; he has spent years in the West. Yet he is blind to the most obvious of facts about American culture: No one in America would give a damn.
    Meanwhile, discussion of Turkey’s most serious social and economic problems—corruption, poverty, unemployment, and a legal system held in contempt even by its attorneys—has been eclipsed. Reports of economic miracles under the AKP have, as everyone now understands, been exaggerated by statistical legerdemain. This is all too easy to do, because Turkey has one of the largest underground economies in the world, worth somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of the country’s GDP. Every major economic sector in Turkey is largely off-the-record. No one can say confidently whether these sectors are growing or shrinking, and even officially, Turkey now has the second-highest rate of unemployment in Europe. This is hardly the mark of an expanding middle class.
    Among the most serious of Turkey’s problems, ignored in the constant din of mutual accusations, is the grave seismic risk to Istanbul. The city’s position on a highly active fault line and the prevalence of shoddy construction make it not only possible but probable that it will be the world’s next Port-au-Prince. The death and displacement of half a million Turks in an earthquake would clearly be the end of any hope of stability and peace in this region.
    The failure to prepare for this predictable event is a betrayal of trust, like so many the Turkish people have suffered. Each deepens the paranoia. Each citizen believes that to survive, he must lie and conspire. Everyone assumes everyone else is lying and conspiring against him because he himself is lying and conspiring.
    Turkish Ambassador Namik Tan recently said that the West “must understand that in this region, two plus two doesn’t always equal four. Sometimes it equals six, sometimes 10. You cannot hope to understand this region unless you grasp this.”
    Psychiatrists are typically advised to attempt to form a “working alliance” with the paranoid patient, avoid becoming the object of projection, and provide a model of non-paranoid behavior. This is also sound advice in diplomacy.
    But paranoia is known to be a particularly intractable disorder. Those who experience it do not trust those trying to help them. The West should keep this, too, in mind, for the paranoid spiral here could easily do what spirals are known to do: spin out of control.

  • Turkey needs more from Ataturk’s heirs

    Turkey needs more from Ataturk’s heirs

    By David Gardner

    Published: March 11 2010 22:44

    ftTurkey’s ruling party has once again entered into conflict with the Turkish army. This is more than the latest episode in a power struggle commenced as soon as the Justice and Development party (AKP) of Recep Tayyip Erdogan first came to power in 2002.

    It is more, too, than a battle of wills between neo-Islamists and secularists; more even than a new and dangerous chapter in a recurring constitutional crisis. It is, above all, a clash between two rival establishments jostling for supremacy: the traditional metropolitan elites who see themselves as the guardians of the secular, republican heritage of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey; and the new AKP establishment that combines the conservative and religiously observant traditions of Anatolia with a huge constituency in Turkey’s modern but Muslim middle class.

    One of the principal reasons for this now chronic crisis is that the first group, the Kemalists, are unelectable: after being trounced in two general elections by the AKP they appear to have no strategy except to return to power by goading the army and the judiciary into seizing back what their howlingly irrelevant parties keep losing at the ballot box.

    It is a commonplace, often deployed with self-serving slyness in Europe, that Turkey is engaged in a struggle to determine its real identity. Yet, the real drama of Turkey today is more banal: it lacks an effective opposition to the AKP. It will keep bobbing from crisis to crisis until it has one.

    The trigger for the latest phase in this transitional struggle was the Erdogan government’s detection of alleged plots by ultra-nationalists connected to the military and security services to overthrow the AKP.

    Turkey’s military has form on this. Before the advent of the AKP, it had ousted four governments, and closed four Islamist parties, in four decades. But it was wrong-footed by the popularity of and momentum behind the new ruling party, under Mr Erdogan, a charismatic former mayor of Istanbul, as prime minister. And there was another, transforming factor: Europe.

    After more than four decades in Europe’s ante-room, in December 2004 Turkey finally realised its ambition of becoming a candidate member of the European Union. To meet the criteria of the club, the Erdogan government carried out a constitutional revolution: introducing democratic freedoms of expression and association, minority rights for the Kurds and, above all, starting to subordinate the overmighty generals to civilian authority.

    The European project worked as a powerful engine of reform and helped glue together Turkey’s political tribes because the Kemalists and the military saw the EU as a fulfilment of the country’s western destiny foreseen by Ataturk, while the AKP saw the EU’s democratic rules as a shield against the generals. Put another way, Europe managed to hold the rivalries of the two, competing establishments in precarious but real alignment. The EU was working as the load-bearing bridge for Turkey’s transition.

    But then EU negotiations stalled – mainly because reluctant partners such as Germany and France think Turkey is not European enough and too big, too poor and too Muslim to absorb. As they raised the bar to entry, Turkish reform ran out of steam. The shield against the generals was removed. The glue of political cohesion dissolved. It became clear that a clash between the army and the AKP had only been postponed.

    In 2007, the army tried unsuccessfully to stop Abdullah Gul, then AKP foreign minister, from becoming president, on the grounds that he had once been an Islamist. Mr Erdogan called its bluff with early elections. The AKP hugely increased its share of the vote, from 34 per cent to 47 per cent on an 84 per cent turnout.

    The urban secular middle classes had staged vast demonstrations in defence of a liberal lifestyle they felt was under threat. There was, too, an unmistakable class animus, captured in sneers about “black Turks” from the countryside, who talk only about God, family and football, wanting to take over the country. But Turks chose democracy over the generals. That should have been a moment for Turkey akin to Spain’s emergence from Franco’s shadow, completed when Spaniards elected the Socialists in a 1982 landslide after a failed army coup in 1981.

    But, the following year, the Kemalists turned to the courts to try to get the AKP banned. The constitutional court split; the ruling party survived. This score-draw, after the AKP’s 2007 electoral landslide, appears to have emboldened Mr Erdogan to start packing and using the judiciary too. Hence the baroque plots (Ergenekon) and fathomless sub-plots – Balyoz (Sledgehammer) and Kafes (Cage) – before the courts now, implicating both retired and serving officers in the alleged planning of coups.

    The AKP’s opponents say it is striking against a politically weakened army to impose Islamism by stealth. There are genuine fears, stoked, say, by local mayors who ban alcohol. But there is no evidence that adds up to theocracy by the back door.

    The case against the swaggering populism of Mr Erdogan is that he has squandered a golden opportunity to widen and deepen reform. The AKP’s attitude, common to all Turkish parties, is that it has a right to the spoils: “we won, it’s our turn”. But the outlook of some secularists reflects a lazy sense of entitlement to power; unable to win elections any more, they incite the army and the courts. Their parties are not real parties. They are shrinking cults for outsize egos. Ataturk’s Republican People’s party (CHP), under the ageing and illiberal Deniz Baykal, is a rudderless rump, incapable of appealing to a young Turkey.

    The AKP, by contrast, is demonstrably the chosen path to modernity of the socially conservative, observant but at the same time dynamic and entrepreneurial middle classes of central Anatolia, who now demand their rightful share in power. The AKP’s appeal, in other words, is both aspirational and reassuring, by holding fast to the moorings of family, religion and the villages from which many Turks are just a generation away. What has liberal Turkey got to put up against it? A few, suggestive stirrings in the undergrowth such as the Turkish Movement for Change (TDH) of former Kemalist and mayor of Istanbul’s Sisli district, Mustafa Sarigul.

    What it desperately needs is a regrouping of secular, liberal and social democratic forces into an electable party (something an EU re-engagement with Turkey would help).

    Banging on about secularism is therapeutic but ultimately futile. A viable centre-left needs to abandon the fragmented, pre-modern to Jurassic, and episodically putschist secular parties. Instead of worshipping at Ataturk’s shrine they should follow his example. The founder of Turkey built the republic from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Even Mr Erdogan looked far beyond the wreckage of Turkish Islamism to create the AKP. Turkey’s centre-left should emulate him and start again.

  • What’s Really Behind Turkey’s Coup Arrests?

    What’s Really Behind Turkey’s Coup Arrests?

    What’s Really Behind Turkey’s Coup Arrests? | Foreign Policy

    BY SONER CAGAPTAY | FEBRUARY 25, 2010

    FEBRUARY 27, 2010

    What’s Really Behind Turkey’s Coup Arrests?

    All signs point to Fethullah Gülen, whose shadowy Islamist movement is rapidly extending its tentacles into all aspects of Turkish political life.

    BY SONER CAGAPTAY | FEBRUARY 25, 2010

    For the last several decades, the Turkish military was untouchable; no one dared to criticize the military or its top generals, lest they risk getting burned.  The Turkish Armed Forces were the ultimate protectors of founding father Kemal Ataturk’s secular legacy, and no other force in the country could seriously threaten its supremacy. Not anymore.

    On Feb. 22, 49 officers—including active-duty generals, admirals, and former commanders of the Turkish navy and air force—were arrested on allegations of plotting a coup against the government. Specifically, the officers were charged with authoring a 5,000-page memo that was later published in Taraf, a paper whose editorial policy is singularly dedicated to bashing the military. Among other things, the memo stated that the Turkish military was planning to bomb Istanbul’s historic mosques and shoot down its own planes to justify a coup.  When I asked a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey for his views on the news, he thought the scenario was ridiculous. “If the Turkish military was going to do a coup, they would not be writing a 5,000-page memo about it,” he stated.  Three days later, the former commanders of the navy and air force were released — further proof that the government’s intention was to intimidate Turkey’s military, rather than proceed with an indictment against these high-ranking officials. The arrests followed a Feb. 19 incident in which an audio recording of Turkey’s chief of staff was leaked to Vakit, a small jihadi Islamist newspaper that has celebrated the killing of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. In Turkey, it is illegal to wiretap individuals without a court order, and it is also illegal to publish such wiretaps. However, no one has been prosecuted for this wiretap against the chief of staff—a sign that the balance of power in Turkey has shifted decisively.

    A mountain has moved in Turkish politics. All shots against the military are now fair game, including those below the belt. The force behind this dramatic change is the Fethullah Gülen Movement (FGH), an ultraconservative political faction that backs the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The FGH was founded in the 1970s by Fethullah Gülen, a charismatic preacher who now lives in the United States but remains popular in Turkey. It is a conservative movement aiming to reshape secular Turkey in its own image, by securing the supremacy of Gülen’s version of religion over politics, government, education, media, business, and public and personal life.

    To some, it might appear that the newfound freedom to criticize the military proves that Turkey is becoming a more liberal democracy. But the truth is that Turkey has replaced one “untouchable” organization for another, more dangerous, one. Criticizing the Gülen movement, which controls the national police and its powerful domestic intelligence branch, and which exerts increasing influence in the judiciary, has become as taboo as assailing the military once was. Today, it is those who criticize the Gülen movement who get burned. COMMENTS (87) SHARE: Digg  Facebook  Reddit   More…

    Of course, coup allegations are serious matters that warrant immediate action.  However, these allegations are part of the Ergenekon case—a convoluted investigation that so far has produced nothing in the last three years but a record-setting 5,800-page indictment, hundreds of early-morning house raids, and the detention of many prominent Turks, including university presidents and prominent educators such as Kemal Guruz and Mehmet Haberal. The only quality that ties together all of those arrested is their opposition to the AKP government and the Gülen movement. Zekeriya Oz, the chief prosecutor leading the Ergenekon case, and Ramazan Akyurek, the head of the police’s domestic intelligence branch, as well as other powerful people in the police, are thought by some to be Gülen sympathizers.

    Although some of the people interrogated and arrested might have been involved in criminal wrongdoing, most appear to be innocent. Take, for instance, Turkan Saylan, a 73-year-old grandmother who was undergoing chemotherapy. Saylan ran an NGO providing liberal arts education scholarships to poor girls in eastern Turkey, an area where Gülen’s network runs many competing organizations. She was interrogated by the Turkish police for allegedly plotting a coup from her death bed, and passed away only four weeks later.

    Many others have languished in jail, or even died, without seeing an indictment.  The Gülen-controlled parts of the judiciary and police have also wielded illegal wiretaps against those entangled in the Ergenekon case, leaking intimate details of their private lives, such as marital infidelity, to pro-AKP and pro-Gülen media in order to damage their reputations.

    Illegal wiretaps and arbitrary arrests serve to intimidate the public, not prosecute criminals. Because of Ergenekon, Turks who oppose the AKP and the Gülen movement fear to speak their minds freely. If you have doubts, call a friend in Turkey and ask for an opinion of the case. Your friend will respond with details of the weather.

    The military, which opposes the AKP and the Gülenists because it sees itself as the virtual guardian of Turkey’s secular polity à la Ataturk’s vision, serving as a bulwark against religion’s domination over politics and government, has become the primary target of this round of politically motivated arrests.  Illegally obtained documents, including confidential and sometimes embarrassing medical records of four-star generals, were published openly in Gülenist media.  Although the chief of staff said the documents were doctored, they were recently used as evidence, with the support of anonymous witnesses, to arrest serving generals and admirals.

    The roots of the Gülen movement’s vendetta against the army run deep. Following the pattern of the evangelical movement in the United States, the FGH grew dramatically in the 1980s. Gülen espoused a Machiavellian approach to democracy, saying to his followers in a message broadcast on Turkish TV in 1999 that “every method and path is acceptable [including] lying to people.” In the 1990s, the movement gained political power by throwing its weight behind various governments, which in return appointed FGH members to prominent positions in the bureaucracy, including the police and the intelligence branch.  In the late 1990s, Gülen went head-to-head with Turkey’s military—and lost.  The clash between the Islamist Welfare Party (RP) government, which was supported by the FHG, and the military was at the center of this conflict. In 1997, the Turkish military orchestrated a public campaign against the RP. With pressure mounting against its rule, the RP government stepped down. As a result, members of Islamist movements, including those belonging to the FGH, were purged from their posts in the bureaucracy and the military.  When the Turkish courts charged Gülen with corruption and anti-secular political activities in 1999, he fled to a rural compound in Pennsylvania. Although he was later acquitted, Gülen has never returned to Turkey.  The FGH has returned, however, with a vengeance. When the AKP, which is largely a reincarnation of the banned RP, came to power in 2002, the FGH positioned its media, voter, and business lobby support behind the governing party. In return, the AKP appointed FGH members to prominent positions in the judiciary and the bureaucracy, including the police’s intelligence branch.  With the Gülen movement in control of large portions of the government apparatus and running a political witch hunt against its opponents through the Ergenekon case, Turkey is taking a dangerously authoritarian turn. A personal friend and politician from the former Soviet Union once said, “A police state emerges not when the police listen to all the citizens, but when all the citizens fear that they are being listened to.” Welcome to the new Turkey: If you listen carefully, you can hear the political ground shifting below your feet.

  • A. K. P-NESS: The condition of being A.K.P.

    A. K. P-NESS: The condition of being A.K.P.

    For reasons unknown, Istanbul has been dubbed the 2010 European Capital of Culture. And guess who is in charge of the year-long celebration? The AKP-controlled Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Agency, that’s who.

    • The AKP, the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, the Justice and Development Party which brought neither justice nor development—
    • The AKP, seven years in office spent worrying about whether a woman should touch a man’s hand, and calling it modernity—
    • The AKP, seven years in office, squeezing the heads of women into headscarves, covering their bodies in bedsheets, and calling it freedom—
    • The AKP, seven years in office with a prime minister who has grabbed responsibility for both women’s ovaries and men’s testes (and use thererof) by encouraging, at the top of his lungs, the production of at least three children in each family, and calling it democracy—
    • The AKP, seven years in office, still banning thousands of websites, in the name of morality—
    • The AKP, seven years in office, still spewing nonsense that the reason Turkey was spared epidemics in the 16th century was due to the Islamic religious ablution five times a day—
    • The AKP, seven years in office, and its education ministry still distributes maps to students that depict Armenia, Bulgaria and Georgia residing within Turkish borders—
    • The AKP, seven years in office, falsely imprisoning doctors, journalists, writers, businessmen, former military officers, and labor union leaders for their dissenting political views and depriving them of the constitutionally guaranteed rights—
    • The AKP, seven years in office, and now picking a mindless quarrel with Israel to satisfy its egomaniacal cravings—
    • The AKP, seven years in office, conducting stealth foreign policy initiatives under the direction of western puppet masters that lead to alienation, humiliation, and embarrassment for the Turkish people, and the Turkish Army—
    • The AKP, seven years in office, resulting in fabulous wealth to party members, their families, and their special friends—
    • The AKP, seven years in office looting the nation and trashing its culture, and calling it development—

    And now this same AKP, is preparing for the big cultural event of next year by continuing to do what it does best… the P-word…PLUNDER!

    Of surprise only to those who have spent the last seven years at the North Pole watching the polar ice cap melt, the Istanbul agency in charge of next year’s culture fest is being charged with corruption. Big money is missing. And, as is usual, no one knows what’s going on. Bear in mind that this money comes from another sweetheart deal, this one a hosing system that the AKP-controlled parliament approved two years ago. And it’s a beauty. Every time a long-suffering Turkish citizen buys gasoline a few kurus are siphoned off to feed the “culture agency.” The opposition party, the normally inert CHP, claims that this could amount to 250 million lira a year, adding that it smells a lot like the Deniz Feneri swindle that reaches, according to German Prosecutors, the highest levels of the Turkish government. But in typical AK-Plunder party style that investigation has been delayed, deferred, and otherwise quashed. But one thing remains absolutely clear; when the public’s money goes missing, the AK Plunder-party is involved.  Playing with Erdoğan’s immortal words uttered in Davos: AKP, about plunder, you know stealing very well.

    Beyond money, what has also gone missing is brainpower. It seems that the center piece “cultural” project focuses on yet another p-word: the penis. In particular, the penis of Prince Mehmet who had his prepuce removed to great and long acclaim in 1582. The prince’s father was Murad III, whose reign was described in My Name is Red, the book by the relentlessly self-promoting Turkish author, Orhan Pamuk, another P-word. Pamuk also got money from the culture agency—750,000 lira. Pamuk will use the money to open a museum—the Innocence Museum—the name of  his latest book. For certain, connected and cooperative Turks, the rich get richer. And Yaşar Kemal, Turkey’s greatest writer gets exactly what?

    It seems that back in the good old days of 1582, the celebration for paring the prince’s prepuce lasted a record 52 days (some sources say 55, but who’s counting). By any measure, that’s a long time to celebrate a teeny-tiny piece of skin from a wee pup of a boy. Moreover, it seems a rather weird event to play such a huge role in any representation of Turkish culture, even by rock-bottom AKP standards. But maybe I’m missing something. Of course, there was much pomp associated with the prince’s penis, considering where it came from and who it emulated, that is, the sultan and the sultan’s. (The boy’s mother seems to have played an uncredited role in the original production.) In this case, certainly pomp is important. Just examine politics and politicians for example (two more P-words). Thus one should pay notice to, and take heed of, the various and sundry processions, gift presentations, and celebratory performances that lasted so long. All this will be staged and dramatized, animated and filmed, documented and published. It will be like living in the 16th century, precisely where the AKP is bringing the country. In a somewhat penetrating article, the Turkish Daily News reported that the cultural commission’s project about the princely penis would not last the full 52 days. Instead, it would be a “shortened performance.” Indeed. Whether this wording was meant to be tongue-in-cheek was not immediately apparent. Nevertheless, even the “shortened” re-creation of Mehmet’s circumcision ceremony is estimated to cost Turkish automobile drivers 12 million lira. And that’s a whopper of a resurrection.

    All of this sent me scurrying to my archives to find how some costs might be cut. Perhaps the actual cutting scene can be cut? Perhaps a cast member can be cut? Perhaps? Perhaps? I leave the reader to judge. As luck would have it, right next to my Atatürk biography by Andrew Mango, I found my copy of Jarrahiya Ilhaniye a tome about royal surgery by 15th century surgeon Serafeddin Sabuncuoğlu. It deals with everything one would want to know about Ottoman surgical techniques, particularly as applied to circumcision, more sharply applied to Prince Mehmet. I have read the details of the actual procedure. It might be sufficient to just peruse the following and decide for yourselves whether this event is worth all the time and millions.

    The author, Dr. Sabuncuoğlu, suggests a scissor with slightly curved blade tips. He also recommends that two ligations be made for health and safety. No argument from me. He advises that “the surgeon cut the perpetual skin between the ligatures so that there will be no flow of blood and the glans won’t be wounded.” Again, this sounded like good advice to me. But then he began to discuss a complication that often occurs. Oh-oh, I hate complications, particularly…well…. Okay, it’s about…never mind, I’ll let the doctor tell the story*…

    (Note: The bold-faced comments in brackets are mine and were recorded on a listening device in the prime minister’s office while I was reading Dr. Sabuncuoğlu’s book. I thank the prime ministry for the use of the tape. Such understanding people.)

    “If a part or whole layer of the foreskin slips from your hand”[YIKES!], Sabuncuoğlu cautioned, and is inverted during the operation [INVERTED? HOW…? LET ME OUT OF HERE!] draw it out immediately with a hook or a crochet [A HOOK? OH MAMA! ANNE! İMDAT!] and make your incision before the place swells.” [WHAT INCISION? WHAT PLACE? WHAT SWELLS?]

    Sabuncuoğlu seems unusually calm about such things. He adds, “If you fail to do this, let it be.” [LET IT BE? WHAT KIND OF A DOCTOR ARE YOU?].

    Not to worry says  Sabuncuoğlu. [I’M WORRIED! I’M WORRIED! IT’S MY PENIS FOR ALLAH’S SAKE!] “Allow the swollen part to subside, and then gently peel the skin.” [SUBSIDE? WHAT AM I? A PATLACAN? PATLICAN MIYIM?].

    “Be careful not to cut the tip of the penis,” warns the doctor, “but if it is cut there is no harm done.” [EASY FOR HIM TO SAY! ALLAH KAHRETSİN! HE SOUNDS LIKE ERDOĞAN AND HIS TEĞET ECONOMIC POLICY!]

    “Dress the wound with flesh-generating powders.” [YOU QUACK! ŞARLATAN HEKİM!]

    “Should the foreskin be cut away more than needed and the skin is wrinkled up that will do no great harm either.” [AAAGH!!! LANET OLSUN!!! AHMAK! DANGALAK!!!!]

    But perhaps I overreacted.

    Nevertheless, this great leap backward by the AKP, typical as it is, should be thwarted on the grounds of defamation of the character of the Turkish people. We live in a dangerous, difficult age. And that’s the point. We are not Ottomans who kept their women enslaved beneath the veil and behind the lattice, and all their people ignorant and illiterate. Our cultural reference is not their dark-mindedness. We, all of us, are modern, vital citizens of Turkey. Our cultural reference point is the Enlightenment not the corruptions of the Ottoman Empire. That’s the message that should be conveyed to Europeans, and indeed, the world. But first we need to convey it to ourselves. It is far, far better thing to light a candle than continue to curse the darkness. And that is the one sure way to dispel the murk of AKP-ness.

    Cem Ryan, Ph.D.

    İstanbul

    * Consult the below address at MuslimHeritage.com for more “ceremonial” details.

  • Letter to President Obama: The ISLAMIC Republic of Turkey

    Letter to President Obama: The ISLAMIC Republic of Turkey

    20 October 2009

    The Honorable Barack H. Obama
    President of the United States
    The White House
    1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
    Washington, DC 20500
    USA

    Dear Mr. President:

    I wrote to you on 20 January 2009, the day of your inauguration as president, about the dire conditions prevailing in the Republic of Turkey. (1) Today I stand by every word that I then wrote. Even more so, since conditions are now much worse. I suggest you reread this letter before you again meet with any Turkish politician. Accordingly, I have listed below the access internet addresses.

    The problem, as we both know, is the nature of the increasingly hard-line Islamic ruling party, the AKP. On 29 October 2009 you will have another opportunity to meet with its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This is a date of terrifying irony. Eighty-six years ago, to the day, Turkey was proclaimed a republic. Thus centuries of backwardness by the sharia Ottoman Empire, the nightmare of dark-mindedness, the suppression of women, the illiteracy and ignorance of the population, all these civil transgressions were finally consigned to the garbage dump of history. Hope had arrived at last. The rescue mission of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had been successful and would proceed. (Note: Incredibly, Erdoğan and his minions label these grand achievements as “traumatic.”) A few hours before the republic was proclaimed, Mustafa Kemal remarked to a French journalist, “Can one name a single nation that has not turned toward the West in its quest for civilization?”

    Now, eighty-six years later, one can finally answer Mustafa Kemal. Thanks to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the USA, your CIA, the European Union, and plenty of dollars filling the gaping pockets of politicians, hack journalists, outright traitors and, as Mustafa Kemal would say, selected “ignoramuses” there IS one such nation: Mustafa Kemal’s Turkey, today’s Turkey. Indeed, today’s Turkey has turned its back on the West. But its quest? The inept government seems incapable of answering that question. Beyond personal corruption, fantastic plundering, fabulous enrichment, suppression of women, extrajudicial imprisonments, destruction of the natural environment, and general lawlessness, no plan has emerged during its seven-year term in office. The 15 October 2009 article, “How Turkey Was Lost”, in the Jerusalem Post says it all.(2)

    And you have helped too, Mr President. Were you surprised by Erdoğan’s antics in Davos? By his attempt to storm your Secret Service barricade outside the hotel in New York City? By his sudden ranting about Israel? Mr President, you shouldn’t be, for this is the quality of the man. You proceed with the likes of him and his people at your, and our, peril. In my earlier letter to you I wrote: “Do not be deceived Mr. President, this government neither serves you, nor the Turkish people. In the name of so-called democracy, it serves itself.” Nothing more need be said.

    Today, on all counts, Turkey and the people of Turkey have failed. They have failed Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. They have failed themselves. Else how could they so submissively tolerate a government formed by the likes of Erdoğan and his AKP. Mr President, on 29 October 2009, you will see the personification of this profound, tragic failure in the normally scowling face of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, painfully contorted into his “White House smile!”

    Mr President, quite simply, Turkey has become an Islamic fascist state. Cameras and listening devices abound. People are identified for arrest by the government-controlled press. Even I, Mr President, have been fingered by newspaper hack widely known to be a mouthpiece for the president of the republic.(3)  Mr President, this lawless government has trashed the constitution. Jails are loaded with patriots—journalists, scientists, physicians, writers, retired military officers, businessmen—all opposed to the destruction of the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Mr President, There is no significant difference between the doings of this government and what went on in Germany in the early Thirties, or in Pinochet’s Chile in the Seventies. None!

    Lawless politicians! Lawless judges! Lawless prosecutors! Lawless police! Lawless! Lawless! Lawless…

    On 29 October 2009, the 86th anniversary of the founding of Republic of Turkey, you, Mr President, will meet with the Turkish prime minister. Perhaps this will be the day you both announce the birthday of the Islamic Republic of Turkey. Given what has happened to Turkey at the hands of the United States since Atatürk died, nothing would surprise me. And nothing would please Erdoğan more. And you, Mr President, should know.

    Sincerely yours,

    James (Cem) Ryan, Ph.D.

    Istanbul, Turkey

    (1) Letter to President Obama (20 January 2009):

    (2) “How Turkey was lost”, Caroline Glick, 15 Oct. 2009.The Jerusalem Post

    (3) “İki ‘garip’ Amerikalı”, (Two Weird Americans), Yeni Şafak, 29 April 2009

    “By complete independence, we mean of course complete economic, financial, juridical, military, cultural independence and freedom in all matters. Being deprived of independence in any of these is equivalent to the nation and country being deprived of all its independence”

    Mustafa Kemal

    FOR REASONS UNKNOWN