Turkish Forum

Tag: Caliphate

  • Turkey – The Last Chance to Save the State of Kemal Ataturk

    Turkey – The Last Chance to Save the State of Kemal Ataturk

    ZZ ZZZBy Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

     

     

    When on May 27th 1960 the first coup d’ état was staged in Turkey, the President of the country Celal Bayar, the Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, several ministers, and many Democratic Party members were arrested. At the same time, the Milli Birlik Komitesi (National Unity Committee) forced 235 generals and more than 3000 commissioned officers to retirement. In addition, no less than 500 judges and public prosecutors and 1400 university faculty members were removed in an effort to purge the corrupt regime that Celal Bayar and Adnan Menderes had tried to install for no less than 14 years ever since the ominous Democratic Party was incepted in 1946 as a tool of political perversion and coercion, and as a means of destruction of the state of Kemal Ataturk. Some of the arrested were sentenced to death, whereas others were condemned to life imprisonment only to be later released. The fact that there is now a Celal Bayar University at Manisa demonstrates that Turkey is populated by people whose memory is short.

     

    Shoot Erdogan dead now!

     

    In the next coup d’ état, President Erdogan must be shot dead at once. The Turkish army generals and colonels and the Turkish statesmen, who will stage it, and the businessmen, academics and journalists, who will support it, will have to arrest even fewer officers, judges, and public prosecutors. In striking contrast with the 1960 coup d’ état, the forthcoming one must offer people the chance to express their indignation for the disastrous manner in which Turkey’s affairs have been managed by the AKP (Justice and Development Party) gangsters over the past 12 years. In full coordination with the army and from the very first moment, Turkish patriots, secular activists, and supporters of the national interests of the country must take to the streets along with the tanks and the soldiers, block the offices of the present unrepresentative government, destroy the headquarters and offices of AKP, arrest and execute the villainous AKP cadres on the spot where they may appear, and at the same time, prevent Erdogan’s corrupt and fanatic followers from appearing in public.

     

    All telephone lines, fixed and mobile, and Internet connection must be blocked, and radio stations and TV channels closed down before the establishment of the new national order, and until the national purgatory administration takes over. All embassies must be kept under garrison, and foreign diplomats must be severely isolated from what will be going on in the streets, the barracks, and the governmental buildings. The members of the right and center-left secular parties of the opposition and their youth organizations must immediately form militias ready to cooperate with the army, isolate AKP strongholds, and implement the new order across Turkey.

     

    Effectiveness in eliminating the guilty and the ignorant, the dangerous and the ominous will matter greatly, and this means that the ruling AKP figures and their first-degree relatives must all be executed without trial and within the hour. With them dead, and with their pictures displayed on the only governmental TV channel allowed to operate managed by a new administration and put under army control, AKP lunatics will have little chance to fight for anything. A second level of purge must eliminate within less than a week hundreds of thousands of present AKP supporters, radical sheikhs and imams, all pro-AKP journalists, whereas some thousands of newly built mosques must simply be rapidly ruined and irreversibly turned to nice small parks.

     

    Contrarily to what happened in 1960, when a coup put at last an end to the chaotic situation that lasted 14 years, today’s Turkish generals and colonels must understand that the country cannot afford to wait for 14 years of nefarious self-destruction carried out by an ignorant, pseudo-Islamic, villainous political class (AKP) that hates Turkey, before they decide to stage the much needed coup d’ état; (2002 + 14) 2016 is unfortunately a faraway horizon. In very little time, Turkey will have already gone beyond the point of no return. There is no parallel that can be drawn between 1960 and 2014. What makes now the difference is the very wide array of critical international implications that all take place around Turkey; precipitated developments are expected to occur in the next few months and this imposes a immediate regime change in Ankara.

     

    Turkey – one location encircled by fire

     

    In the present conjuncture, Turkey faces a multifaceted explosive situation in

     

    1 – its southern borders (Assad’s Syria / the fake Caliphate / PKK being strengthened through its contacts with the fake jihadist state / North Iraqi Yazidi refugees threatened to extinction by the fake jihadists / North Iraqi Turkmen persecuted by the so-called Kurdish militias of Barzani and Talabani / North Iraqi Aramaean Christians facing existential threat at the hands of the fake jihadists / the North Iraqi so-called Kurdish Regional Government, its aspirations for independence, and the Israeli support for this case / the final decomposition of Iraq / Iran’s involvement in Iraq)

     

    2 – its eastern borders (the possibility of a nuclear Iran / the eventuality of an Israeli attack against Iran’s nuclear plants / the Azeri, Gorani (pseudo-Kurdish) and Baluch minorities’ struggle to achieve independence and secession from Iran / the thorny relations with Armenia that harbors a racist anti-Turkish irredentism while being a close ally of the Zionist state / the spectrum of an Azeri-Armenian war over Nagorno-Karabakh / Israel’s infiltration in Azerbaijan which is the result of calamitous mistakes perpetrated by earlier AKP administrations, and of Erdogan’s pathetic ignorance of, and idiotic approach to, foreign policy / the downgrading spiral of the Azeri – Iranian relationship which is the result of Zionist influence over Baku / the troublesome relations between Georgia, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Russia / UK-Saudi-incited terrorism in Daghestan and other parts of the Russian Caucasus region / the consideration of EU and/or NATO membership extension to Georgia and Azerbaijan as part of the Anti-Russian policies of the West)

     

    – its northern borders (Russia, Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Lugansk People’s Republic, Donetsk People’s Republic, Ukraine, Transnistria, and Moldova – in fact, there are ongoing, overt or covert, hostilities in all 7 states located north of Turkey and on the northern shorelines of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov)

     

    – its south-western borders (war between the two Cypriot states may be the result of the Anti-Turkish pact made between Israel and South Cyprus, due basically to the deterioration of the Turkish-Israeli relationship which was another irrelevant foreign policy choice made by the disastrous AKP administration – this time the pretext for war can be fabricated via Oil and Gas exploration efforts across NE or NW Cyprus’ coastline)

     

    – its western borders (the current situation in the Balkans being already complicated among Albania, Kosovo and Serbia, among Sanjak, Montenegro, Bosnia and Serbia, among Macedonia, Greece and Bulgaria, as well as between Turkey and Greece)

     

    When conflicts occur and strengths are pulled all around a specific country, the basic notions of geo-strategics signal the end of the country’s territorial integrity, and therefore the only possible option left to the local center of power or administration is partly expansion and forceful annexation of an adjacent territory up to the point of definite balance change in the direction of the expansion.

     

    For today’s Turkey the most appropriate direction for partly expansion and annexation of adjacent territory is the South, and the chaotic lands beyond its southern frontiers, so in the present article I will focus on this subject.

     

    Turkey’s Syrian policy – Historical depth and missed opportunities

     

    It was quite silly for the successive Erdogan administrations to cooperate with the criminal Western powers that fomented discord, strife, civil war, and utter genocide in Syria; and it was silly, because it had already been clear that the same powers intended to do exactly the same to Turkey itself – simply at a later stage. But it was even more idiotic to cooperate with the West and in parallel prepare other, particular plans, thinking that the Western agents, who are all over the place in Turkey because of AKP governmental inadequacies, will not take good note of them.

     

    For Turkey’s national interests, Ankara should have either acted unilaterally before 2012 invading Syria (after a theatrical episode that could have been fabricated and staged on this purpose) or blocked decisively every Western effort to penetrate Syria and threaten the Alawi regime of Bashar al Assad that has been enthusiastically supported by the Aramaean Christian minority.

     

    The Western bias over Syria finds at its antipodes the Western bias over Armenia. And a shrewd Turkish foreign minister should have exploited the matter – contrarily to the inconsistencies that characterized all persons who held this position after 2002. Either one of two things happens:

     

    Either Turkey is an independent state unrelated to the Ottoman Empire, and it cannot therefore interfere in Syria’s affairs, but in this case all accusations about the so-called Armenian Genocide must be removed as irrelevant and inadmissible

     

    Or Turkey is the successive state form of the Ottoman Empire, and it can be reproached for what happened to the Ottoman Armenians, but in this case, Ankara has the right to interfere and arrange the affairs of its former province.

     

    If Erdogan’s Syrian policy failed, this is due to a detrimental mistake of conceptualization. In the first place, all AKP cadres never realized how their minds have been prefabricated in a calamitous, self-destructive manner that prevents them from either thinking out of the box or realizing how self-destructive they are for any place they may govern. In fact, the formation of AKP in Turkey consists in a Western effort to colonize Turkey via the bogus ideology of Islamism, which is a byproduct of the Freemasonic Western Orientalism. The fake ideology was composed in the Orientalist ateliers of France and England during basically the 19th c. and thence projected onto the targeted populations that the Western countries wanted to destroy. Kemal Ataturk totally blocked this system, throwing it out of Turkey, but after 1946, due to Western Intelligence, started a slow process of infiltration of which the AKP cadres are the unfortunate and unconscious product.

     

    It is well known that, at the time of its inception, Islamism was a vicious theoretical opposition to the Ottoman Empire. Who else may have planned more schemes to dissolve the Government of Islam (Caliphate) than the Western colonials? And who contributed to the ultimate fall and destruction of Islam more than the ignorant Arabic speaking mob that – from Khartoum to Damascus and from Algiers to Madinah – supported the schemes of the enemies of Islam? The colonization process, which started in Egypt (1798) and Algeria (1830) and involved the diffusion of Islamism and several other false ideological systems, misconceptions and systematized ignorance, was planned by the villainous Freemasonic class of Western Europe and North America to be completed with Turkey’s islamization. By fervently supporting the rise of AKP, the Western powers wanted to capture Turkey – the only part of the Ottoman Empire that had remained thanks to Kemal Ataturk unaffected by the Islamist abomination and free of the colonial falsehood and biases.

     

    Since its inception, AKP was contaminated with the colonial ideology of Islamism; worse, it was also plagued with a certain dose of Pan-Arabism, another vicious theory and excruciating distortion of the historical reality.

     

    Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians, Jordanians, Iraqis, Kuwaitis, Qataris and Emiratis are not Arabs. They are Arabic-speaking Aramaeans. By ascribing themselves to Pan-Arabism and Arab Nationalism, the different colonial and postcolonial governments of the aforementioned eight (8) states simply blocked and canceled forever a normal nation building effort in their realms, thus preventing themselves from becoming emancipated nations. In fact, they destroyed themselves, and we see now the results of the useless and worthless existence of these fake states over the past nine (9) decades.

     

    Kemal Ataturk did in Turkey exactly what the various local administrations did not do in the aforementioned eight (8) states. And Turkey was successful in becoming a fully-fledged nation in less than 15 years (1923-1938).

     

    But by ascribing themselves to Pan-Arabism and Arab Nationalism, the idiotic AKP elites, fake journalists, and bogus-intellectuals, they destroyed Turkey’s chances in the region. One may contend that AKP administrations did not promote Turkey’s arabization in any sense; this may appear correct, but it is not. In fact, they contributed to the arabization of Turkey’s foreign policy, by accepting the existence of the colonial fake states at face value (which cannot be accepted), and by dealing with them, as if these states were normal and not mere technical entities.

     

    The fake, so-called Arab states, these lowly and pathetic realms of false emirs, bogus-kings, bloody tyrants, blind intellectuals like Michel Aflak, ignorant imams, and uneducated (and therefore stupidly fanaticized) mobs were fabricated by the West only for later use and stage management. These fake technical entities were produced in the 1920s (as Egypt earlier and their NW African counterparts later) in order to serve their colonial masters’ plans in the 2010s. The only proper policy that Turkey could have had in regard with these eight (8) realms was Kemal Ataturk’s policy for Turkey itself. Turkey should therefore have promoted the diffusion of Aramaic Syriac language in these countries, while contributing to a nation-building effort in which the natives in the different modern Arabic vernaculars would abandon their jargons and learn their real historical language, Aramaic, that their forefathers had forgotten because of their acceptance of Islam, which brought about a linguistic arabization.

     

    By learning Aramaic Syriac, while keeping Classical Quranic Arabic as their religious language, Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Jordanian, Palestinian, Kuwaiti, Qatari and Emirati Muslims would feel that they are one nation along with their Christian compatriots who preserved Aramaic Syriac as their native language. This would have minimized if not eliminated the division between Sunni and Alawi denominations in Syria, in total opposition to the Western divisive and corrosive policies that target the ultimate destruction of those realms.

     

    Turkey’s Iraq policy

    Even more importantly, in Iraq, the proper nation-building effort with Aramaic Syriac as national language would have strengthened the Shia Mesopotamian identity and the anti-Iranian stance which had characterized these populations for many long centuries when they wholeheartedly sided with the Ottoman Sunni Sultan against the Iranian Shia Shah – something that the Satanic, Freemasonic governments and diplomats of France, England, Holland, Canada, Australia, and America did their ingenious best to obscure and conceal.

     

    In Turkey, there is a tendency to believe that, before the rise of AKP to power, the successive governments disregarded and were detached from the country’s southern neighbors and, after the rise of AKP to power, the Islamist administrations, in opposition to the earlier foreign policy, implemented a rapprochement. This fantasy was highly promoted by the global mass media, so one can already be sure that it pleased the powers-that-be. In general, by shifting the interest and the mindset of the average people from the true to the mythical, the Freemasonry-controlled global mass media make sure that the essential is always kept secret and concealed.

    What is important to assess with respect to the aforementioned options of Turkish foreign policy toward Turkey’s former provinces and current neighbors is that both axes of policy were very wrong and dramatically ineffective.

     

    Turkey’s geostrategic position as a bridge between worlds makes it versatile. Sometimes the territory of Turkey can be the location of a very strong and powerful government that controls faraway lands (Hattushilis III, Antiochus Epiphanes, Justinian I, Suleyman Magnificent). Sometimes, the same territory can be divided into small states and principalities (9-7th c. BCE, 1st. c. BCE, 11th – 12th c. CE). This is of seminal importance.

     

    Any historical government with its seat on Turkey’s present territory is successful and prolongs its duration, only if it expands its ideology, Weltanshauung, and world vision among the people inhabiting the surrounding lands. As long as both types of Turkish administrations, those before and those after 2002, did not act according to the aforementioned, both policies are pure failures.

     

    Turkey’s ideal time for expansion was back in the mid 90s; by hesitating to implement a series of measures that would lead to territorial expansion, the Turkish military and statesmen heralded the country’s implosion. Yet, immediately after the first Iraq war (comically re-baptized Gulf war by the global mass media), Turkey should have created the necessary pretext for the invasion of Mosul, Arbil and Kirkuk. Then, the Turkish army should have advanced to Baghdad irreversibly annexing the largest part of Iraqi territory first and later the rest, before fully absorbing it and restructuring it all. Any opposition to Turkey, by its NATO allies would be untenable due to the fact that, through its annexation to Turkey, Iraq would automatically become NATO member state territory.

     

    In Mesopotamia (which is the correct name instead of the fake modern term ‘Iraq’), Turkey’s nation-building effort should have been based on

    – strong alliance with the Turkmen of Kirkuk and establishment of a well-supported return policy addressed to all the Turkmen who were forced to flee due to the colonial & postcolonial persecution and to the arabization policies carried out about by the fake kingdom and the bogus republic of Iraq

    – total commitment to the success of a return policy established for all Aramaean Christian and Mandaean populations that were forced to exile in the last three decades of the Ottoman Empire and during the calamitous decades of ‘royal’/’republican’ rule. In this regard, the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the Qudchanis Patriarchate of the ‘Nestorian’ Christianity / in Konak / Hakkari is a must.

    – full support of a nation building effort for all ethno-religious groups in the Zagros Mountains and the Transtigritane plains that have been viciously misnamed ‘Kurds’ by the colonial gangsters of England, France and America, whereas they are not one nation but many, namely Yazidis, Shabak, Bahdinani, Faili, Hawleri, Sorani, Gorani, Ahl-e Haq

    – comprehensive education for the Sunni dialectal Arabic speaking group that should be offered compulsory, 12-year, primary & secondary education in Aramaic Syriac in order to be fully incorporated into one nation with the Christian Aramaeans of Iraq and Syria

    – similar formative policy applied to the Shia dialectal Arabic speaking group that should be offered compulsory, 12-year, primary & secondary education in Aramaic Syriac in order to be fully incorporated into the Aramaean Syro-Mesopotamian nation

     

    Global mass media portray Turkey as a worthless ally for US, NATO

     

    In spite of the aforementioned failures, oversights, and missed opportunities, Turkey is facing now a major challenge. Following the emergence of the fake Caliphate, the evil establishment of AKP did neither specify nor make clear what policy they intended to pursue for what is by definition an existential threat for the state of Kemal Ataturk.

     

    The fake Caliphate (however it may be named, ISIL, ISIS, IS, etc., etc., etc.) controls more than half of Turkey’s southern borderline, yet the unrepresentative AKP regime in Ankara has nothing to say. The lack of freedom of press in Turkey under the AKP regime is impressive; this is due to the tolerant stance of the army and to the decision of the top army officers to take distance from the government. No one fights against, rejects or denounces the calamitous AKP non-policy which risks dismembering Turkey.

     

    While avoiding to focus on the essential, Murat Yetkin, writing for Hurriyet ), demands that Turkey does not turn out to be a base for the impotent and worthless Muslim Brotherhood, which by definition is not a group of terrorists but a bunch of idiots who were totally unable to run the country because of their fake religious faith and disproportionate ignorance. This article looks like an irrelevant understatement in view of Turkey’s troubles in the South.

     

    Yet, it is not the Islamic Brotherhood that controls a territory almost one third (1/3) the size of Turkey at the southern borders of the country, but the fake Caliphate. The immediate destruction of the fake Caliphate of the monkeyish Muslims should have been the target no 1 for all Turks.

     

    AKP’s unreasonable, suspicious, and self-catastrophic reluctance to make of Turkey a major contributor into the US-led effort against the fake Caliphate becomes the reason for fiery anti-Turkish publications in the Wall Street Journal, yet the Turkish army has nothing to say…

     

    A certain historical depth is added to the present attitude of the Turkish administration, which means that serious lobbies are hidden behind a text that states the following: “the reality [is] a Turkish government that is a member of NATO but long ago stopped acting like an ally of the U.S. or a friend of the West. Former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Francis Ricciardone declared this week that the Turkish government “frankly worked” with the al-Nusrah Front—the al Qaeda affiliate in Syria—along with other terrorist groups. Ankara also looked the other way as foreign jihadis used Turkey as a transit point on their way to Syria and Iraq. Mr. Ricciardone came close to being declared persona non grata by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government last December”. https://www.wsj.com/articles/our-non-ally-in-ankara-1410561462#printMode)

     

    However, the included threats must be perceived very clearly; so low Turkey’ reputation has fallen that the WSJ columnist defines Turkey as a non-US ally, determines the US military bases in Turkey as useless, and even urges their transfer to another location ). It would be wise to focus more on this highly informative text; its author comes up with the suggestion of establishing a US air base in the mountains of the North Iraqi ‘Kurdish’ zone which does not even constitute an independent state!

     

    The fact that an idiotic text was immediately published in Hurriyet in guise of response to the above groundbreaking publication ) shows only corrupt the major media are in Turkey and testifies to worthless and catastrophic compromises made between the Turkish media magnates and the ominous AKP administration.

     

    Turkey’s uselessness as a US / NATO ally has rather become a global media trend instead of being an isolated element; one can consider it as a part of a wider media orchestration. Indicatively, Thomas Lifsonm writing for the American Thinker, asks whether this is the end of Turkey as an ally ).

     

    “Turkey is gradually moving from a reluctant NATO ally toward an embarrassing or embarrassed partner in the fight against the Islamic State”, states Cengiz Candar https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2014/09/turkey-usa-western-ally-nato-isis-syria-iraq.html?utm_source=Al-Monitor+Newsletter+%5BEnglish%5D&utm_campaign=2bdc950045-September_15_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_28264b27a0-2bdc950045-102403457).

     

    All this does not bode for Turkey’s new unrepresentative administration, which is the result of low voter turnout, and of fake presidential elections denounced by the opposition as rigged.

     

    Turkey’s Southern Policy 2014 – 2016 under AKP – A Nightmare to Avoid

     

    The current stance of the taciturn AKP elites reveals their secret plans and unveils their evil, anti-Turkish actions. Their silence is quite telling indeed.

     

    In fact, they will do all they can to make the US coalition fail in its attacks against the fake Caliphate that they assist in every sense. Modest estimates mentioned in serious publications ) make state of thousands of young jobless Turks who are sent by AKP cadres to the fake Caliphate in order to fight for the fake, Satanic Islam that Kafir Erdogan believes in. In reality, more than half of fake Caliphate fighters are AKP youngsters.

     

    After the US-led attacks will fail, the AKP administration will increase the dose of support they offer to the fake jihad forces and turn them against Damascus and Baghdad. The entire region will face an unprecedented bloodshed because evidently what is in the backside of Erdogan’s mind is the extermination of Syrian and Mesopotamian Shia. Of course, the Muslim fratricidal war, which is the only major misery Erdogan is apt to, will extend to Lebanon and Turkey itself. Alevi mosques from Sivas to Istanbul will shut down and massive street fights will lead Turkey to civil war.

     

    Many failed to realize that AKP extravagantly politicized dictatorship was not geared against the secular nature of Kemal Ataturk’s state first; quite methodically, it was carried out as a covert Anti-Alevi radicalism and religious sectarianism. Anti-Turkish and anti-Alevi material is being diffused in the Turkish primary and secondary education ) only to be denounced by European courts as fascist, racist, and heinous. The secret target behind the fake religious venom diffused through Erdogan’s trashy manuals is to force Turkey’s Alevis (around 35% of the country’s total population) to remove their children from the public education schools that will then be turned to fake religious schools and to fake jihad fighter-producing factories.

     

    AKP will turn overtly radical Islamist only after the fake Caliphate fighters will turn Damascus and Baghdad into blood lakes. This can be a matter of few only months. But then, it will only be too late for Turkey as well, because it is clear that the much publicized ‘New Turkey’ is only a new, yet fake, Caliphate, which will withdraw from NATO and from any negotiation in view of Turkey’s adhesion to European Union in completion of Erdogan’s immoral, villainous and ominous pseudo-prophecy about democracy (“Democracy is a bus ride. Once I get to my stop, I’m getting off.”).

     

    Erdogan coercively promoted by EU & US to bring the end of Turkey

     

    What the silly elites of AKP fail to grasp is that, when their Shia Holocaust will be completed in Damascus and Baghdad, Turkey will have already undergone a terrible shock as well (an Alevi/Sunni civil war), and being at its weakest point, will have to face an Israeli attack that will have as target the creation of a real Lebensraum around the Zionist state, because the fake Caliphate’s propulsion by Turkey in Syria and Mesopotamia and the ensuing merge into a wider Caliphate will have placed Israel under imminent existential threat.

     

    Even worse, their plans seem to be well known and anticipated by all forms and networks of Zionist Intelligence, and for this reason MEMRI does not miss an opportunity to highlight as an alert the real danger that Erdogan’s words constitute for Israel and its existence (example: .

     

    The result of an asymmetrical Israeli reaction to Erdogan’s silly plans about the revival of a Caliphate will comprise the following:

    • Nuclear bombardment of Ankara
    • Israeli annexation of Syria and of a part of Iraq’s territory
    • Israeli annexation of Hatay (Antioch / Antakya)
    • Formation of an independent Kurdistan which, as an ally to Israel, will comprise of today’s Kurdish region in North Iraq, and of a great number of Turkey’s eastern provinces including Gaziantep, Kahraman Marash, Malatya, Urfa, Diyarbakir, Tunceli, Bingol, and up to Van and Hakkari
    • Armenian annexation of Turkey’s northeastern provinces from Kars to Erzurum and from Trabzon to Giresun (it is to be expected that Armenia will immediately declare war on Turkey in the advent of a war between Turkey and Israel)
    • South Cypriot annexation of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (following an attack that will be undertaken by combined South Cypriot & Israeli land and sea forces – as it is to be anticipated that South Cyprus will immediately declare war on Turkey in the advent of a war between Turkey and Israel)
    • Greek annexation of the Aegean Sea islands of Gökçeada (Imbros) and Bozcaada (Tenedos), of Eastern Thrace, and of Istanbul-turned-to-Constantinople (as it is to be considered as a fact that Greece will immediately declare war on Turkey in the advent of a war between Turkey and Israel)

     

    Turkey’s Safety and National Security: Turkish Army’s Primary Task

     

    In view of the aforementioned, the Turkish army must take action as soon as possible. In the first days after the coup, the country must be totally sealed off and be left without any communication. Only foreign citizens and tourists should be allowed to leave the country. All incoming flights must be cancelled. Particularly the southern border must be declared war zone and anyone approaching the borderline should be shot dead.

     

    Following a stabilization period of 1 to 2 months, which in itself implies the parallel weakening of the fake Caliphate and the partly rehabilitation of the Syrian regime of Bashar al Assad, Turkey should mobilize its army and with a force of at least 350000 men invade the Syrian and Iraqi territories presently occupied by the fake Caliphate. Subsequently, the Turkish army should march on Damascus, Baghdad, and Arbil to eliminate the unrepresentative local regimes and introduce a nation building effort as per above. Turkey will have to present itself as the guarantor of the historical heritage, cultural identity, and national integrity of all nations and ethnic, linguistic and religious groups existing in the area.

     

    Turkish diplomats will then have to explain to the US, Europe and others that Turkey will not withdraw from its provinces of Syria and Mesopotamia where Human Rights will be respected as per the wishes of all the indigenous and true nations and ethnic, linguistic and religious groups, in mutual respect and to their benefit, and in striking contrast with the various colonial and postcolonial biases. The return of all the descendents of populations forced to immigrate and seek exile elsewhere over the past 120 years will have to start immediately, and this project must become one of the keys to the full rehabilitation of the systematically destroyed region.

     

    Turkey will have to demand that the allied forces, which may have meanwhile failed to destroy the fake Caliphate (prior to Turkey’s military expedition), accept the fait accompli.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Turkey gives Prophet Mohammad’s hairs to Chechnya

    Turkey gives Prophet Mohammad’s hairs to Chechnya

    Grozny, February 3, Interfax – Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan has given three hairs of Prophet Mohammad to the Chechen Republic. The hairs were taken from Istanbul to Grozny on Thursday.

    “The Chechen diaspora in Turkey asked Erdogan to give the holy hairs to Chechnya. We received a positive response within a month and the priceless gift has been delivered to Grozny today,” Aihan Ergyuven, chairman of the Chechen committee Sivas, told reporters at the Grozny airport.

    Despite the cold weather, thousands of Chechens, including Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, met the hairs at the Grozny airports and in the city’s streets.

    A religious ritual marking this event was held in the republic’s central mosque.

    According to earlier reports, a different hair of Prophet Mohammad was taken from Uzbekistan to Chechnya on January 26, 2011. The hair is a capsule, which is located in a box. According to historical documents, the hair, which was taken to the Grozny central mosque, had been in Uzbekistan since the times of the Caliphate.

    via Interfax-Religion.

  • Revival of Muslim empire

    Revival of Muslim empire

    YUSUF KANLI

    Is it not a wild idea to assume that the radical Islamist fantasies of the neo-Ottomanists of the dissolution period of the Ottoman Empire or the mostly Egyptian Arab forefathers of jihadist Islam or the restoration of the Caliphate movement might have a minute chance of coming true?

    If we are to take out the fundamental difference between the neo-Ottomanist ideology, which was centered on the creation of a united “Caliphate State” something like today’s European Union, with the caliphate remaining in Istanbul – and the Egypt-centered Arab jihadist or the restoration of the Caliphate movement, that was obsessed with Arabs taking back caliphate to the holy Mecca, there was a common cause: To achieve the united state of the nation of Islam, or the “ummah.”

    Creation of the modern, democratic and secular Turkish republic and the March 3, 1924 abrogation of caliphate was a setback to both the neo-Ottomanist and pan-Arabic caliphate movements or aspirations of a united caliphate state of the ummah. [This is a complex discussion as according to many researchers caliphate is not indeed abrogated; its functions were ended while the institution and its powers were transferred to the Turkish Parliament.] The obsession of reviving the state of Islam – like the state that existed during the lifetime of Islam’s Prophet Mohammad and the succeeding first four caliphs – never ever died out and indeed has been one of the fundamental pillars of the Muslim Brotherhood Movement, which this way or the other, under many names, exists all through the Arab geography today. Interestingly enough, though with some slight, yet very meaningful differences, the movement exists in non-Arab Muslim societies, including Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

    Of course, no one can claim that al-Qaeda and the Nationalist View Movement in Turkey, or the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, are one and the same, though both come from the same tradition of political Islam. No one can claim either that both Hamas and the al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun of Egypt are one and the same. There are national and cultural divides between all these parties, which irrespective whether they officially declare it or not, aspire for the creation of the united caliphate state of the ummah, where shariah or the rule of Quran would strictly prevail.

    Could the “Arab Spring” – as is so far said – succeed in creating democratic nation states in the Arab geography and beyond in the lands populated by Muslim people? Or, is there a possibility of the states of Middle East and North Africa turning into Sunni alterations of the Iranian theocracy? Or, as Newsweek asked in its June 20 edition, would the Greater Middle Eastern neighborhood eventually turn to Turkey and help the governance of political Islam there revive the Muslim Ottoman Empire? Though this last scenario was branded as “nightmarish” by the Newsweek and though very few Turks would object utopia of a Turkey-based revival of the caliphate state, it would not be at all easy either for the Turks to forget the “Arabs stabbed Turks in the back” rhetoric or for the Arabs not to remember what was it like for them to live under Ottoman rule. Definitely, there would not be a need for a new “Lawrence of Arabia” for the peoples of this geography to remember the recent history and the strong animosities coated with modern-day political interests.

    Political Islam throughout this geography may wish to see their ultimate goal of creation of Muslim empire realized but if that target was so easy to attain it would have been achieved long ago, perhaps when there was still an Ottoman Empire. Like the Greek Megalo Idea, having utopias might help maintain integrity, but putting them into action might bring about farfetched disastrous consequences.

    via Revival of Muslim empire – Hurriyet Daily News.

  • Chronicling the Caliphate

    Chronicling the Caliphate

    The Ottoman Empire’s greatest travel writer captured a peak moment in Islamic civilization.

    (Page 1 of 2)

    ottomon-empire-melik-OV12-vl Shane McCauley / Gallery Stock

    Shane McCauley / Gallery Stock Evliya Çelebi relates a magical version of the Islamic empire.
    Shane McCauley / Gallery Stock Evliya Çelebi relates a magical version of the Islamic empire.

    Evliya Çelebi relates a magical version of the Islamic empire.

    There are important reasons why we should all learn more about life during the Ottoman Empire. It was the last era in which a sultan-caliph, a sort of Islamic emperor-pope, held sway over virtually the entire Muslim geosphere. Many Islamists today explicitly yearn for the return of such a unified Muslim super-state. At the Ottoman Empire’s zenith, roughly between 1600 and 1700, Sharia dominated human affairs from India to Morocco and deep into Europe, stopping just short of Vienna. That era could furnish clues to what it might be like again if the Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk gain widespread momentum. Furthermore, with Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan banging on about his party’s “neo-Ottoman” approach to foreign policy, it behooves us to know what coherent world view, if any, he and other nostalgists are drawing on for their grand designs.

    The most exhaustive chronicle of the Ottoman world and environs was recorded by Evliya Çelebi (b. 1611), a figure celebrated in the Muslim world as one of history’s greatest travel writers, on par with Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo. A Turk born in Istanbul to a privileged court family, Çelebi traveled for about 45 years, from 1640 up to the year he died in Cairo. He spent those decades crisscrossing the sultan’s dominions, completing pilgrimages to Mecca and Jerusalem and even entering “infidel” Vienna as an ambassador. A native Istanbullu, his intricate portrait of the costumes and conventions of his hometown remains the richest source text for historians. He wrote 10 long volumes of his Seyahatname, or travelogue, in the ornately archaic Arabic-scripted Ottoman language of his day, a language as remote to modern Turks as Latin to Italians. Turks know all about him, name parks after him, but very few read him at any length.

    A volume of outtakes from his work, titled An Ottoman Traveller: Selections From the Book of Travels of Evliya Çelebi, was recently published to coincide with the 500th anniversary of Çelebi’s birth. Selected and translated by Ottoman experts Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim, it gives us the most accessible glimpse to date into Çelebi’s text, itself a window onto a highly cultivated sensibility living at a peak moment in Islamic civilization. Çelebi embarked on his travels two years after the brutally efficient Sultan Murat IV reconquered Baghdad from the Persians in 1638. (The honorific title of Çelebi denoted a gentleman or esquire of Sultan Murat’s era, and indeed the ancestors of Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi originally came from Turkey with the sultan’s invasion forces.) In various campaigns Murat had stamped out revolts in Anatolia and stabilized the empire’s borders. The ensuing order made the Seyahatname possible, though Murat died the same year that Çelebi set out.

    The book can be enjoyed on many levels—for its descriptions of towns, natural wonders, and ancient monuments such as the Parthenon and the Kaaba; for its Sufi-dervish notions of “mystical” love; for its nutty take on history, such as the bios of Jesus and Plato; and for the pleasant company of its unreliable narrator. But one’s first reaction is to marvel at the utter strangeness of the world on view. From Istanbul’s guilds of lion tamers and snow procurers to sorcerers and torturers in far-flung provinces, the unfolding panorama teeming with marvels and superstitions seems closer to the world of antiquity than to our own day.

    via The Arab World’s Greatest Travel Writer – Newsweek.

  • Turkey and the Restoration of the Caliphate

    Turkey and the Restoration of the Caliphate

    Turkey, the supposed bridge between East and West, was, until recently, showcased as a model democratic and secular exception in the Muslim world. Since the days of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk — founder of the modern Turkish state in the 1920s — the Turkish military and courts were assumed to be effectively moderating against the theocratic and ideological hold of Islam evident in Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

    However, closer inspection reveals that this has not been the case, especially in the last half century. Instead, what actually exists is the veneer of a democratic republic overlaying an insidious, percolating revival of the Ottoman Empire by way of dormant Islamic fundamentalism and Turkish nationalism. Using financial and political clout on a global scale, Turkey and one of its premier Islamic leaders, Fetullah Gulen, have steadily gathered allies, including even in the United States, to pursue their dream of a global caliphate.

    The fight against modernization and secularization never really ended in Turkey, particularly among that country’s rural population, according to author and commentator Andrew Bostom. Bostom reviewed the scholarship of former Hebrew University professor Uriel Heyd, PhD. (1913-1968) who 43 years ago wrote regretfully of his belated recognition of Turkey’s re-Islamization. Dr. Heyd decried as shortsighted the view that the secular state had expunged Islam as a vital force in Turkish life. He traced re-Islamization efforts to the late 1930s and cited the dramatic rise of religious instruction in schools, the proliferation of mosques, Muslim supremacist views of Turkishness — only Muslims could be real Turks — and the return of the five-times-daily public call to prayer in Arabic following the Democratic Party victory in 1950.

    Thus, contrary to the current media view, the rise of Islam in Turkey is not a recent phenomenon attributable to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). But the movement toward an Islamic theocracy has indeed accelerated since the 2002 formation of a single-party government with a two-thirds parliament majority and Erdogan’s subsequent election in 2003.

    United States and Turkey

    Since the end of World War I when the German-allied Ottoman Empire was defeated and the sultanate and caliphate were replaced by the Republic of Turkey, Turkey has been an important U.S. ally because of its size, strategic location and profitable business opportunities for American companies. Although designated a “neutral” country during World War II, Turkey supplied the Germans with substantial quantities of chromites, essential minerals which harden steel for armor. The Turks didn’t declare war against Germany until 1945, ostensibly to be a party to final negotiations at war’s end. That same year, Turkey became a United Nations charter member and, as part of the U.N. command, participated in the Korean War, thereby earning a much desired place in NATO in 1952. The United States and Turkey enjoyed close bilateral relations through the post-Cold war period.

    Today the government in Turkey has moved away from the West, particularly the United States and Israel, and toward Iran and Syria, effectively changing the balance of power in the Middle East and across the globe. Turkey is actively and more openly pushing for Islamization and an expanded role for the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2007 on Turkish television, Erdogan admonished Westerners’ use of the term “moderate Islam,” by declaring, “These descriptions are very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.”

    That should have set off alarms in the West and extinguished any fantasies of Turkey’s role as a pillar of “moderate” Islam. Erdogan had made earlier alarming statements, similarly ignored as in 1994, while mayor of Istanbul, when he avowed, “Thank God Almighty, I am a servant of the Shariah.” Further confirming his strategy in 1996 after he was dismissed as mayor, the future Prime Minister stated, “Democracy is like a streetcar. You ride it until you arrive at your destination and then you step off.” Since 2002, the Turkish government has been pursuing a version of Islam closely aligned with the Wahhabi extremist Islam of the Saudis.

    Islamization and Turkey

    The Erdogan government publicly claims to be democratizing Turkey but has curtailed freedom of the press, jailed and sued journalists for criticizing the government and confiscated newspapers and sold them to AKP sympathizers. AKP supporters have infiltrated the military and are suspected of wiretapping and evidence fabrication against retired military officers. Erdogan lowered the age for judgeships in order to replace nearly half of all judges with his younger AKP sympathizers. He also removed banking regulatory board members and replaced them with Islamic banking officials and is reported to have received significant financing from Saudi Arabia, including a known Al Qaeda financier.

    Anti-Semitism and attacks against Christians and Catholics have increased in Turkey. Expressions of Armenian heritage and culture have been denied, church property has been confiscated, Armenian instruction has been limited to two hours per week (although Sunni Islam classes are required in Turkish public schools) and it is illegal to discuss the Armenian Genocide. Although Turkey previously enjoyed good relations with Israel, the Jewish state is now declared an enemy of Turkey and the media has promoted an anti-Semitic TV series and several anti-Semitic films. Last year, instead of sending aid through legal channels to Gaza and despite Israel’s appeals to the government to stop the action, AKP officials openly supported the Gaza flotilla in partnership with the Global Muslim Brotherhood network. Turkey facilitated the purchase and departure from Turkish ports of the lead flotilla ship, the MV Mavi Marmara. Further, the AKP is closely tied to the Muslim Brotherhood whose spiritual leader — Yusuf al-Qaradawi — calls for Islamic domination of Europe. That Turkey, a NATO member, should have such alliances is quite concerning.

    In 2010, Erdogan received a human rights award from Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and recently refused to impose sanctions on Gaddafi’s regime, even as Gaddafi has used fighter jets to kill his own people.

    Just this past week, Erdogan visited Germany and told an audience of 10,000 Turkish Germans (of three million in Germany) not to assimilate but to remain part of Turkey. Turkey has used Germany as a strategic base in Europe and sends young Turks, who have fulfilled their military service, into Germany through the extremist Islamic Society of Milli Gorus (IGMG). IGMG members with German-born daughters are encouraged to marry off their daughter to these Turkish males so that they can obtain permanent residency status and create a fifth column of Turkish Islamists. Trade between Turkey and Iran increased by more than 86% last year and Turkey has been supplying Iran’s missile program. In return, Iran has agreed to contribute $25 million to the AKP for the upcoming election in June.

    Meanwhile, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai recently announced in a joint press conference with Turkish President Abdullah Gul and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari that he would be pleased to see Taliban officials setting up an office in Turkey as part of a “new phase” of building bridges and integrating the extremist group.

    Fetullah Gulen and Turkey

    A significant component and AKP ally in the changing face of Turkey has been the influential Gulenist Movement led by Fetullah Gulen, a powerful force in Turkey for over four decades. Gulen began a grassroots movement in the 1970’s with the Islamist political party, Milli Gorus, a worldwide Islamist movement with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. AKP emerged from Milli Gorus to restore Islamic religion and culture.

    The foundation of Gulen’s teachings is that state and religion should be reconnected and the country re-emerge as part of a pan-Turkic regional power. A 2009 article in the Middle East Quarterly by Rachel Sharon-Krespin titled “Fethullah Gulen’s Grand Ambition” quotes sermons delivered by Gulen on Turkish television in 1999 which provide insights into his methods.

    “You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers … until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria … like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it … You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey … Until that time, any step taken would be too early-like breaking an egg without waiting the full forty days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all-in confidence … trusting your loyalty and secrecy. I know that when you leave here-[just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here.”

    Beginning in the 1970’s, Gulen began establishing a worldwide network to promote Islam and Turkish nationalism. His followers have since established hundreds of schools in over 110 countries. Gulenists operate an Islamic bank with over $5 billion in assets and own significant print and broadcast media properties, NGOs, think tanks and a publishing company. Gulen recruits Turkish youth by providing housing and education and grooms them for careers in the legal, political and academic professions. In recent years, the AKP passed legislation allowing graduates of Islamic high schools entry into Turkey’s universities, guaranteeing Islamist leadership in the future. Gulen controls the majority of schools, universities and dormitories throughout Turkey. His followers remain loyal and donate up to one-third of their income to the movement. In Turkey, Gulen and the AKP together control the police, the intelligence services and the media and actively recruit diplomats for their utility as foreign intelligence satellites. Overall, the holdings are valued at up to $50 billion.

    Members of the Gulen movement extend Turkey’s influence across the globe and occupy important positions running several media outlets and controlling multiple organizations that facilitate the dissemination of their message worldwide. A visit to a Gulen interfaith and cultural center in Houston illustrates the politically attuned nature of the movement. Signed photographs of local and state politicians and other prominent people are strategically placed at the building’s entry way, implying acceptance of the center’s activities and giving the impression that the center is an integral and respectable part of the community.

    In 1998,Gule n was convicted (since acquitted in 2006 by Erdogan’s AKP government) by the Turkish government for “trying to undermine the country’s secular institutions, concealing his methods behind a democratic and moderate image” and went into voluntary exile in the United States. Outside of Turkey, Gulen’s goal has been to educate a foreign leadership sympathetic to an Islamist Turkey. But his schools are prohibited in Russia and Uzbekistan banned his madrasas and arrested eight Gulenist journalists for involvement in extremist organizations. In the Netherlands, the movement is being investigated for suspicion of being an Islamist fundamentalist network.

    Gulen, Turkey and the United States

    In the United States, Gulen operates the largest charter school network in America and enjoys the cooperation and protection of the U.S. government. His schools stress intercultural dialogue and tolerance. They include a curriculum that teaches the Golden Age of Turkey or the period of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish language, dance, culture, cooking and Islam, all financed by American taxpayers.

    Meanwhile, his worldwide network reaches into U.S. politics through aggressive lobbying, political donations and paid trips to Turkey for members of Congress and their staffs. The Gulen Movement in the United States represents itself as a multi-faith global organization designed to bring together businesses, educators, religious leaders, journalists and others. Gulen has placed many of his followers in large U.S. engineering firms, NASA, the White House, universities and Hollywood. Through his U.S. State Department contacts, he has procured H1-B visas to staff his schools with Turkish followers.

    Turkey through Gulen wields considerable power in American politics and is actively involved in lobbying Congress to promote its interests in Washington. Gulen was recently honored under Texas State Resolution No. 85, which recognized his contributions and promotion of world peace, with the Texas legislature describing the Gulen movement as fostering intercultural understanding and tolerance. During the 2008 election cycle, a Turkish-American couple, Yalcin and Serpil Ayasli — founders of Hittite Microwave, a U.S. military contractor — gave more money, $424,050, to politicians and political action groups than anyone else in the United States. In subsequent years, the Ayaslis have ranked among the country’s top 20 donors. The couple’s donations have been geared specifically toward advancing U.S. relations with Turkey and promoting Turkish interests, including stopping the Armenian Genocide Resolution. On this issue alone, “Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker”, a service that tracks lobbyist interactions with government officials, reported that Turkey lobbied Congress on the Armenian Genocide Resolution and hired foreign agents to work with influential people outside of the government, spending $3.5 million and logging over 2,200 total contacts, including 100 with the executive branch.

    Until recently, Turkey presented its foreign policy as pro-Western. Before the 2002 elections in Turkey, Gulen secured an invitation for Erdogan to the White House, which was construed by the Turkish electorate as a U.S. endorsement. Although the United States has an air base in the country, in 2003, Turkey blocked the use of its bases for U.S. ground troops in the lead up to the war in Iraq.

    In 2005, Turkey became the General Secretariat of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), a 57 shariah law-endorsing permanent delegation to the U.N. whose mission is to safeguard the interests of the Muslim world. This OIC post strengthened Turkey’s Islamic agenda as well as the AKP’s stature. Assumption of anti-U.S. and anti-Israel positions has increased Turkey’s credibility and stature in the Arab Muslim world as it has moved closer to Syria and Iran.

    In 2009, Erdogan visited Iran and voiced support for Tehran’s nuclear program and refused to support economic sanctions imposed by the West. The Turkish-Iranian-Syrian alliance provides a hedge against the possibility of an independent Kurdish state, offers significant economic opportunities, enhances Iran’s power in the region, empowers Hezbollah and Hamas, puts pressure on pro-Western Arab countries and represents a serious threat to Israel.

    Current Middle East Turmoil and Turkey

    The current Middle East turmoil is an opportunity for Turkey and Iran to shift the region toward radical Islamist rule and elevate Turkey’s role as a regional power. The AKP government expects to play a significant role in the evolving Middle East political re-orientation. Turkey was one of the first countries to advise Mubarak to step down and world leaders, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood, are turning to Turkish leadership to assist the transitional government. Recently, Hamad Al Khalifa, the prince of Bahrain, sought Turkish intervention with Iran. The Muslim Brotherhood has extolled the virtues of Turkey providing the AKP with leverage in the Egyptian situation.

    When the Islamist AKP took over the Turkish government, the Saudis, who were fearful of the threat presented by Iran and mindful of their own lack of power, saw an opportunity to exert influence on the new government and to revive the caliphate. President Gul had worked at the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) in Saudi Arabia for eight years in preparation for the Islamization of Turkey under the Wahhabis. In 1991, he was sent back to Turkey to launch the Islamist movement under Necmettin Erbakan (1926 – 2011), Turkey’s first Islamist prime minister, and, later, the AKP.

    Under the Ottomans, Muslim power reached its zenith and the Caliph was transferred from Mecca to Istanbul, home of the Holy Relics and Caliphate Seal today, coveted by the Wahhabis since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. As Turkey is strong militarily, economically and its people are more nationalistic than Arab Muslim countries, the Saudis believed they could benefit from the alliance. With 100 million Islamicized Turks and Saudi funding of aggressive mosque building and dawa (proselytizing) in Europe, the resurgence of the caliphate could be a reality. The Saudis, who are motivated by the resurgence of the Sunni Caliphate, have played a significant role in Turkey’s rise in the Muslim world.

    Erdogan in partnership with Fetullah Gulen has made a concerted effort to target the military, take control of the media and stack the courts in order to realize the dream of Neo-Ottomanism — a return to Turkey’s Muslim imperialist past. In their long-term campaign to subordinate the army, the guardian of Turkey’s secular democracy, show trials have been held in which high-ranking military officers and political opponents have been arrested and detained without bail. The defendants stand accused of attempting to overthrow the AKP government. The AKP instigated demands by the European Left to curtail military activity as a condition for Turkey’s E.U. membership, although there is speculation that this was just a pretext for weakening the military and Turkey does not intend to join the E.U. Academics and journalists are also on trial for trying to bring down the government. In 2003, Erdogan used a constitutional amendment to target the courts and the military and secure the AKP’s rule in the country. Erdogan then selected Islamist judge replacements and President Gul appointed pro-Islamic generals and military officers.

    Turkey’s move away from the West, its renewed alliances with Islamist regimes and its disavowal of secular reforms in favor of theocratic rule under shariah could precipitate a precarious shift in the balance of power in the world. A portentous event could have been when Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last month hosted Nureddin Surin, a Hizbollah-activist and the delegation leader of the MV Mavi Marmara, the Turkish ship captured by Israeli as it tried to run the Gaza blockade. Surin used the occasion to declare, “We are here today with the longing and the determination to build a Middle East without Israel and America, and to refresh our pledge to continue on the path of the Mavi Marmara shahids (martyrs)…..”

    The Iranian Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, took the opportunity to thank the Turkish Muslims for their fight on behalf of Islam. Given the strength of this alliance combined with Saudi largesse and a changing picture in the Middle East, a global caliphate under shariah law could become a reality.

    By Janet Levy
    American Thinker

  • Bring Back the Caliphate

    Bring Back the Caliphate

    Soner Cagaptay
    Wall Street Journal
    October 7, 2009

    The reaction in Turkey to the recent death of Ertugrul Osman, heir to the Ottoman throne and successor to the last Caliph, could not be more shocking. Islamists in kaftans and long beards gathered in Istanbul two weeks ago to bury the titular head of the world Muslim community, a scotch-drinking, classical music-listening Western Turk who until recently lived on New York City’s Upper East Side.

    The Islamists’ embrace of Osman, a descendant of the westernized Ottoman sultans, provides a periscope into the Islamist mind: Islamism is not about religion or reality. Rather it is a myth and a subversion of reality intended to promote Islamism, a utopian ideology. Osman, raised by a line of West-leaning caliphs and sultans, loved Ataturk’s Turkey, yet the Islamists abused his funeral and the memory of the caliphate, changing it into a symbol for their anti-Western, anti-secular and anti-liberal agenda.

    Were Ertugrul Osman alive and were the Ottomans around today, he would be Sultan Osman V and no doubt, he would be going after the fundamentalists who abused his funeral in an attempt to distort his legacy.

    Despite what the Islamists want the world to believe, the Ottoman caliphate was not anti-Western. The Ottoman Empire always interacted with the West — an interaction that goes all the way back to 16th-century Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, who envisioned himself as the Holy Roman emperor. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Ottoman sultans and caliphs embarked on a program of intense reforms to remake the Ottoman Empire in the Western image to match up with European powers. To this end, the caliphs launched institutions of secular education, and paved the way for women’s emancipation by enrolling them in those schools. By the beginning of the 19th century, the sultans and caliphs of the Ottoman Empire embodied Western life and Western values. The last caliph, Abdulmecid Efendi, considered the Ottoman state a Western power with a Western destiny. An enlightened man and avid artist, the caliph’s sought-after paintings, including nudes, are on exhibition at various museums, such as Istanbul’s new museum of Modern Art.

    It is therefore wrong to represent the Ottoman Empire as the antithesis to the secular republic Ataturk founded in 1923. True, when Ataturk turned Turkey into a secular republic in 1923 by abolishing the Ottoman state and the caliphate, Ataturk did noteradicate the sultan-caliphs’ legacy. Rather, he fulfilled their dream of making Turkey a full-fledged Western society. Ataturk’s reforms are a continuation of the late Ottoman Empire — he merely pursued Ottoman reforms to their logical conclusion.

    Moreover, Ataturk was the product par excellence of the Ottoman Empire. He was raised in Salonika, the hub of cosmopolitanism and Western culture in the reforming empire. He studied in secular Ottoman schools, and he was trained in the Westernized Ottoman military.

    The debate over the Ottoman caliphate’s legacy has ramifications not only for Turkey, but also for contemporary Muslims and the Western world’s desire to counter radical Islamists. Years before emergence of al Qaeda, the caliphs produced an antidote against radical jihadists, a progressive vision for a Western-oriented Muslim society. The sultan-caliphs built the institutional foundations of this society, including the first Ottoman parliament and constitution of 1876, and planted in it seeds of Western values, such as secular education and women’s emancipation. Modern Turkey owes its existence as much to Ataturk as to the sultan-caliphs who were among the first to promote liberal and Western values in a Muslim society.

    Now, the Islamists want to usurp the caliphate and its legacy. The fundamentalists first distort the caliphate’s politics, reimagining it as an anti-Western institution. Then, they portray the revival of this invented caliphate as the ultimate political dream in an anti-Western ideology.

    Eighty years ago, the Ottoman caliph-sultans imagined a Turkey that is more akin to modern Turkey than to the Islamist society envisioned by al Qaeda or others who dismiss Ataturk’s dream of a Western Turkey and liberal values as anomalies. Ertugrul Osman himself told Turkish journalist Asli Aydintasbas shortly before his death that “the republic has been devastating for our family, but very good for Turkey.”

    Caliph Osman was Turkish by birth, Muslim by religion, and a Westerner by upbringing. I want my caliph back, and so should all Muslims who want deliverance from the distorted and illiberal world envisioned by the Islamists.

    Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute.

    ===============================

    Ertugrul Osman, Link to Ottoman Dynasty, Dies at 97

    By FRED A. BERNSTEIN
    Published: September 24, 2009

    Ertugrul Osman, who might have ruled the Ottoman empire from a palace in Istanbul, but instead spent most of his life in a walk-up apartment in Manhattan, died Wednesday night in Istanbul. He was 97.


    Enlarge This Image
    Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

    His Imperial Highness Prince Osman Ertugrul of Turkey and Princess Zeynep in their two-bedroom walk-up on Lexington Avenue.

    The cause was kidney failure, according to his wife, Zeynep, who was visiting Istanbul with him when he died.

    Mr. Osman was a descendant of Osman I, the Anatolian ruler who in 1299 established the kingdom that eventually controlled parts of Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Mr. Osman would have eventually become the Sultan but for the establishment of the Turkish Republic, proclaimed in 1923.

    For the last 64 years, Mr. Osman — formally His Imperial Highness Prince Ertugrul Osman — lived in a rent-controlled apartment in a four-story building on Lexington Avenue in the East 70s. At one time he kept 12 dogs in his home, a two-bedroom unit up a narrow, dim stairway, and enlisted neighborhood children to walk them.

    Given the gap between what might have been and what was, Mr. Osman was often asked if he dreamed that the empire would be restored. He always answered, flatly, no.

    “I’m a very practical person,” he told The New York Times in 2006. “Democracy works well in Turkey.”

    In an interview for Al Jazeera television in 2008, he refused to say an unkind word about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who led the revolution that deposed his family.

    Ali Tayar, an architect from Istanbul and a friend, said in 2006 that Mr. Osman had “no ambitions to return, and he doesn’t want anyone to think he does.”

    “But he’s an incredibly important link to Turkey’s past,” Mr. Tayar added.

    Born in 1912, Mr. Osman was the last surviving grandson of an Ottoman emperor; his grandfather, Abdul Hamid II, ruled from 1876 to 1909. In 1924, the royal family was expelled by Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. “The men had one day to leave,” Mr. Osman said. “The women were given a week.”

    Mr. Osman attended school in Vienna and moved to New York in 1939. He returned to Turkey for the first time 53 years later, in August 1992, at the invitation of the prime minister. On that trip, he went to see the 285-room Dolmabahce Palace, which had been his grandfather’s home (and where he had played as a child). He insisted on joining a tour group, despite the summer heat. “I didn’t want a fuss,” he said. “I’m not that kind of person.”

    As a young man, Mr. Osman ran a mining company, Wells Overseas, which required him to travel frequently to South America. Because he considered himself a citizen of the Ottoman Empire, he refused to carry the passport of any country. Instead, he traveled with a certificate devised by his lawyer. That might have continued to work had security measures not been tightened after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In 2004, he received a Turkish passport for the first time.

    Mr. Osman married Gulda Twerskoy in 1947. She died in 1985. At a party in 1987, he met Zeynep Tarzi Hanim, an Afghan princess. Nearly 30 years his junior, she had been raised in Istanbul and was living in New York. They married in 1991. He has no other survivors.

    Mr. Osman often impressed interviewers with his dry wit and knowledge of trends in politics, architecture and pop culture. When Didem Yilmaz, a filmmaker, interviewed Mr. Osman for “Seeking the Sultan,” a short documentary film about him, she expected to find him bitter about his life’s trajectory. Instead, she said, she found him to be “kind, understanding and contemplative.”

    At one point, she added, he said to her knowingly, “If I had a bad life, it would be better for your film.”

    This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

    Correction: October 5, 2009
    Because of an editing error, an obituary on Sept. 24 about Ertugrul Osman, a descendant of Turkish royalty, misstated the length of time his second wife, Zeynep, lived with him in a Manhattan apartment and misstated the ownership of 12 dogs that lived there at one time. Ms. Osman has lived there since the couple married in 1991, not “for the last 64 years.” (Mr. Osman had lived in the apartment for that length of time.) And the dogs were owned by Mr. Osman, not by the two of them.