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  • Fethullah Gulen’s cave of wonders

    Fethullah Gulen’s cave of wonders

    By Spengler feto gulenTAKKELI

    We’ve been had, boys and girls: the international community, the world press, Israeli intelligence, the United Nations, the lot of us. The existential drama off the Gaza coast turns out to be a Turkish farce, the kind of low comedy that in 1782 Wolfgang Mozart set to music in the opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan playing the buffo-villain Osmin and Turkish self-exiled preacher and author Fethullah Gulen as the wise Pasha Selim.

    In the post-American world, where every wannabe and used-to-be power makes momentary deals with other powers it plans to kill later, one makes inferences with caution. But I’ve seen this opera before.

    Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania in the United States, was silent as a jinn in a bottle about politics until last Friday, when he told

    the Wall Street Journal that the Free Gaza flotilla’s attempt to run the Israeli blockage of Gaza “is a sign of defying authority, and will not lead to fruitful matters”.

    Erdogan’s Islamists have run a two-year campaign of judicial activism against secular politicians, journalists and army officers, and secular critics long have alleged that Gulen is the clerical power behind the prime minister.

    For the secretive Gulen to criticize the Turkish government in the midst of its public rage against Israel is an imam-bites-dog story. Gulen appears to have positioned himself as a mediator with Israel. Turkey does not want to end its longstanding relationship with Israel; it wants Israel to become a Turkish vassal-state in emulation of the old Ottoman model.

    The killing last week by Israeli commandos of nine activists on board the Mavi Marmara served numerous goals, and Gulen’s grand return to Turkish politics appears to be one of them. The question that every commentator in the Turkish press asked over the weekend, in one form or other, was: When will this voice of Muslim moderation re-emerge as an open force in the ruling Islamist party?

    There is every indication that the Turkish government dispatched the Gaza flotilla in order to stage a violent confrontation. The Erdogan government announced that it had carefully vetted the passenger list on the Mavi Marmara, which is to say that it knew that many of the passengers boarded with the intention of achieving “martyrdom” in a clash with the Israelis. They must have known this, for both the Turkish as well as the Palestinian press ran interviews with family members of some of the nine dead passengers explaining this intent.

    The passengers’ plans for martyrdom have been celebrated in the Arab press, and translated on the website of the Middle East Media Research Institute. The Turkish government also knew that the Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH), the Islamic charity behind the Gaza flotilla, had ties to Hamas, for it had banned the IHH from charitable activity in Turkey a decade ago due to its connection to an organization that the previous secular government regarded as terrorist.

    What explains Israel’s apparent intelligence failure? Israel fields a small service tasked with operations in Iran, southern Lebanon, Gaza and Syria among other prospective enemies. The Mossad probably relied on counterparts in Turkish intelligence – with whom it has a long history of collaboration – to cover the passenger list on the Mavi Marmara. The often-unreliable Debka claims that “Turkish intelligence duped Israel”, which in this case is likely. By stealth or by sloth, Israel was roped into the comedy.

    The star of the comedy, at least for the Turkish media, is Gulen. The 78-year-old imam has lived in self-imposed exile for two decades, due to charges by Turkish prosecutors that he led a conspiracy to subvert the secular state. He presides over Turkey’s largest religious movement, commanding the loyalty of two-thirds of the Turkish police, according to some reports. His movement – a transnational civic society movement inspired by Gulen’s teachings – also controls a network of elite schools that educate a tenth of the high school students in the Turkic world from Baku to Kyrgyzstan. And it reportedly controls businesses with tens of billions of dollars in assets.

    His movement has been expelled from the Russian Federation and his followers arrested in Uzbekistan by local authorities who believe his goal is a pan-Turkic union from the Bosporus to China’s western Xinjiang province (“East Turkestan” to Gulen’s movement).

    In Mozart’s Abduction, Belmonte and Pedrillo descend into the pasha’s harem to rescue Kostanze; in last week’s version, Israeli commandos descended onto the Mavi Marmara. And there is the stock villain of Viennese comedy, the Turk Osmin, played by Erdogan. The predictable occurs, and the prospective Shahidi become actual corpses. And Erdogan threatens Israel with terrible things, in emulation of Mozart’s Osmin, who sings:

    “First you’ll be beheaded!
    Then hanged!
    Then spitted on hot stakes!
    Then bound, and burned, and drowned, and finally skinned!”

    This, one supposes, is supposed to frighten the children in the audience, who then will smile and clap when the Wise Old Man enters to urge moderation, caution and respect for authority, in the person of Gulen.

    The Islamic shift in Turkey has been underway for years. As Rachel Sharon-Krespin wrote in the Middle East Quarterly (Winter 2009):

    As Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) begins its seventh year in leadership, Turkey is no longer the secular and democratic country that it was when the party took over. The AKP has conquered the bureaucracy and changed Turkey’s fundamental identity. Prior to the AKP’s rise, Ankara oriented itself toward the United States and Europe. Today, despite the rhetoric of European Union accession, Prime Minister Erdogan has turned Turkey away from Europe and toward Russia and Iran and re-oriented Turkish policy in the Middle East away from sympathy toward Israel and much more toward friendship with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria.

    We are now in a post-American world, at least where the Barack Obama administration is concerned, and Turkey like its neighbors is scrambling for position. What does Turkey want in a post-American world?

    The question itself seems stupid, for the obvious answer is: “Whatever it can get.” It wants to become the dominant regional power rather than Iran, casting a wolfish glance at Iran’s Azeri population, who speak Turkish rather than Persian. It wants to “mediate” the Israeli-Palestinian issue and is not squeamish about its prospective partners. It wants Palestine to be an Ottoman province once again. It wants to be the energy hub for the Middle East and the outlet for Russian and Azerbaijani pipelines.

    But it is a bit more complex than that. Modern Turkey is an artificial construct, rather than a nation-state in the Western sense. Since the Turks completed the conquest of Byzantine Anatolia in the middle of the 14th century, a relatively thin crust of ethnic Turks has ruled over subject peoples. The Ottoman Empire at various points in its history had a Christian majority; its civil service at different points was more Venetian, Armenian and Jewish then Turkish; its self-understanding was global and religious, that is, as the caliphate of Islam, rather than as a national entity.

    When World War I reduced Turkey to an Anatolian rump, Kemal Ataturk attempted to impose “Turkishness” as a secular, national ideology on the European model. To make the country “Turkish”, several million Orthodox Christians were estimated to have been killed. The hollowness of Ataturk’s secular construct, modeled on the nastier European national movements, made it vulnerable from the beginning. The army was the only institution that could hold Turkish society together.

    What will replace Ataturk’s secularism? I wrote two years ago:

    If political Islam prevails in Turkey, what will emerge is not the same country in different coloration, but a changeling, an entirely different nation. In a 1997 speech that earned him a prison term, Erdogan warned of two fundamentally different camps, the secularists who followed Kemal, and Muslims who followed sharia. These are not simply different camps, however, but different configurations of Turkish society at the molecular level. Like a hologram, Turkey offers two radically different images when viewed from different angles. Turkish Islam, the ordering of the Anatolian villages and the Istanbul slums, represents a nation radically different than the secularism of the army, the civil service, the universities and the Western-leaning elite of Istanbul. If the Islamic side of Turkey rises, the result will be unrecognizable. Turkey in the throes of Islamic revolution? Asia Times Online, July 22, 2008.

    Gulen’s pan-Turkic mysticism views Turkey as the center of a new caliphate uniting the Muslim world. He preaches a “Turkish renaissance” with a modern spin “to ensure that religion and science go together and that science penetrates not only individual lives, but also social life”. His schools educate the elite of the Turkic world across Asia. Gulen’s interest, to be sure, focuses on the Turkish state, whose bureaucracy is now filled with his acolytes. But unlike Ataturk’s secular nationalism, which tried to redefine Turkey on a European model, Gulen’s Islamism is inherently expansionist.

    What Gulen means by science is of an entirely different order than the Western understanding. This “imam from rural Anatolia”, as his website describes him, inhabits the magical world of jinns and sorcery. Science is just a powerful form of magic of which Turks should avail themselves to enhance their power, as he writes in his 2005 book, The Essentials of the Islamic Faith:

    Jinn are conscious beings charged with divine obligations. Recent discoveries in biology make it clear that God created beings particular to each realm. They were created before Adam and Eve, and were responsible for cultivating and improving the world. Although God superseded them with us, he did not exempt them from religious obligations.

    As nothing is difficult for God almighty, he has provided human beings, angels and jinns with the strength appropriate for their functions and duties. As he uses angels to supervise the movements of celestial bodies, he allows to humans to rule the Earth, dominate matter, build civilizations and produce technology.

    Power and strength are not limited to the physical world, nor are they proportional to bodily size … Our eyes can travel long distances in an instant. Our imagination can transcend time and space all at once … winds can uproot trees and demolish large buildings. A young, thin plant shoot can split rocks and reach the sunlight. The power of energy, whose existence is known through its effect, is apparent to everybody. All of this shows that something’s power is not proportional to its physical size; rather the immaterial world dominates the physical world, and immaterial entities are far more powerful than material ones.

    He goes on to warn about sorcery and the danger of spells; he allows that it is meritorious to break spells (for evil witches are everywhere casting spells), although a good Muslim should not make a profession of this, for then he might be mistaken for a sorcerer himself. The notion that “wind” and “energy” are “immaterial” forces exudes the magical world view of an Anatolian peasant; the miracles of technology are the secret actions of jinn, just as the planetary movements are the actions of angels. When Gulen talks about the union of religion and science, what he means quite concretely is that the magical view of jinns in the Koran aids the believer in enlisting these “immaterial” forces to enhance the power of Islam. Science for Gulen means the management of jinn.

    Gulen, in short, is a shaman, a relic of pre-history preserved in the cultural amber of eastern Anatolia. Kemalism was sterile, brutal, secular and rational; the “moderate Islam” of Gulen is magical, a mystic’s vision of Ottoman restoration and a pan-Turkic caliphate.

    The Erdogan government crafted the Mavi Marmara affair as a piece of theater, preparing the deus ex machina (god from the machine) entrance of Gulen himself, more Pagliaccio than Apollo, to be sure. The trouble is that the Turkish Islamists live in a world of magical realism in which theater and reality, human and jinn, desire and achievement blend into a mystical blur. Gulen explains in his The Essentials of the Islamic Faith that Allah created the jinn out of fire. And that is what the apologists for Turkish Islamism are playing with.

    Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman, senior editor of First Things (www.firstthings.com).

  • SYMPATHY FOR THE TURKISH DEVIL

    SYMPATHY FOR THE TURKISH DEVIL

    ERDOGAN3
    By Spengler

    The American commentariat is shocked, shocked , to discover that Turkey has abandoned the Western alliance for an adventurous bid to become the dominant Muslim power in the Middle East. Tom Friedman of the New York Times suggested on June 15 that “President [Barack] Obama should invite him for a weekend at Camp David to clear the air before US-Turkey relations get where they’re going – over a cliff.” Friedman blames the European Community for rejecting Turkey’s membership bid which, he says, was a “key factor prompting Turkey to move closer to Iran and the Arab world”.

    But it is not quite so simple. Friedman and the conventional wisdom are wrong, as usual. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is behaving dreadfully, to the point that a group of retired senior Turkish diplomats denounced him for “neo-Ottomanism”. But Turkey has not moved closer to Iran, except in tactical diplomatic terms. The problem is more subtle: America’s blunders in Iraq gave Iran the chance to become a regional hegemon, and Turkey must vie with Iran for this role as a matter of self-preservation.

    It was not the European Community, but rather the George W Bush administration, that pulled the rug out from under Turkey’s secularists and built up Erdogan as a paragon of “moderate Islam”. America’s feckless nation-building policy in Iraq helped Turkey over the edge into Islamism.

    In a recent essay [1], I portrayed the Mavi Marmara incident in which nine Turks were killed by Israeli commandos onboard one of the six boats attempting to breach the blockade on the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, as a Turkish farce. It should be obvious to anyone with access to YouTube that Erdogan conducted an exercise in guerilla theater, which qualifies as a comedy of sorts unless you were one of the dead Turks on the boat. What has transpired over the past eight years, though, is a tragedy.

    Turkey is held together by weak glue. It never was a nation-state, despite founding father Kemal Ataturk’s ferocious efforts to make it appear to be one. Kurds comprise somewhere between six million and 20 million (the Kurdish nationalists’ claim) of Turkey’s population, and Kurdish separatism poses a continuing threat to Turkey’s national integrity.

    For the usual corrupt and foolish reasons, world opinion has focused on the nine dead Turks on the flotilla; of far greater consequence are the several dozen Turkish soldiers who died at the hands of Kurdish guerillas in the past two weeks. More important still are the 2,000 or so Turkic people who died in Kyrgyzstan in the past weeks. Much less distinguishes a failed state like Kyrgyzstan from an apparently successful state like Turkey than Westerners think.

    America is about to leave Iraq; Iraq is likely to break up; and if an independent Kurdish state emerges from the breakup it will become a magnet for Kurdish separatists within Turkey. Erdogan has 1,500 Kurds under arrest, including the mayors of some Kurdish towns.

    Ataturk’s post-war secularism defined “Turkishness” as a national identity that had never before existed. “Turkishness” is something of a blood pudding. Ottoman identity had nothing to do with nationality in the Western sense. It was religious and ethnic. A fifth of the population of Anatolia before World War I was Christian, mainly Armenian and Greek; virtually all were expelled or murdered. The Turks killed more than a million-and-a-half Armenians, employing Kurdish militia to do most of the actual dirty work (that is why what is now “Turkish Kurdistan” was until 1916 “Western Armenia”. The modern Turkish state was born in a bloodbath, and founded on massive population shifts. The enormous Kurdish minority got the southeast as a consolation prize but still longs for its own language, culture and eventual national state.

    Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was a monster, but for the Turks a useful monster. The 1988 Anfal campaign against the Kurds of northern Iraq killed up to 180,000 of them, and the crackdown on the Kurds after the 1991 First Gulf War killed as many as 100,000. The Turks, by contrast, killed perhaps 20,000 to 40,000 Kurds during the 1980s and 1990s.

    Turkey in 2003 refused America permission to open a northern front against Saddam out of fear that the war would destroy Turkey’s ability to control its restive border. The destruction of the Iraqi state, moreover, created a de facto independent Kurdish entity on Turkey’s border, the last thing Ankara wanted. If America had simply installed a new strongman and left, Turkey would have been relieved. But America’s commitment to “nation-building” and “democracy” in Iraq, to Ankara’s way of thinking, meant that Iraq inevitably would break up; the Kurdish entity in northern Iraq would become a breakaway state; and Iran’s power would grow at the expense of Turkey.

    Turkey has many reasons to fear Iran, whose possible nuclear ambitions make it a prospective spoiler in the region. But there is another vital issue. Among the fault lines that run through the modern Turkish state is a religious divide. Iran exercises influence through the Alevi minority in Turkey, a heretical Muslim sect closer in some ways to Shi’ite than Sunni Islam. No accurate census of the Alevi exists; they may comprise between a fifth and a quarter of of Turkey’s population. The late Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared the Alevi to be part of Shi’ite Islam in the 1970s, and they have been subjected to occasional violence by Sunni Turks.

    The Iraq war undermined the position of the Kemalist military, which had bloodied its hands for decades in counter-insurgency operations against the Kurds. Erdogan’s Islamists argued that the weak glue of secular Turkish identity no longer could hold Turkey together, and proposed instead to win the Kurds over through Islamic solidarity. The Kurds are quite traditional Muslims; unlike the Turkish Sunnis, the provincial Kurds of southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq often practice female circumcision.

    After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the George W Bush administration saw no reason to back the Turkish generals who had let them down in Iraq, and instead threw their backing to the Islamists, on the theory that Erdogan represented a sort of “moderate Islam” that would provide an example to other prospective democratic Muslim regimes. When Erdogan won parliamentary elections in 2003, Bush invited him to the White House before he took office, a gesture that persuaded most Turks that America had jettisoned its erstwhile secular allies, as I wrote in 2007. [2]

    The Bush State Department stuck to the story of “moderate Islam” in Turkey even while Erdogan used outlandishly extra-legal methods to dismantle the secular establishment, as I wrote in 2008. [3] In fairness to the State Department, the idea that Turkey was home to a specially moderate strain of Islam was not the invention of American foreign policy analysts but of the Islam specialists of the Jesuit order. Father Christian Troll, a German Islamologist who advises Pope Benedict XVI, and his student Father Felix Koerner popularized the notion of a less virulent strain of Turkish Islam. I reviewed Koerner’s book on Turkish Islam in 2008. [4]

    One cannot blame the Bush administration (nor the Jesuit Islamologists) for the person Erdogan has become. By the turn of the millennium, Kemalist secularism was a grotesque relic of 1930s European nationalism. Turkey’s leading novelist, Orhan Pamuk, evoked the spiritual misery of secularist Turkey and the attractions of radical Islam in his Nobel-prize-winning novel Snow, which I reviewed in this space in 2004. [5]

    To the extent that there was some hope of keeping Turkey in the Western camp, though, the Bush administration’s nation-building blunders in Iraq and credulous admiration of “moderate Islam” in Ankara destroyed it.

    Political Islam as a replacement for Kemalist nationalism is the glue that will hold Turkey together, in Erdogan’s view. It does not seem to be doing a good job. Islamic solidarity was supposed to persuade the Kurds to behave themselves, along with a few nods in the direction of the use of the Kurdish language, which the Kemalists tried to suppress. The killing of 11 Turkish soldiers in raids staged from Iraq and the bombing of a military bus in Ankara show that Kurdish resistance has not diminished. Erdogan, previously so concerned about human rights and the Biblical injunction against killing, raged that the Kurdish rebels will “drown in their own blood”.

    Erdogan’s political Islam failed to stabilize Turkey. It will contribute to instability in the region to an extent that is difficult to foresee. Iran now has the more reason to assert its influence in Iraq, perhaps by encouraging the breakup of the country and the emergence of a Kurdish state that might threaten Turkey.

    Turkey, in turn, has all the more reason to agitate among the Turkish-speaking, or Azeri, quarter of Iran’s population. Iran will use its influence among Turkish Alevis to challenge the Turkish Sunni establishment; Iran will encourage Turkish separatism. Meanwhile Erdogan’s alliance of opportunity with Hamas undercuts the American-allied Sunni Arab states, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, not to mention Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestine Authority.

    With the United States in full strategic withdrawal, a Thirty Years War in western and central Asia seems all the more likely.

    Notes
    1. Fethullah Gulen’s cave of wonders Asia Times Online, June 9, 2010.
    2. Why does Turkey hate America? Asia Times Online, October 23, 2007.
    3. Turkey in the throes of Islamic revolution? Asia Times Online, July 22, 2008.
    4. Tin-opener theology from Turkey Asia Times Online, June 3, 2008.
    5. In defense of Turkish cigarettes Asia Times Online, August 24, 2004.

    Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman, senior editor at First Things magazine (www.firstthings.com).

    __._,_.___
  • Kurdish Heritage Reclaimed: Stephen Kinzer

    Kurdish Heritage Reclaimed: Stephen Kinzer

    After years of conflict, Turkey’s tradition-rich Kurdish minority is experiencing a joyous cultural reawakening

    • By Stephen Kinzer
    • Photographs by Lynsey Addario
    • Smithsonian magazine, June 2010

    Isolation allowed the Kurds to survive for thousands of years while other cultures faded from history.

    More from Smithsonian.com

    • Iraq’s Resilient Minority
    • Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?

    In the breathtakingly rugged Turkish province of Hakkari, pristine rivers surge through spectacular mountain gorges and partridges feed beneath tall clusters of white hollyhock. I’m attending the marriage celebration of 24-year-old Baris and his 21-year-old bride, Dilan, in the Kurdish heartland near the borders of Syria, Iran and Iraq. This is not the actual wedding; the civil and religious ceremonies were performed earlier in the week. Not until after this party, though, will the couple spend their first night together as husband and wife. It will be a short celebration by Kurdish standards—barely 36 hours.

    Neither eating nor drinking plays much of a role at a traditional Kurdish wedding. On the patio of a four-story apartment house, guests are served only small plates of rice and meatballs. Instead, the event is centered on music and dance. Hour after hour, the band plays lustily as lines of guests, their arms linked behind their backs, kick, step and join in song in ever-changing combinations. Children watch intently, absorbing a tradition passed down through generations.

    The women wear dazzling, embroidered gowns. But it’s the men who catch my eye. Some of them are wearing one-piece outfits—khaki or gray overalls with patterned cummerbunds—inspired by the uniforms of Kurdish guerrillas who fought a fierce campaign for self-rule against the Turkish government throughout much of the 1980s and ’90s. The Turkish military, which harshly suppressed this insurgency, would not have tolerated such outfits just a few years ago. These days, life is more relaxed.

    As darkness falls and there is still no sign of the bride, some friends and I decide to visit the center of Hakkari, the provincial capital. An armored personnel carrier, with a Turkish soldier in the turret peering over his machine gun, rumbles ominously through the city, which is swollen with unemployed Kurdish refugees from the countryside. But stalls in music stores overflow with CDs by Kurdish singers, including performers who were banned because Turkish authorities judged their music incendiary. Signs written in the once-taboo Kurdish language decorate shop windows.

    By luck, we encounter Ihsan Colemerikli, a Kurdish intellectual whose book Hakkari in Mesopotamian Civilization is a highly regarded work of historical research. He invites us to his home, where we sip tea under an arbor. Colemerikli says there have been 28 Kurdish rebellions in the past 86 years—inspired by centuries of successful resistance to outsiders, invaders and would-be conquerors.

    “Kurdish culture is a strong and mighty tree with deep roots,” he says. “Turks, Persians and Arabs have spent centuries trying to cut off this tree’s water so it would wither and die. But in the last 15 to 20 years there has been a new surge of water, so the tree is blossoming very richly.”

    Back at the wedding party, the bride finally appears, wearing a brightly patterned, translucent veil and surrounded by attendants carrying candles. She is led slowly through the crowd to one of two armchairs in the center of the patio. Her husband sits in the other one. For half an hour they sit quietly and watch the party, then rise for their first dance, again surrounded by candles. I notice that the bride never smiles, and I ask if something is amiss. No, I’m told. It is customary for a Kurdish bride to appear somber as a way of showing how sad she is to leave her parents.

    The party will go on until dawn, only to resume a few hours later. But as midnight approaches, my companions and I depart, our destination a corba salonu—a soup salon. In a few minutes we enter a brightly lit café. There are two soups on the menu. Lentil is my favorite, but when traveling I prefer the unfamiliar. The sheep’s head soup, made with meat scraped from inside the skull, is strong, lemony and assertive.

  • TURKISH FORUM INTELLIGENCE SUMMARY

    TURKISH FORUM INTELLIGENCE SUMMARY

    With Friends Like These ; Turkey is ready to start a new round of diplomatic initiatives to stop countries that supply the PKK with arms. Turkey has undertaken similar initiatives in previous years.

    Over the past few months, the PKK has relied on arms from Mediterranean countries, intelligence reports indicate. The roadside bomb that exploded in Halkalı on Tuesday was of Portuguese origin, intelligence sources said, adding this country to the list of countries that supply arms to the terrorist organization. That attack was carried out by the PKK’s urban offshoot, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK).

    The most crucial question is how the PKK is able to bring these arms supplies it obtains from Mediterranean countries to northern Iraq. US journalist Seymour Hersh claimed in 2007 that this was done via Israel.

    The General Staff has seized PKK arms and ammunition originating from
    31 different countries.However, NATO-member countries have been the biggest suppliers. Most of the arms and ammunition seized are of Russian, Italian, Spanish, German and Chinese origin.

    EARLIER REPORTS

    May 22, 2007

    C4 plastic explosive

    Explosion rocks Ankara, the Turkish capital

    Five people have been killed and at least 60 hurt in an explosion during evening rush hour at the entrance to a shopping centre in the district of Ulus. A Pakistan national was among the dead. The area has been cordoned off and an investigation has begun. Unconfirmed reports suggest an explosive device may have been left at a nearby bus stop and is PKK related. It is suspected that the explosive is C4 which was supplied (as Block demolition charge M112, which may also be cut and/or removed from the mylar wrapper and hand formed as desired to suit the target) to US forces in Iraq and is more that a few tons are missing . PKK routinely uses Italian sourced plastic land mines and Armenian made remote detonation (cell phone type) equipment. In recent months huge weapons caches were discovered in many parts of Turkey such as Muğla, Van, İzmir, Ağrı and Şırnak.

    C-4 is the standard-issue plastic explosive used by the US military.
    C-4 or (Composition C-4) is used for any stable explosive, and “Composition A” and “Composition B” are other known variants. Made up of explosive, plastic binder, plasticizer and, usually, marker or taggant chemicals such as 2,3-dimethyl-2,3-dinitrobutane (DMDNB) to help detect the explosive and identify its source C-4 is 1.34 times as explosive as trinitrotoluene (TNT).

    C-4 is made by combining RDX slurry with binder dissolved in a solvent. The solvent is then evaporated away and the mixture is dried and filtered. The final material is an off-white solid with a feel similar to modelling clay. A major advantage of C-4 is that it can easily be moulded into any desired shape. C-4 can be pressed into gaps/voids in buildings, bridges, equipment or machinery. C-4 is also well known for its durability, reliability, and safety. It will not explode even if hit by a bullet, punched, cut, or thrown into a fire.

    The only reliable method for detonation is via both heat and pressure, i.e a detonator or blasting cap.

  • JORDAN: ‘Mossad hit men targeted Erdogan’

    JORDAN: ‘Mossad hit men targeted Erdogan’

    Thu, 24 Jun 2010 01:15:56 GMT
    Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
    The Israeli intelligence agency Mossad has failed in an attempt to assassinate Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a Jordanian weekly says.

    Informed sources in Turkey say that the Mossad plot has been foiled by the country’s security forces, al-Manar quoted a report in the most recent edition of the Al-Majd weekly as saying.

    There are also reports that Israel has been trying to incite violence inside Turkey by lending support to the militants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

    Earlier in June, Sedat Laciner, the head of the International Strategic Research Organization — a Turkish think tank — said Mossad agents and Israeli military retirees had been sighted providing training to PKK militants in Iraqi Kurdistan.

    Laciner said Tel Aviv does not have a positive perception of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, which is led by Erdogan.

    After an Israeli attack on a Gaza-bound flotilla that left nine Turkish citizens dead on May 31, Ankara drew up a roadmap to “completely” cut its ties with Israel.

    Turkish President Abdullah Gul had earlier announced that a roadmap would be prepared on the issue of sanctions against Israel.

    “The roadmap details a process through which Turkey will completely cut its ties with Israel” in several stages, Turkish daily Today’s Zaman reported on June 17.

    According to the roadmap, the first step would be that Turkey’s ambassador to Tel Aviv, who had previously been recalled, would not be sent back unless Israel sends a member to a UN investigatory commission that aims to look into the Israeli attack on the Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla.

    The roadmap would also require all military training and cooperation with Israel to be halted and states that an internal Israeli inquiry into the attack would in no way be recognized by Turkey.

    MGH/HGL

  • Fetullahs Businessman flex their newfound political power

    Fetullahs Businessman flex their newfound political power

    Wednesday, June 23, 2010
    Rep. Bill Pascrell, center, and Levant Koc, right, of the Interfaith Dialog Center, with Mehmet Sahin of the Turkish Parliament.
    BY HERB JACKSON
    The Record
    WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT

    Turkic businessmen and community leaders packed a posh Washington hotel to announce their new national group, and invited members of Congress to learn about their growing population and economic power.

    “I want to see all the Jersey guys,” says Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-Paterson, who is quickly surrounded in the Willard Hotel ballroom. “Are these the guys that own all the restaurants?”

    Census data show Pascrell’s district is home to the biggest concentration of Turks in New Jersey, and as he works the room, he waves to members of the band he recognizes from events in Passaic County. He also meets Mehmet Sahin, a member of the Turkish Parliament who, among other things, is seeking contacts for an associate who wants to open a hotel in New Jersey.

    Near the buffet table, Rep. Scott Garrett, R-Wantage, takes a break from his tabbouleh to debate with a Westfield businessman about whether Governor Christie really will cut property taxes.

    Congressmen wooing new business to their districts or debating local politics is hardly new terrain, and in that sense, the opening gala of the Assembly of Turkic American Federations (A fetullah Gulen Organization)last month is like thousands of other receptions every year in Washington.

    But the formation of the ATAF, which highlights an Islamic identity that makes some secular Turks uneasy, comes as Turks are playing catch-up in the Washington influence game.

    They especially want to counter the influence of Armenian-Americans, whose No. 1 issue in Washington for decades has been a United States declaration that the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey from 1915 to 1923 were genocide.

    Turkey denies the charge, and disputes what Rutgers University genocide expert Alex Hinton says is a consensus of historians.

    When the latest genocide affirmation resolution passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee by a razor-thin 23-22 margin in March, Turkey briefly recalled its ambassador, and congressional opponents warned that full passage in Congress would damage relations with an important ally.

    Co-sponsors of the measure — including the entire New Jersey delegation except Pascrell — do not share that fear.

    “It should not injure a relationship built on many other things,” said Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., who added that his attendance at the ATAF gala was not a sign he was changing his support for the genocide resolution.

    Until recently, Turkey argued its case in Washington primarily through influential former members of Congress who registered with the Justice Department as foreign agents of its government.

    Over the past decade, a few hundred congressional staffers and a handful of members of Congress also took trips funded by Turkish-American groups to Ankara, Istanbul and other cities.

    Starting in 2007, however, the first of two federal political action committees registered, and the principal leader for one of the PACs also registered as a federal lobbyist in 2008.

    By contrast, Armenian groups had spent $2.6 million from 1999 through 2007 on lobbying, and made $569,000 in contributions through federal PACs.

    “We’re historically disorganized,” said Levent Koc, chief executive of the Interfaith Dialog Center founded in Carlstadt and now based in Newark, who invited many of the New Jersey officials to the reception. “We decided to come together for better coordination and communication.”

    The ATAF is an umbrella for 150 separate local organizations around the country, including Koc’s center, the Turkish Cultural Center in Ridgefield and the Pioneer Academy of Science in Clifton.

    All are affiliated with Turkish Muslim scholar Fethullah Gulen, Koc said. Gulen, who now lives in Pennsylvania, advocates a conservative brand of Islam that condemns terrorism and advocates more interfaith cooperation and science education. He was acquitted in absentia of what supporters called politically motivated charges in Turkey of advocating an Islamic state.

    Koc said the new group’s primary goal is to foster better understanding of Turkic people — a term that includes not only those from Turkey but also those from such countries as Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — and cooperation between Muslims and other faiths.

    It’s not connected to the Turkish government or Turkish politics, he said.

    But one person attending the reception, South Hackensack chemical importer Tarik Ok, said one reason the ATAF was forming now was, “The government suggested we all go under one roof.”

    The new group has the leader of a much older group with a similar name uneasy.

    Gunay Evinch, president of the 30-year-old Assembly of Turkish American Associations, said he has asked the newly formed Assembly of Turkic American Federations to change its name and make its ties to the Gulen movement clear.

    “I told them it’s unnecessarily confusing, and it would be better to define yourselves as who you are, a sect movement within Islam,” said Evinch, who has already received mail at his Washington headquarters intended for the other group.

    Evinch said his group and the Turkish Coalition of America, which created a PAC in 2007 and registered to lobby in 2008, have worked hard to increase Turkish influence in Washington by getting American Turks to overcome a reluctance to make campaign contributions.

    “Turks did not [traditionally] reach into their pockets to give to campaigns, they thought it was corrupt,” he said. “The PAC educated people to understand that in the U.S. you can give to campaigns.”

    Evinch said a key difference between his ATAA and the new ATAF is that his group advocates only on issues important to Turks and Turkey, including the Armenian resolution and questions surrounding Cyprus.

    “We don’t advance the cause of Islam or a sect of Islam, and we don’t do interfaith dialogue based on Islam or any religion,” he said. “We also don’t import Turkish politics into our community.”

    Koc said that while it supports better understanding of Islam, his group is not limited to Muslims.

    “I cannot say we’re faith-based. Some scholars say this is a religiously motivated social movement. That doesn’t mean we are serving only Muslims or Turks. We serve all,” Koc said.

    He also disputed any religious motivation in seeking a change in Turkey’s government.

    “There’s a new generation in Turkey, and it’s more open. People opposed to this change are blaming religious people, but there are change supporters who are left wing and right wing, some of them are old socialists,” Koc said.

    “When they try to change the status quo, people who want the status quo blame Muslims. I don’t know why.”

    E-mail: jackson@northjersey.com