Tag: ISIS

  • Tunisia’s Islamists set for big gains as world casts wary eye on landmark elections

    Tunisia’s Islamists set for big gains as world casts wary eye on landmark elections

    By Associated Press, Published: October 16

    TUNIS, Tunisia — As the land that launched the Arab Spring heads into historic elections next week, all eyes are on the long-repressed Islamists — and whether a big victory for them will irrevocably change this North African nation and inspire similar conservative movements around the region.

    Many fear that despite vows to uphold democracy, Tunisia’s Islamist Ennahda Party is bent on imposing a theocracy that would roll back hard-won secularism and women’s rights. Others see an opportunity to bring a moderate form of political Islam into the Arab world — one styled after the successful ruling party in thriving Turkey.

    via Tunisia’s Islamists set for big gains as world casts wary eye on landmark elections – The Washington Post.

  • Turkish President Gul Visits Troops on Iraq Border

    Turkish President Gul Visits Troops on Iraq Border

    Turkish President Abdullah Gul on Friday made a surprise visit to Turkey’s southeast to inspect troops on the Iraq border and boost the morale of soldiers.

    The president, accompanied by Chief of General Staff Gen. Necdet Ozel, visited troops in the Yuksekova district of the border city of Hakkari.

    Media reports, citing sources working for the office of the presidency, said the visit aimed to boost the morale of soldiers and that the president’s visit will not be limited to Yuksekova. He will reportedly visit troops in other areas along the border.

    Turkey has recently seen increased violence in the Southeast by the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The group, classified as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, has killed more than 50 people, including civilians, in the past couple of months.

    via Turkish President Gul Visits Troops on Iraq Border.

  • Turkey’s Prime Minister Hails Arab Democracy Efforts in Tunisia

    Turkey’s Prime Minister Hails Arab Democracy Efforts in Tunisia

    Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday that Islam and democracy are not contradictory.

    Tunisian Prime Minister Beji Caid Essebsi, right, shakes hands with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the prime minister office in Tunis, September 15, 2011.

    On the second leg of his North Africa tour, Erdogan spoke in Tunis where the “Arab Spring” protest movement began this year. After meeting with Tunisian prime minister Beji Caid Essebsi, Erdogan said “a Muslim can run a state very successfully.”

    Tunisians are set to vote on October 23 in assembly elections, the first since Tunisian protests helped depose longtime ruler Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

    In Turkey, Erdogan’s party has Islamist roots and its election success has served as a model for political groups spreading in the Arab world. Turkey is 99 percent Muslim.

    In comments to reporters, Erdogan also slammed Israel for saying Turkey is ready to deploy warships “at any time” if a feud with Israel over its blockade of Gaza escalates.

    Erdogan’s visit to Tunisia comes after a stop in Egypt.

    On Wednesday, Erdogan spoke with leaders of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood after receiving a hero’s welcome from Egyptians for his pro-Palestinian stand.

    Erdogan’s four-day diplomatic visit to North Africa is aimed at expanding Turkey’s growing influence in a region full of political upheaval.

    He goes next to Libya, and is expected to meet with the head of Libya’s National Transitional Council Friday.

    Some in Israel have expressed concern that Erdogan’s “Arab Spring” diplomatic tour will stoke anti-Israel tensions, as it comes while Turkish-Israeli relations have hit new lows.

    The two countries have been in a dispute over Turkey’s demand for an apology for Israel’s deadly raid on a Gaza-bound Turkish aid ship last year. Turkey recently expelled the Israeli ambassador and other top diplomats from Ankara, and has suspended military trade and cooperation with Israel.

    Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

    via Turkey’s Prime Minister Hails Arab Democracy Efforts in Tunisia | Middle East | English.

  • Turkey rising

    Turkey rising

    There is far more violence and killing in the Middle East, on the ground and from the air, within and across the borders of sovereign states, than even the most attentive news addict would learn from the Western media.

    Here’s a report on Turkey’s bombing of northern Iraq.

    The Iraqi government is apparently unmoved by the military attack on its territory – not moved to indignation anyway. Perhaps it silently welcomes the onslaught, since the victims are Kurds. Anyway, it has made no attempt to repel the bombers by force or even by diplomacy.

    The Western mass media, and the UN, and the government of the United States, also choose to ignore the continuing military operation.

    Western governments, media, and professional humanitarians do not find the Kurds interesting.

    Turkey justifies its attack by claiming to be retaliating for the killing of Turkish soldiers by Kurdish terrorists.

    Western governments, media, and professional humanitarians have not proclaimed that the retaliation is “disproportionate”.

    Iran too has recently bombed the Kurds in northern Iraq. No protests. Except by the Kurds, of course – but the powers that have signed on to a UN resolution to protect civilians are not listening to them.

    Since mid-July hundreds of Kurdish civilians in Iraq have fled bombings by the Iranian and Turkish armies, and set up refugee camps that are situated along the northern part of Iraqi Kurdistan (which borders Turkey and Iran). Up to a hundred Kurds have been killed in these bombings.

    A Turkish crackdown on Kurds is nothing new and is part of an ongoing war with the terrorist organization PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), that started in 1984. In this war approx. 40,000 people – most of them Kurds – died, another two million Kurds or so were displaced and more than 3000 Kurdish villages were destroyed.

    This time around however, the stakes are much higher since the Kurds have cast their eyes on the ‘Arab spring’, and feel that this might be the moment to establish an independent Kurdistan.

    The situation on the border of northern Iraq started to deteriorate when Iran began bombing Kurdish villages in July. …

    Turkish officials insist that the raids are not aimed at civilians but are meant to destroy the PKK’s infrastructure and to annihilate its fighters. …

    Aimed at or not, civilians have been killed.

    The recent Turkish military campaign triggered Iraqi Kurdish protests. They started when a family of seven was killed by a Turkish air strike near the town of Rania in Iraq, next to the Iranian border.

    But let none say that Prime Minister Erdogan, who ordered the Turkish air force to bomb the Kurds in northern Iraq, and under whom “Turkey is rapidly becoming less democratic and more Islamic”, is without a soft side to his nature. He has spoken out against the violence unleashed in Syria, on Kurds and others, by Assad:

    Erdogan … harshly criticized Bashar al-Assad’s bloody suppression of opposition protests in neighboring Syria, which has its own Kurdish minority. Tensions between Turkey and Syria boiled over this week, after Assad told Erdogan not to interfere in internal Syrian affairs. …

    Erdogan will not confine himself to minding Turkish affairs. He “aims to Islamize Turkish society and to limit political freedom” as the report rightly says, and he is off to a strong start in realizing his agenda not only in his own country but beyond:

    The Erdogan regime is supporting the Islamist agenda for the Middle East and working to become a regional superpower.

    The writing is on the wall but it is highly doubtful the West will notice it.

    Until it must, when the conflagration spreads – as it almost certainly will – too widely to be ignored any longer.

    Note: It should be remembered that Turkey is a member of NATO.

    via The Atheist Conservative: » Turkey rising.

  • Ataturk’s vision for Turkey slowly diminishing

    Ataturk’s vision for Turkey slowly diminishing

    By Austin Bay

    Even for a television talk show, it was an extraordinary claim.

    During his January 1, 2000, end-of-the-millennium broadcast, “McLaughlin Group” host John McLaughlin declared that his award for “the Person of the Full Millennium” went to the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a “Muslim visionary who … abolished the Ottoman sultanate … emancipated women … the only leader in history to successfully turn a Muslim nation into a Western parliamentary democracy and secular state.

    Quite a claim, but fact supports it. Ataturk’s pragmatic approach to modernizing a nation devastated by World War I and subsequent regional violence has real resonance for Arab Spring 2011’s continuing drama. Ataturk left Turkey with a democratic political structure, and Turkey’s democracy is his still evolving legacy. This “Turkish Model” influences contemporary Arab modernizers.

    However, last month’s resignation of Turkey’s most senior military officers is indicative of Turkey’s domestic political struggles, as well as its internal battles over what Ataturk’s vision means in the 21st century. From the staunch Turkish secularist point of view, the resignations marked the bitter end of Ataturk’s separation of mosque and state and the stealthy return of Islamist tyranny.

    Ataturk used the Turkish military as an instrument for modernizing the nation; the Turkish military committed itself to protecting republican Turkey’s secular political system. The leaders of the Justice and Development Party (AKP, Turkey’s governing moderate Islamist political organization) claim the resignations demonstrate that they are solidifying civilian control over the military — that’s how democracies do it — and therefore forwarding Ataturk’s visionary goals.

    Princeton foreign affairs professor Sukru Hanioglu’s new book, “Ataturk: An Intellectual Biography” (Princeton University Press, 2011), provides clarifying insight in this unsettled moment.

    Hanioglu explores the ideas that stimulated Ataturk’s mind and political imagination and influenced the modernization program he pursued in Turkey after 1923.

    Hanioglu’s Ataturk is not a “sagelike dispenser of wisdom” (the Ataturk cult-of-personality narrative) but a very “down-to-earth leader who strove to realize a vision not depending on any one ideology but by utilizing a range of sources.”

    Ataturk’s hometown, Salonika (Greek Thessalonica), was a cultural amalgam — a seaport with Greek, Slavic, Turkish and Jewish communities mixing and clashing. The city was as eclectic as Ataturk’s intellectual influences, which included H.G. Wells, Thomas Henry Huzley and Gustave Le Bon. Ataturk blended diverse and often contradictory influences; Hanioglu notes that Ataturk was influenced by both authoritarian doctrines and Enlightenment liberalism. The political expression of this eclecticism — at times utilitarian, at times expedient — was a “nationalism sanctified by science.”

    Ataturk built on the work of 19th-century Ottoman Empire modernizers who “embraced a modernity within the parameters of an international civilization.” Hanioglu argues that Ataturk’s philosophical eclecticism and his pursuit of goals advocated by previous Turkish modernizers in no way diminishes Ataturk’s political achievement. Ataturk’s creative genius was creative, transformative leadership.

    Yet, even Ataturk never fully bridged the “tension between the traditional and the modern” that was evident in the late 19th century Ottoman Empire. The AKP’s scrap with the Turkish military reflects this tension. (At one point, Hanioglu notes that Ataturk believed “the crude intervention of the military in politics” would ultimately harm the military as an institution.)

    Arguably, the AKP itself — if we can take their leaders at their word — is an attempt to further the process of harmonizing Turkish Muslim social values and secular electoral politics. Mob confrontations between liberalizers and Muslim Brotherhood extremists in Cairo’s Tahrir Square are an anarchic expression of this tension in the Arab Muslim context. Libya’s chaotic civil war takes the tension further into the abyss of violence and uncertainty.

    These current conflicts attest to the continuing value of Ataturk’s Turkish achievement.

    Austin Bay is a syndicated columnist.

    via Ataturk’s vision for Turkey slowly diminishing | Sun Journal.

  • Islam Rising? Turkey’s Ruling Party Wins Election

    Islam Rising? Turkey’s Ruling Party Wins Election

    ISTANBUL, Turkey — Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is considered the new strong man in the Middle East and the most powerful leader in the Muslim world.

    After winning Turkey’s national elections for the third time since 2002, Erdogan is also the man the U.S. and Israel will have to contend with for at least the next four years.

    On Sunday, his Justice and Development Party (AKP) party won 50 percent of the vote and 325 seats in Turkey’s parliament.

    While the election left the party with a big majority, it didn’t give them the two-thirds majority needed to independently rewrite the country’s constitution — their main goal.

    Many feared if that if the AKP won enough seats in parliament, they’d re-write the constitution and institute Sharia law.

    Still, the results do accelerate the nation’s growing influence in the region. With Turkey literally straddling Europe and Asia, the Turks see themselves as a nation of bridges.

    The government is also building political bridges in the Muslim world, positioning itself to fill a power void left by declining U.S. influence in the Middle East.

    “Believe me, Sarajevo won today as much as Istanbul,” Erdogan said following Sunday’s victory. “Beirut won as much as Izmir. Damascus won as much as Ankara, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, (and) the West Bank. Jerusalem won as much as Diyarbakir.”

    The government insists its agenda is to implement Western-style democracy, but some see a number of warning signs behind that claim.

    More journalists are in jail in Turkey than most any other nation, and the government plans to restrict Internet use in August.

    Another concern — the AKP and Ergogan are closely linked to the Fetullah Gülen movement, whose agenda is to achieve world domination through Islam.

    Finally, Middle East expert Daniel Pipes warned Sunday’s election might be the last fair and free ones in Turkey.

    via Islam Rising? Turkey’s Ruling Party Wins Election – Inside Israel – CBN News – Christian News 24-7 – CBN.com.