The Tesettür-type veil is a key code symbol of Islamists in Turkey. Once Shar’ia is implemented the make-up, lipstick and smile will be outlawed.
ISN Security Watch – Ankara protest highlight’s Turkey’s ‘culture war’ — To be a radical Islamist in Turkey is to risk imprisonment. But lying about it is just peachy if you can get away with it until you eliminate all the secular institutions. It’s going on now.
But many Turks remain convinced Erdogan’s pro-market, pro-Western make-over masks an Islamist core. These critics are quick to point out that Erdogan is a man who once said, “Thank God, I’m for Shar’ia [Islamic law].” Recent tax hikes on alcohol, efforts to alter the country’s secular educational system, and a failed attempt to criminalize adultery provide additional evidence that Erdogan still harbors a conservative Islamist agenda, and is just waiting until the pillars of Turkey’s secularist institutions are sufficiently undermined before he moves to implement it, critics say.
“If this man becomes president, Turkey will go back to the Middle Ages”, says retired civil servant Bahriye Yesilfidan, 49. “He isn’t sincere about democracy. He just wants to turn Turkey into Iran, or Saudi Arabia.”
President Sezer thinks the same. “Foreign forces,” he said during an 13 April speech, are collaborating with some Turks “to introduce a moderate Islamic regime under the name of democracy. This is a fundamentalist model.”
The irony to all this is that unless Turkey backs off on its harsh treatment of Islamists it will never get into the EU. Thus the situation for a continued secular Turkey is not good.
What does this have to do with Earth Day? Where are the Earth Day post? What a coincidence it’s Vladimir Lenin birthday too. How on Earth Day did that happen?
Could someone pass the bacon?
And more importantly, are the Muslims getting their fashion advice from the Koreans and Chinese these days? Stripes and plaid?
Cripes!
This is another area where the neo-cons showed themselves to be such idiots about the Middle East.
They actually believed that turning Iraq into a shining beacon of Jeffersonian democracy would be a cakewalk: invade; let the private sector come in; hold elections; and leave by late summer.
Then sit back and watch the reverse domino effect happen as the other countries in the region turn democratic one after another out of deep admiration for Americas freedom and envy of the Iraqis.
If the neo-cons pulled their heads out and looked around, they’d have known that diplomacy and development money would have been far better spent peacefully in Muslim countries that were already democratic or tending that way — like Turkey, Kuwait, Pakistan, Lebanon, Indonesia and — yes — even Iran.
From the linked article:
“You don’t win elections by frightening people,” daily Radikal editor Ismet
Berkan wrote in a commentary published 14 April
HeeHee
5,
But you DO scare off those that will vote AGAINST you.
Unfortunately, Turkey has never been a “secular” society nor a democracy. The last thing they are is tolerant, especially to their minorities. They take Christian monuments and remove their religious artifacts and hang pictures of Atatürk on them; or blow them up for “highways.”
The Muslim minorities (such as the Kurds) that were used to insight violence against the Christian minorities are being persecuted.
They threaten harm to the United States troops if the U.S. recognizes the free-determination of the Kurds in northern Iraq or the wrong doings of its past governments.
They prevented the exposition of the 15th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide because it contained one line about the Armenian Genocide that was perpetrated by the Ottoman Turkish government (not even the current government).
These are the friends of the United States. No U.S. political party (left or right) has these right.
Frankly, I think that “human rights” with respect to Turkey’s EU admissions is a smoke screen. It really comes down to Cyprus and allowing mutual cooperation. If Turkey were to settle with Cyprus, I’d bet they have enough money to grease the wheels and get into the EU despite being a Muslim country and despite the claim that they are not European.
Europe has caused this by refusing Turkey entry, but not rejecting them outright., They keep forcing changes on Turkey that are an insult to the country. Turkey should just drop the EU, and go for free trade with America and Israel and Britain instead.
“The Tesettür-type veil is a key code symbol of Islamists in Turkey. Once Shar’ia is implemented the make-up, lipstick and smile will be outlawed.”
And where did you get that conclusion? Where does it say smiling is against the Shari’a?
Did I forget to mention?
Islam = Religion of Peace.
Thank you.