Thursday, June 5, 2008

Turkey, the EU, the Secularists and the Islamists.

Today, Tayip Erdogan and his ruling AK party got a well deserved slap down from Turkey's Constitutional Court. The AKP had wanted to reverse a law that forbade women from wearing head scarves at university, a law that was a core component of the heritage left by modern Turkey's founding secularist father Kemal Ataturk. So far only the AKP's Bekir Bozdag has dared to protest saying " This is interfering with both democracy and parliament's legislative authority ". Although this protest will be echoed in the West, it will not help the AKP which may in fact well be banned for its creeping Islamisation program by a second ruling to be delivered this autumn. There are enough urban Turks who are justly proud of Ataturk's secularist legacy and they with the Armed Forces and the Judiciary will no doubt check the Islamists for a while.

But for how long for? That question brings us to the interesting dependence of Turkish Islamism on Turkish membership of the EU. Erdogan's AKP has boasted that democracy is the bus to Islam. It is a sort of one person, one vote, once only take on democracy. You have a democratic election, you vote in an Islamist party and, hey presto, the Islamists ban the democracy that got them in. If you have heaven's rule on earth, who needs democracy? This irony is a serious problem throughout the Islamic world; if they were allowed to hold truly democratic elections, most Muslim countries would, with Gulf money greasing the process, let the nutters in. Algeria held relatively free elections and the Islamists won. The Algerian secularists and Army saw what was next on the menu and promptly " annulled " the election results. Erdogan and the AKP, no fools they, realised that if Turkey is admitted into the EU, the EU would not tolerate the Turkish Armed Forces's " interference in the democratic process". This means that Turkey in Europe would be as Islamic as the AKP wants. With its Anatolian retrogrades it would be a majority, as it is now, able to democratically do whatever it wants in Turkey. All our women in burkhas? Sure! Sharia with some nice televised stonings? You got it! None of the numpties running Europe would object. How could they? It would have been after all the will of the Turkish people. More subtely, the Islamists might get Turkey into the EU, behave long enough to purge the secularists under Brussel's approving wing and then secede to set up the beloved Caliphate of old. Either way, the bus would have served its purpose.
So, in conclusion, for our's and Turkey's sake it is best that Turkey remain outside the EU. Outside, Turkey would remain safe under the undemocratic but benevolent tutelage of its secularists. Hey, in 50 years or so even the Anatolians might mellow out. Who knows?

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