Demographic suicide: sanctioned by ... ideology

Mosques to become bigger part of German life – Chancellor Angela Merkel

Chancellor Angela Merkel has said Germans had for too long failed to grasp how immigration was changing their country and would have to get used to the sight of more mosques in their cities...

"Our country is going to carry on changing, and integration is also a task for the society taking up the immigrants... For years we’ve been deceiving ourselves about this. Mosques, for example, are going to be a more prominent part of our cities than they were before ...

... we now have to ask the question whether we should train imams here in our country who accept the principles of our state and legal order, or whether preachers should continue in the next few decades to come mostly from Turkey.

... mosques will be a more prominent part of our urban landscape than before..."

Lawrence Auster, Merkel tells Germans to accept the Islamization of Germany

The ironies are sickening. When Hitler came to power in 1933, there were 600,000, mostly highly assimilated, Jews in Germany, one percent of the population, but the Nazis viewed this one percent Jewish element as such a threat to the German nation that it had to be dispossessed and destroyed.

Now there are five million Muslims in Germany, six percent of the population of 81 million, the carriers of a way of life and a system of law totally incompatible with the West, and the German policy is to attack, not the Muslims, but a sole individual, Thilo Sarrazin, who warns that the Muslims cannot assimilate.

File under the ideology of: demography is unstoppable because we'd much rather be displaced than criticise immigrants; so shut up, we're all Kemalists now, just don't notice that Ataturk's suppression of Islam is too being defeated by demography. In other words, the brain-dead ideology of non-discriminatory immigration will be rescued by the brain-dead ideology of Kemalism? Yeah, sure. Lose, lose - the epitaph of ideology.

Fact and Fantasy: Turkey's Ergenekon Investigation

Between Fact and Fantasy: Turkey's Ergenekon Investigation (PDF)
By Gareth H. Jenkins
August 2009
Central Asia-Caucasus Institute
Silk Road Studies Program

Preface
by Svante E. Cornell
Research Director
Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program

Two years since its inception, the Ergenekon case has mushroomed beyond all expectations. In over a dozen predominantly pre-dawn raids, hundreds of suspects have been detained and/or questioned, and almost two hundred have been charged. Prosecutors have so far produced two indictments running a total of several thousand pages, and both a third and a fourth indictment are rumored to follow in coming months. But far from convincing its critics, the Ergenekon investigation has become ever more controversial. On the one hand, it has clearly uncovered information on wrongdoing on the part of some of the accused, and certainly on the prevalence of democratically questionable views among a section of the Turkish elite. But that said, the prosecution appears to have failed to live up to the high judicial standards that Turkey’s population were entitled to expect, leading to serious doubts concerning the investigation’s conduct, and ultimately, its motives.

Several factors have fed these concerns. Firstly, every pre-dawn raid appeared to net an increasingly unlikely batch of suspects. Gradually, a pattern emerged whereby prosecutors could show little or no evidence of any wrongdoing on the part of a substantial proportion of the suspects, many of whom appeared to have nothing in common except their political opposition to the AKP in particular and to Islamic conservatism in general. Secondly, as the investigation dragged on, concerns mounted regarding the length of time suspects spent in detention without being formally charged with any crime. Third, it gradually became clear that the case not only made claims that defied reason – such as implicating the supposed Ergenekon organization in every act of political violence in Turkey’s modern history – but also that the investigation included deep inconsistencies and internal contradictions. Fourth, the systematic leaking of evidence from the investigation to the pro-AKP press, which appeared to serve the purpose of intimidating the opposition, had by mid-2008 become a serious concern that compromised the integrity of the investigation. In sum, at the time of writing, the Ergenekon investigation has led to a climate of fear spreading in the ranks of the substantial section of the Turkish population that is opposed to the AKP government and to Islamic conservatism...

In view of the Ergenekon investigation’s massive impact on, and far-reaching implications for Turkey’s society and politics, it is all the more surprising that it has been subjected to so little analytical treatment. Indeed, studies of the case seldom go beyond newspaper-length articles that can at best highlight only limited aspects of the issue. This is in all likelihood a factor of the sensitive and infected nature of the case, as well as a result of the prohibitive size of the indictments, which has deterred even those scholars that do have a command of the Turkish language from acquiring a serious enough knowledge of the case to speak authoritatively on the subject.

Yet that is exactly what Gareth Jenkins has done. A long-time and respected observer of Turkish politics and society, Jenkins is ideally placed to understand, as well as explain, the intricacies of the Ergenekon investigation. His published works to date include monographs both on the Turkish military and on Turkish political Islam, both key ingredients in the maze of relationships that make up the context of the Ergenekon investigation. Not standing at that, Jenkins is among the few to have studied both indictments in the case in detail. It was therefore natural for the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program to commission Jenkins to conduct an in-depth analysis of the case. The result is the present paper, whose conclusions concerning the Ergenekon case should form essential reading for anyone seeking to understand contemporary Turkish politics. Those conclusions, however, are not encouraging. They suggest, in fact, that the prevailing Western view of the Ergenekon investigation as a step forward in Turkey’s democratization process is misplaced. Indeed, they also imply that the Western tacit encouragement of the investigation – though diminishing in emphasis as concerns have mounted even there – should be tempered with a much more acute concern for the investigation’s breaches of the rule of law and due process. Coupled with other developments of concern in Turkish affairs, not least the growing intimidation of independent media, the Ergenekon investigation is certainly worthy of much closer monitoring and analysis.

Executive Summary

... However, whether among those formally indicted as part of the Ergenekon investigation or those detained in the police raids and subsequently released without charge, many appear to have been guilty of nothing more than opposition to the AKP. In fact, there is no proof that the Ergenekon organization as described in the indictments exists or has ever existed. Indeed, the indictments are so full of contradictions, rumors, speculation, misinformation, illogicalities, absurdities and untruths that they are not even internally consistent or coherent...

However, some of the inconsistencies in the evidence presented to the court have led to accusations that the investigators have amended material to try to reinforce the charges against the defendants. Such accusations have been dismissed as unfounded by those involved in the investigation. But it is difficult to be as dismissive about the frequency with which material – particularly the transcripts of what appear to be recordings of telephone calls involving either the defendants or critics of the investigation – has appeared in pro-AKP media outlets and websites. In most cases, the victims of the apparent wiretaps have claimed that, although substantially accurate, the recordings and transcripts have been doctored to try to incriminate or discredit them. Government officials have dismissed suggestions that the transcripts are based on wiretaps by AKP sympathizers in the TNP, claiming that the equipment required to tap telephone calls is freely available on the black market. While that may be the case, it does not explain why it is only critics and opponents of the AKP who have had their telephones tapped and purported transcripts of their conversations published in the media. Nor does it explain the failure of the law enforcement authorities to investigate the apparent wiretaps. Under Turkish law, tapping a telephone without judicial approval is a crime, as is publishing the transcript of a wiretap.

The law enforcement authorities have also displayed a marked reluctance to pursue other accusations of wrongdoing against those associated with the AKP. Even after a German court ruled in September 2008 that close associates of leading members of the AKP in Turkey had been involved in the embezzlement of at least €16.9 million in donations to the Deniz Feneri e.V. Islamic charity. When members of the Doğan Group, Turkey’s largest media holding, reported details of the German court’s findings, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan instructed party supporters not to buy the group’s newspapers. On February 19, 2009, the tax authorities abruptly fined the Doğan Group TL 826 million (approximately $525 million) for alleged tax irregularities; charges which the group has resolutely denied. On April 13, 2009, one of the Doğan Group’s executives was detained overnight on suspicion of links to Ergenekon. On April 21, 2009, all of the companies in the Doğan Group were banned from bidding for state tenders for a period of one year.

This context has inevitably reinforced suspicions that the Ergenekon investigation cannot be explained solely by the investigators’ penchant for conspiracy theories. Significantly, despite its proponents’ claims that it represents a final reckoning with the some of the darker pages in recent Turkish history, the Ergenekon investigation has made little attempt to investigate the numerous well-documented accusations of abuses by Deep State operatives during its heyday in the 1990s. Indeed, the fear is that it represents a major step not – as its proponents maintain – towards the consolidation of pluralistic democracy in Turkey, but towards an authoritarian one-party state.

File under: This is complete nonsense, everybody knows that Islam is a religion of peace, case closed, nothing to see here, move along you Islamophobes.

Peter Hitchens: Turkey's growing repression

Peter Hitchens, Daily Mail:

A deeper change is under way. Deliberately unremarked by Western commentators for some years, Turkey has a fiercely Islamist Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Even now, Barack Obama, like George W. Bush before him, still bleats about how Turkey should be allowed to join the EU. And establishment commentators, encouraged by liberal Turkish intellectuals, absurdly continue to insist that Erdogan is in some way 'moderate'.

How odd. Back in the Nineties, this supposed moderate was railing that: 'The Muslim world is waiting for Turkey to rise up. We will rise up! With Allah's permission, the rebellion will start.' Erdogan was even imprisoned for quoting a fervent Islamist poem that declared: 'The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers...'

Now he is Prime Minister, he has not stopped thinking this. He simply knows better than to blurt it out.

Fashionable liberals in the West prefer to worry about the sinister Deep State, or Derin Devlet, which they claim really governs Turkey through a combination of military power and thuggery. And they have a point, though not as much of one as they used to.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the dictatorial-founder of modern Turkey, was almost as ruthless as Stalin, using military and police power in the Twenties to sweep away the fez, the turban and the veil, impose Western script and emancipate women. His inheritors are the Turkish army, who have emerged from their barracks four times since the Second World War to stage a putsch, hang a few politicians and drive the mullahs back into their mosques. Even further out of sight, and based on a Cold War organisation designed to perform acts of resistance in the event of a Soviet takeover, are profoundly secret networks of government agents committed to safeguard Ataturk's secular order.

They have made some unsavoury allies. Their existence gives credence to the genuinely creepy Ergenekon trials, aimed at a misty and possibly non-existent secret network of conspirators. The plotters are supposed to have sought to foment a fifth military coup. Personally, I think it a swirling tub of fantasy. In a brilliant demolition job (Ergenekon: Between Fact And Fiction: Turkey's Ergenekon Investigation), Turkish expert Gareth Jenkins has gone through more than 4,000 pages of indictments. And he accepts some wrongdoing has been uncovered.

But he concludes: 'The majority of the accused...appear to be guilty of nothing more than holding strong secularist and ultranationalist views.'

As the case wears on, Turkey slips decisively towards the more alarming end of the Islamic spectrum...

Foes of the Islamist government are arrested in surprise dawn raids. One of those scooped up in the arrest net was a 73-year-old woman, head of an educational charity, in the final stages of cancer. Many of the 200-odd accused have been held for years on vague charges. But their arrests fuel the government's claim that it is threatened by a vast alleged conspiracy to bring it down. This supposedly implicates everyone from army officers to journalists.

Above all, the charges are aimed at the army, the force that has kept the mullahs in check, and incidentally kept the women unveiled, in Turkey for the past 90 years.

The supposed plot has now become so enormous that a special courthouse has been built in the suburbs of Istanbul to handle the hearings.

Ilter Turan, Professor of Political Science at Bilgi University, Istanbul, says: 'Erdogan has authoritarian proclivities. He will take journalists to court if he does not like what they write about him. He scolds them for writing critical things. He asks editors, "Why don't you come and tell us about the problem in private before printing it?" He's a potential autocrat who likes to engage in acts of personal generosity, like an old-fashioned monarch.' ...

Under Turkey's proportional representation voting system, Erdogan can - and does - choose all his candidates. Critics and opponents can be easily got rid of. His power is about to increase if he wins a planned constitutional referendum set for September 12. If voters want increased 'human rights' they will also have to increase Erdogan's power to appoint judges and other key officials...

One such intellectual is so nervous about Erdogan's thin skin that he asks me not to name him. Some of his allegations against the government - of corruption and Judophobia - are so alarming that I can only hint at them here.

And he flatly contradicts Ahmet Altan about Ergenekon, saying: 'All the government is trying to do is to humiliate and intimidate the army, and make sure it is powerless to interfere in politics in future. This coup attempt is supposed to have been hatched years ago, and never took place - because it had no support in the army. Among all these dozens of people in the dock there is not one who has the power or the prestige to lead a putsch. They're just nonentities. The documents in the case come from nowhere. '

Even more emphatic is an impressive retired general, Haldun Solmazturk, a quiet professional who certainly can't be dismissed as a Westernised intellectual. He told me: 'Ergenekon is a tool to intimidate democratic opponents. I cannot call Erdogan a democratic leader. He has no interest at all in progressive Turkish democracy.

'They have shown no interest in finding a middle way. Ergenekon is a huge pot into which they throw anybody associated with any kind of opposition - the military, the universities, the media. There are people still in prison after three years, with no convictions. Many friends of mine have been arrested. I have no doubt that the majority of the suspects didn't commit any crime.'

Wasn't the general afraid? No. 'They can't intimidate everybody. I am not afraid of them. That is exactly what they want.'

But he is contemptuous of Western politicians who fail to see the direction Turkey is taking. 'I, and many like me, are angry with those in the United States and Europe who have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to attacks on democracy here.' ...

We in Western Europe have long assumed that the world that was created in 1945 would last for ever. But we have not paid enough attention to the rising new nations to our East, or to the new powers, fat with oil and gas, heedless of the old laws of liberty, which are gathering strength as America weakens.

Now we may have to pay attention. Among the bayonet-like minarets and helmet-like domes of ancient Istanbul an East wind is blowing, which I think will chill us all.

File under: Things David Cameron and Barack Obama will never know.

Cameron backs Turkey entry into EU

Journalist at end of video asks Cameron: is this consistent with his pledge to reduce immigration? He fobs it off. Barking mad. Another video here.

Islamism Series: Return of the Caliphate

This is the continuation of my regular feature 'Islamism Series'. At the bottom of this entry, you can click on the label of that name to read the prior entries.

So what exactly do they want, these radical Islamists, these terrorists? Why don't they just live their lives, and let us live ours? Why can't they just leave us alone? Those are just a few of the many natural, normal questions that the typical, uneducated American usually asks themselves about the radical Islamists. Why are the terrorists blowing up themselves and others, cutting people's heads off, and hating Israel, the United States, and western culture so much? The answer lies in understanding one simple concept: the Caliphate. Radical Islamists want to overthrow and eliminate western governments and culture, and reinstall the rule of the Caliph over first the traditional Muslim lands of the Middle East, and eventually the entire world. So what is this 'Caliphate', and what is a 'Caliph'? Let's take a quick trip back in history, to the late 7th century. Muhammad is the key personality in Islamic history, but we will save a more full treatment of him for another day. For now, let's just preface things with the fact that he was inspired to, founded, and spread the Muslim faith during his lifetime. In 632 A.D., at the age of 62, Muhammad died, and control of the Muslim world was debated and fought over. One group, who became known as the Sunni's, believed that Muhammad's successor should come in the way that tradition dictated at that time: through election, appointment, or consensus. Another group, who became known as the Shiite's, believed that the successors should come from Muhammad's family. He had a family member by the name of Ali, and Shiite supporters felt that Ali should be the successor, and then his descendants down through time. The Sunni's were by far the larger, more powerful group, and their idea of succession through election/appointment took control of the largest portion of the Muslim world under an appointed leader known as a 'Caliph'. The word finds its origins in the old Arabic words halifa (successor) and halafa, meaning 'to succeed'. The Muslim lands ruled over by the Caliph became known as a Caliphate, and this ruling authority spread the rule and control of the Muslims to dominate much of the known world including the entire Middle East, westward into Europe, and eastward into India. Then around the year 1300 A.D., the Ottoman Turks first came to power, and the Ottoman Empire spread the rule of the Caliphate further into the east and west. This rule of the Caliphate would basically remain continuous in one form or another for almost 1,300 years until World War I. For one of the few times, the Muslim world got involved in an outside dispute at that point, joining the war effort on the side of the Germans, the Axis power, ultimately the losing side. In the aftermath of World War I, secular (non-religious) government came to power in the Middle East, and the new leader of Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, abolished the Caliphate. For the first time in 13 centuries there was no central religious leadership in the Muslim world, and religious control fell to the local Imams and clerics in each country, where it remains today. So what do the radicals want? Ultimately what they want is the return of the Caliph to power over the Muslim world, and the expansion of control of the Caliphate to again occur throughout the Middle East, the hemisphere, and ultimately the entire world. That is their ultimate goal. Major obstacles to this goal include the presence and influence in the Middle East of the non-Islamic government and society in places like Israel, the financial and cultural influence of the west as led by the United States, and ideas and concepts like democracy and capitalism, which are wholly anti-Islamic in their view. Bottom line is, they demand that you and I, our government and societies sure, but we as individuals also, do one of three things. First, we can do what they really want: convert to Islam and be a good Muslim. If we don't want to do that, we can pay a tax to the Muslims, which they call the Jizya, and submit ourselves under their rule and 'protection' as second-class citizens. Failing conversion or submission, we can fight. That's it, there is no 'live and let live'. There is no 'you do your thing, I do my thing, and let's leave each other alone'. There is no peace treaty or deal to be cut. They want your conversion, submission, or physical destruction. Period. So now you know what the radical Islamists want: the return of the Caliphate, which includes your conversion or submission. Is that what you want? If not, you have only one choice, the same choice that faced our forefathers who fought the similar ideology of Nazism in World War II: fight them until their influence is completely destroyed. If we 'bring home the troops' from Iraq and Afghanistan, only one side will have quit the war, because they will continue it, that much is guaranteed. So we can have the fortitude to stay and fight them until their influence is eliminated, or we can continue to deal with their terrorism, attacks, destruction, and hatred throughout the world. Your choice.