The
Few Brave Men of Turkey
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This summer, a former al-Qaeda offspring metamorphosed into a regular
army and captured large swathes of land in Iraq and Syria. It first flagged
itself as the Islamic Army of Iraq and the Levant [ISIL], then reflagged
itself simply as the Islamic State [IS]. It declared the Islamic
caliphate in the lands it captured and has since killed tens of thousands
of "infidels," including, primarily, Shia Muslims. It has
beheaded the Western captives it held, declaring them casualties in its
jihad against the Christian world. Its methods of imposing Salafism were
denounced as "too extreme" even by al-Qaeda.
Against this backdrop, a recent survey by the prominent Turkish
pollsters Metropoll found that 84% of the Turks think that ISIL (or IS)
"is not acting on religious motives." Almost a third of the
Turks think that the Islamists, with whom they now share a 900-mile
border, do not pose a security threat to their country, although ISIL in
June attacked the Turkish consulate in Mosul, Iraq's second biggest city,
and took hostage 46 Turks, including the consul general – only to release
them recently in exchange of an unknown number of imprisoned militants.
There is a tricky finding in the same survey. Metropoll found out that
"only a mere five percent of Turks say they feel sympathetic to
ISIL." The Turks (and the world) should be happy that only a
marginal fraction of their countrymen feel sympathetic to a group that
kills in the name of a specific interpretation of Islam. What is five
percent, after all? Sadly, that is not the case.
If a mere 5% of the Turks feel sympathetic to ISIL, it means there are
nearly four million souls residing in Turkey who feel sympathetic to
jihadists. And that is too many. If 10% of ISIL sympathizers in Turkey
decided to join the jihad, that would mean 400,000 new jihadists willing
to fight across the border in Iraq and Syria, or inside Turkey if they
think Ankara allied with the West against their Salafist comrades.
Metropoll's survey has revealed, once again, that Turkey is fertile
ground for Islamic radicalism.
That is hardly any surprise. Earlier this year, a study by the Anti-Defamation League
found 69% of the Turks to be anti-Semitic as opposed to 56% in Iran. More
recently, Gonzo Insight, a Turkish research company, found that 27,309
Turks had tweeted 30,926 contents explicitly supporting "Hitler's
Holocaust of Jews." Not just ordinary Turks, but apparently more
important ones. Samil Tayyar, for instance, a member of parliament from
the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) tweeted, addressing
"Jews," that "may you never be deprived of a Hitler!"
Tayyar has never been taken to the disciplinary board of the AKP party,
which has governed Turkey since 2002.
In another revealing example, Ali Ihsan Goker, head of the physics
department at the Bilecik University, challenged Louis Fishman, an
assistant professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York:
"Treblinka will be ready soon. Constructing the railway to transport
jews at the moment," the Turkish professor wrote on Twitter.
(Treblinka was a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland, established
in the summer of 1942 as part of Operation Reinhard. Under this plan, the
Nazis sought to murder all the Jews living in the area of Poland known as
the "General Government".)
Later the same day Goker also tweeted, "if I was PM I would round
up the stranded Israelis here and send to deportation camp at once."
The Turkish professor proposed to revive the death camps of the
Holocaust era because Fishman had written in Haaretz,
"However, it seems safe to say that in the wake of the current
atmosphere of blatant anti-Semitism, more Jewish families [in Turkey]
will be convinced that the time has come to leave, a decision already
made by many of the Jewish members over the last decade. If they stay,
they are choosing to survive within their own psychological and physical
bubble, or to carry on by ignoring the fact that many of their
compatriots see them as the enemy." (July 23, 2014)
What happens if a university professor in a sane country in the year
2014 proposes to rebuild concentration camps to kill "all the
Jews?" Indictment for hate speech? Termination of academic contract?
Both? In Turkey, the man was awarded a fund to sponsor his research. The
sponsorship came, a month after his proposal to rebuild the death camps
for Jews, from Turkey's state scientific research institute.
But Aykan Erdemir, an opposition member of parliament from the social
democrat Republican People's Party, wrote last week: "The fact that
there is no sanctioning against anti-Semitic [behavior] reveals the
mentality that governs."
He is right. And brave, too. It is not easy to fight anti-Semitism in
a country where there are 400,000 potential jihadists and anti-Semitism
is an award-winning virtue.
Another brave group of men is from the Istanbul branch of the Human
Rights Association. On Sept. 16, they presented a thick dossier to the
ministries of justice and interior, demanding that "the rising
anti-Semitism in Turkey be thoroughly investigated."
In reality, the MP Erdemir and the Human Rights Association are just
too naïve. Erdemir, with his case, will most probably cost, not add,
votes to his party. And the human rights activists, instead of finding
anti-Semitism investigated, may in the end find themselves investigated.
Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is a Turkish columnist for the daily
Hürriyet and a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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