More Fiddling As

On 15 June 2010, Mr. Thomas Friedman published a column in the New York Times titled “Letter From Istanbul.” Mr. Friedman is worried that we are “losing” Turkey. He places some of the blame on the Christians in the European Union, who apparently haven't made good on their promise to invite Turkey into their midst, after promising to do so, and on weak United States foreign policy. Tom Friedman should be smarter than this, but ever since his “The World is Flat” franchise began to fall flat, his judgment has seemed pretty poor. Let me get this straight, Tom. You went to a country that's actively building an alliance with the barbarians ruling Iran, Syria, and the Hezbollah organization. Turkey is a country led by a prime minister who sponsored a run against the Israeli blockade of Gaza, then stocked the lead vessel with radio coordinated thugs, ready to attack the Israeli borders with pipes and knives, then claim the Israelis brutalized them. Now, you ask this country's prime minister why he's so busy setting up a common command center with all these thugs and international criminals, and the answer is something to the effect that the EU has made it clear that it is for Christians, so Turkey is turning its attention elsewhere. Do you really believe anything that comes out of this guy's mouth, Mr. Friedman? What possible reason would an Islamist have for wanting to unite with a Europe that would not want in its midst an Islamist state? Mr. Friedman thinks that Turkey spent the last four years jumping through hoops, trying to qualify for EU membership. Gee, if Mr. Erdogan, the buddy of Iran and Syria, says so, it must be so, but let's try this. Erdogan spent the last four years purging the armed forces of professionals, replacing them with politically reliable Islamists, and otherwise solidifying his party's position.

Mr. Erdogan's Islamist party changed its name to “Justice and Development” after being disqualified from elections under Turkey's secular state laws. It was a name change, only – a sham. Now that he's in power, Mr. Erdogan has invited most of the Muslim world's monsters to Ankara to play, including the criminals running Iran and Sudan. No, Mr. Friedman, nothing the EU could have done would have changed what has happened in Turkey. Nothing. From the moment the Islamists took power, it was clear that Turkey was on the path to an Islamic state. That means that another state might be full of mass murderers, but it can be a good friend of Turkey, simply because it is “Islamic”. How charming. Mr. Friedman can now go back to his laptop, where he can prepare subsequent columns, lecturing us on how we in the West could have prevented Turkey from slipping away into the Islamic camp, if we had only offered it the right enticements, just as, throughout the ages we in the West failed to offer just the right “enticements” to the Nazis, Soviets, North Koreans, Palestinians, Iranians, Sudanese, Serbs, and the rest of the butchers whom we've let march through the world because we just didn't give them the one last thing that really would have made them behave. The West always screws up and sets off the bad guys who really wanted to be good.

The day the Justice and Development party won election, Turkey's path into the Islamist camp, with all the radicalism that entails, was set. Q.E.D. Now Mr. Friedman, having gotten a shot at putting Mr. Edrogan on the journalistic couch, can begin writing what western intellectuals write best – why the western democracies are responsible for everything bad that happens. If all international murderers will line up single file on the left, Security Council personnel will be passing out free passes to all who need them.

There's an interesting bit of irony at work in Turkey. Turkish authorities have blocked access to Google and Wikipedia, because it's possible to find information with these sites that is demeaning to Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish state. Such information is unlawful in Turkey. Simultaneously, the Turkish government is dissolving the secular state that Atatürk created. These information controls help isolate the population, facilitating the change. China has shared with Iran the software that it uses to isolate it's population from “harmful” Internet content. Perhaps Iran can now share this software with Turkey, to help preserve the facade of he modern Turkish state. Watch this space.