New English Review
13 September '11
http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_direct_link.cfm/blog_id/37822
Erdogan, the malignant Turk who reminds one most of Mussolini -- a Mussolini without the jutting jaw but with the same kind of populist appeal to the most debased sentiments --- and among Muslim Arabs, including those misleadingly described, in the West, as "secular" (they can't get away from the mental substrate to be found among those who grow up in societies suffused with Islam), the most debased of sentiments center always around Israel. That tiny land is seen as an outrage, contra-naturam, an offense against nature or, more exactly, Islam and Allah and Muslims, the "best of peoples," for Israel as an Infidel nation-state reverses the natural order of things, that is the takeover, of non-Muslim lands, by Muslims, and it is particularly galling that the Jews, despised always for their weakness (Christians always had a powerful Western Christendom in the background, possibly to be called on in time of need), should not have defeated much larger Arab Muslim armies, and done so repeatedly. And while the entire world should ultimately come under the domination of Islam, think of how maddening how wounding to the amour-propre of Arab Muslims and of those non-Arab Muslims who take Islam most to heart (and Erdogan is certainly one of those), the existence of Israel, its flourishing, must be.
So Erdgoan visits Egypt, where Turkish dynasties, beginning with the Mamluk takeover in 1517, ruled for centuries. Mehemet Ali himself, who essentially freed Egypt from Ottoman rule, and even took his army north, all the way through the Sinai, and Palestine, to the confines of Syria, battling the Ottomans. And he showers crowds with the easy and obvious coin of hatred, hatred for Israel, that is hatred for the Jews, when they are uppity enough to dare to think they have a right to an independent state, have a right to defend, as they see fit, that state, have a right even to such things as exploring for gas in their own territorial waters.
Erdogan can do nothing to solve Egypt's overpopulation problem. A country that might survive, just, if it had a population of 20 million, now has 80 million mostly wretched and underemployed souls, and within 20 years will have 120 million. What help, what solutions, can the likes of Erdogan bring? His own belief in the upward thrust of Turkey reminds one of the late Shah of Iran, who back in the late 1970s was vaingloriously predicting that Iran would soon become "the second industrial power of Asia." These assorted Ozymandiases, with their vivid Oriental imaginations, are comical.
And Erdogan thinks -- thinks! -- that Turkey is a model for the Arabs. But he fails to grasp the nature of his own, Turkish, reality. He is living, Turkey is living, on the results of what Ataturk wrought. Even those industrialists who are pious Muslims, and who have convinced themselves that Islam and "modernity," Islam and economic development, Islam and democracy, get along swimmingly, as "the example of Turkey proves," fail to understand that the example of Turkey proves no such thing. It is Kemalist Turkey, and not Turkey, that is not Erdogan's Turkey, that has created the political, economic, and intellectual conditions for development and progress. Erdogan has been undoing Kemalism and its systematic constraints on Islam. So far the effect of that undoing has been felt by individuals -- army officers, university rectors, journalists (in a society where media freedom is now considered to be less than in Iraq, less even than in Egypt), and others.
But Erdogan knows what ails the Arabs. It's Israel. It's the curse of Israel.
As all educated people know, in Russia, in the last decades of the 19th and first decades of the twentieth century, there flourished groups of black reactionaries who were known as the "chyornosotentsy" or "Black Hundreds." They found the source of Russia's woes in the Jews, as Hitler would later: "Die Juden Sind Unser Ungluck." They attacked, robbed, and killed Jews, in those pogroms that we all know about, everywhere in the Pale of Settlement.
Their slogan went as follows: бей жидов и спасай Россию!" That is, Beat The Jews, Save Russia.
It might as well be -- no, it is -- Erdogan's slogan. Beat the Jews, Save the Muslim lands!
There is no longer any reason to pretend that the Turkey that Ataturk created, the one that in an excess of gratitude to the Turks for providing 5,000 soldiers to the Korean conflict, led to the Dulles brothers allowing Turkey to be offered membershp in NATO. If NATO now has a mission, it is to protect its members from the forces, inside as well as outside of Western Europe, from the Camp of Islam, the forces of Islam. Erdogan has not only punished those in Turkey who would like to continue the Kemalist dispensation, in order to keep Islam constrained, but has gone on a veritable rampage against Israel, which is in every way more a natural and obvious candidate for NATO than Turkey. For Israel is not only an immutable part of the West, but the West would not exist, as it came to exist, had it not been for Israel. Morally, and geopolitically, the Western world cannot allow itself to abandon Israel, or even to continue the kind of appeasement of the Arabs, and of their Jihad against Israel -- whether it is the Slow Jihad of Fatah or the Fast Jihad of Hamas and Hezbollah -- for not only will Israel suffer, but the Western world itself, in the end possibly fatally.
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