In the name of Islam: a liberal appeal
Mar 30th, 2009 by MESH
From Soner Cagaptay
A trap awaits Turkey analysts seeking to explain rising anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in Turkey. There is a tendency to look into the historic roots of both phenomena and to explain both as hardwired in the Turkish polity, not as products of current politics.
To be sure, there are anti-Western instincts in Turkish nationalism, not unlike most post-Ottoman nationalisms. Turkey has had past episodes of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism as well. However, these phenomena were never grassroots movements and never politically sanctioned. Moreover, the Turks have historically supported strong ties with the United States. They also did not oppose intimate ties with Israel, which Turkey recognized in 1949.
Today, though, this is no longer the case, as the Turks view the United States as the country’s chief enemy. A recent poll shows that 44 percent of the Turks consider the United States the biggest threat to Turkey. And the number of people in the country who have anti-Semitic views is rising dramatically. In 2004, 49 percent of the Turks said they did not want a Jewish neighbor; in 2009, this number climbed to 76 percent.
So why are the Turks suddenly spiteful towards the United States and Israel, Americans and Jews? Anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are surging in Turkey because the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government sanctions both phenomena. This combination of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism is not a coincidence. The Islamist thinking is as follows: The Jews are evil, they run America, and therefore America is evil.
Take, for instance, the billboards that Istanbul’s AKP government put up during the Gaza war in Istanbul’s mixed Muslim-Jewish neighborhoods. These oversized billboards depicted a burnt-out child’s sneaker, with a sign saying “humanity is slaughtered in Palestine” over it. Under the sneaker, in large print, the billboard quoted the Old Testament commandment “Thou shall not kill” and added “You cannot be the Children of Moses.” What on earth does the Gaza war have to do with Jewish law? Is it an accident that a day after these billboards appeared in Istanbul’s cosmopolitan Nisantasi neighborhood, vigilantes distributed fliers calling for a boycott of Jewish businesses? Or that the next day, Jewish businesses in the neighborhood took down their names?
The outrage sparked by the Gaza war has failed to subside. In early February, the AKP government of Istanbul opened a cartoon exhibit in the city’s downtown Taksim Square metro station―Taksim Square is to Istanbul what Times Square is to New York City―which included many cartons depicting bloodthirsty Israelis killing Palestinians with American help, such as one in which a satanic-looking Israeli soldier with white pupils washes the blood on his hands of a faucet, labeled the United States. Each month, millions of Turks pass through the Taksim metro station—a government-owned public service.
Unsurprisingly, such black propaganda is not without consequences. A sage once told me that a society is truly anti-Semitic when teachers say bad things about Jews in school. Last month, a group of Turkish schoolteachers distributed sweets in the Central Anatolian town of Kayseri to commemorate Hitler’s blessed memory. During the Gaza war, Israelis, including Israeli teenagers who were visiting Turkey to play volleyball, were attacked. Shops plastered signs on their windows, saying that “Americans and Israelis may not enter.” What is more, Turkish Jews felt physically threatened for the first time since they found refuge in the bosom of the Ottoman Empire.
All this has nothing to do with whatever historic causes one might seek for such developments. Popular anti-Semitism is driven in Turkey by the acts of the AKP government—and that is a fact. Analysts should follow Turkey’s current politics closely in explaining the Turks’ shifting political attitudes. If we fail to point out how anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are spiked up by the AKP, once such sentiments lay roots, we will have no other explanation but to say that anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are intrinsic to Turkish society and, god forbid, the Turks’ religion, Islam.
I call on fellow liberals to think twice before they bypass Turkey’s political transformation and turn to historicizing anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in Turkey. The surge of these sentiments since 2002 demonstrates that, when in power, Islamists can corrupt even the most liberal of the Muslim societies. The singular example of a Muslim society that is friendly towards Jews and Americans risks disappearing in front of our eyes if we do not point out the political nature of Turkey’s current transformation.
If we ignore the political forces changing Turkey today, others will blame the change on the Turks and Islam tomorrow.
MESH Pointer: See the earlier thread, Behind the blow-out at Davos.
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2 Responses to “In the name of Islam: a liberal appeal”
Soner Cagaptay warns us that “the surge of these [anti-American and anti-Semitic] sentiments [in Turkey] since 2002 demonstrates that, when in power, Islamists can corrupt even the most liberal of the Muslim societies. The singular example of a Muslim society that is friendly towards Jews and Americans risks disappearing in front of our eyes if we do not point out the political nature of Turkey’s current transformation. If we ignore the political forces changing Turkey today, others will blame the change on the Turks and Islam tomorrow.” The fault, according to Cagaptay, lies with the “Islamist” AKP regime, which encourages anti-Semitic and anti-American sentiments through various activities.
Let us accept Cagaptay’s account of the changes in Turkey as resulting from the influence of the government. But why should a religiously-oriented party exhibit anti-Semitism? Can it really have nothing to do with the party’s raison d’etre, the advancement of Islam? Two elements deeply embedded in Islam are anti-Semitism and the insistence on domination. This is hardly news to any student of Friday sermons or Islamist pronouncements. The former characteristic is documented exhaustively in Andrew Bostom’s The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism; the latter in Bat Ye’or’s Islam and Dhimmitude and Bostom’s The Legacy of Jihad.
It should thus hardly come as a surprise that a turn toward Islam-oriented politics would lead to increased anti-Semitism and antipathy for a non-Muslim power. Cagaptay fears that we might blame, “god forbid, the Turks’ religion, Islam.” As one of the principles of Islam is that any criticism of Islam must be answered by summary execution, this is probably good advice. Even in Canada (unlike in the Netherlands), where one is not likely to be executed for criticism of Islam, such criticism easily leads to prosecution by the so-called Human Rights Commissions, and, failing that, certain accusations of “Islamophobia” and racism. Islamism in the East and political correctness in the West discourage criticism of Islam. And yet, there is a mysterious correlation between Islam and Islamism. It may be worth closer examination.
Philip Carl Salzman is a member of MESH.
During a recent visit to Istanbul, I learned first-hand the results of the political manipulation of anti-Semitism that Soner Cagaptay describes in his post. The outpourings of hatred against Israel and, especially at the street level, also against Jews during the time of the Gaza fighting rattled the nerves of Turkey’s Jews, many of whom had never before encountered popular anti-Semitism of this kind and were stunned by its ferocity.
To be sure, Turkey was hardly alone in witnessing large demonstrations of public anger leveled against Israel and those who allegedly comprise its supporting “lobbies.” Manifestations of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic animosity took place on the streets of cities throughout Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Few, if any, however, surpassed the size, determination, and passion of anti-Jewish hostility on display in Istanbul and some of Turkey’s other towns.
Moreover, these raw feelings were not confined only to organized street demonstrations but spilled over into the country’s schools, shops, work-places, newspapers and television stations, etc. In short, while Turkey was only one player in a newly globalized movement of extreme hostility focused on Israel and the Jews, the country stood out for what appeared to be an effort to stimulate and spread such aggressive feelings. None of Turkey’s Jews was physically assaulted, and its major institutions, which are heavily secured, received no damage. But many of the community’s members, finding themselves on the receiving end of such an angry onslaught, were made to feel not just uneasy but unwanted.
In seeking to account for this disturbing state of affairs, Soner Cagaptay looks away from history and towards politics. Given recent political developments in the country, he is not wrong to do so, although a truly comprehensive explanation would have to look back in time and acknowledge periods of relatively good relations between Jews and Muslims but also some extremely tense and even destructive times. There were periods when Jews suffered as the result of discriminatory government policies against minorities in general, such as the levying of special taxes on non-Muslim Turkish nationals (1942), which proved to be ruinous for many Jews. At other times, Jews have been specifically targeted as such: in earlier decades there were anti-Jewish riots in some parts of the country; and recent years have seen lethal terrorist assaults against Turkish synagogues and assassination attempts against prominent figures in the Jewish community. Despite the often heralded “tolerance” that Ottoman rulers extended to the Jews, all has not been entirely just and amicable over the generations. Had it been so, the size of Turkey’s Jewish population―once numbering perhaps 90,000 souls―would be a lot larger than the roughly 20,000 it is today.
Nevertheless, Cagaptay is correct to put the blame for the worst of today’s anti-Semitic developments on the country’s political leadership headed by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s present prime minister, whose penchant for using incendiary language may have been a prod to the open release of anti-Jewish sentiments within nationalist and Islamist segments of Turkish society. When a country’s prime minister charges that “Israel’s barbarity is beyond cruelty,” that “Israel has become a country of bandits” and is guilty of “crimes against humanity,” that “Israelis” (or Jews) “know very well how to kill,” and that “sooner or later, Allah will punish [them],” his inflammatory messages will not be lost on his supporters, numbers of whom are likely to take their cue from their nation’s leader and act accordingly. Add to these pernicious charges the irresponsible accusation that Jews “control the media” and “disseminate false reports on what is happening,” and the picture, already ugly, becomes worse still.
Much of the overwrought rhetoric cited above appeared in the run-up to Turkey’s municipal elections, which have just concluded. Some commentators interpret the Turkish prime minister’s harsh words as intentionally aimed to improve his party’s chances with the electorate. (If so, the tactic seems to have failed, for the AKP fared less well in this election than in the previous one.) Others see Erdoğan’s rough treatment of Israel’s Shimon Peres at Davos as exposing more visceral, less politically calculated impulses.
Whatever his motives, Erdoğan’s encouragement of popular anti-Semitism can only damage his country internally and make it appear to be an unreliable actor on the international stage. He himself seems to have recognized as much when he belatedly issued a much-publicized statement declaring, “Those who think to act against Jews will have to face me.” This stern warning was highlighted in some of the mass media, which also registered a cautionary note about the damaging effects of popular anti-Semitism, noting that it is bad for the country and should be restrained.
No one knows for sure what lies ahead, but a couple of conclusions might be drawn from these unnerving events. One has long been known: anti-Semitism is nothing for people in positions of leadership to fool around with, for when released into society, it will have predictably toxic effects. Those on the receiving end of such venom will suffer, but in different ways, so, too, will those who use anti-Semitism for their own ends.
Pursuing a politics of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement may elevate Turkey’s Islamist image in Iran and win Erdoğan favor in parts of the Arab world. But if Turkey wishes to be seen as a responsible partner among Western nations, it would do well to curb populist appeals that encourage the growth of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism within the public sphere. To do otherwise, as Soner Cagaptay persuasively argues, is to take the country down a path that it does not want to follow.
Alvin H. Rosenfeld is professor of Jewish studies and English at Indiana University.