Erdogan: Hamas is not a terrorist group
Recep Erdogan
Jeremy G. writes:
The Turkish prime minister Erdogan says that Hamas is not a terrorist group.
He is fully out of the closet as a jihadist. So much for moderate Islam in moderate Turkey. I wonder if the Europeans are still interested in bringing Turkey into the EU.
LA replies:
First, Erdogan himself has said that there is no such thing as moderate Islam and that the idea is an insult to Islam, since it implies that Islam must be moderated to be acceptable. But of course that hasn’t stopped Westerners from believing that Erdogan and his country represent moderate Islam.
Which brings us to the second point: one of the absolute proofs that a Muslim “moderate” is not a moderate is when he denies that Muslim terrorists are terrorists. I first realized this in 1994 when I watched a group of Muslim “moderates” including then Clinton intimate and now federal prisoner Abdulrahman Alamoudi on the Charlie Rose program, as recounted here. At the end of that article, I summarized what I had learned:
Thanks to the “moderates” themselves, we now understand some basic truths about Muslims, notwithstanding the contemporary notion that it is bigoted and racist to judge the Muslim community as a whole by the “tiny number” of extremists among them.
First, Islamic “moderates” deny that groups like Hamas are terrorists.
Second, Islamic “moderates” deny that preachers and mobs chanting “Kill the Jews, butcher the Christians” should be seen by Americans as a threat.
Third, Islamic “moderates” do not oppose the extremists, but show solidarity with their extremist fellow Muslims; make excuses for them; bitterly denounce American journalists for publicizing the existence of these groups; and, most significantly, describe any attempt by America to defend itself from Islamic terrorism as an expression of “anti-Muslim” bias.
In making this last argument, the “moderates” on the Charlie Rose panel didn’t seem to realize what they were revealing about themselves and the community they represent: If opposing Islamic terrorism is anti-Muslim, then Islam is indeed inseparable from terrorism. Alamoudi and his fellow “moderates” thus provided a more profound indictment of Islam than anything in Stephen Emerson’s chilling documentary about the extremists.
The “moderate” Muslims’ insistence that Americans must see nothing, say nothing and do nothing about Muslim terrorists in our midst should give us an idea of what life will be like in this country when Muslims achieve real political power here. Thanks to the Clintons in particular and the U.S. political establishment in general, and thanks most of all to America’s suicidal immigration policy of the last 35 years, America’s quickly growing population of Islamic “moderates” have already started to acquire such power.
Here is the article on Erdogan:
Erdogan: Hamas not a terrorist group
By JPOST.COM STAFF
04/06/2010
Turkish PM slams Israel for “slaughtering” 19-year-old on ship.
Hamas is not a terrorist organization, it is a resistance movement, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared on Friday at a rally in the Turkish province of Konya, according to local daily Hurriyet.
Erdogan reportedly said Hamas, the legitimate winner of the Palestinian elections, was fighting for its land. “You are always talking about democracy. You’ll never let Hamas rule. What kind of democracy is this?” he reportedly said, apparently addressing the Israeli leadership.
“I do not think that Hamas is a terrorist organization,” Erdogan was quoted as saying. “They are Palestinians in resistance, fighting for their own land.”
The Turkish leader went on to echo the Tuesday speech in which he called Israel’s boarding of the Gaza flotilla “a massacre.” In his address Friday, he said the Ten Commandments should have deterred the soldiers from killing the nine passengers who died on board the ship. “If you do not understand it in Turkish I will say it in English: You shall not kill,” he reportedly said—repeating the phrase in Hebrew.
“They even slaughtered 19-year-old Furkan. They did not even care for the babies in the cradle,” Erdogan was quoted as saying.
Nineteen-year-old Furkan Dogan was the youngest of the nine activists killed in the raid. His funeral Friday in his family’s hometown in Kayseri in central Turkey drew 10,000 people, some chanting, “Down with Israel.”
“Neither I nor his mother or brother have any grief,” his father, Ahmet Dogan, told the Associated Press as he arranged flowers on his son’s coffin before prayers started. “We believe he became a martyr and God accepts martyrs to paradise.”
In his speech, Erdogan also slammed Turkish media reports which were critical of his party’s support of Hamas, saying the “columnists” had a slanted view of the events.
Earlier on Friday, Turkey’s deputy prime minister said his country would work to reduce its military and economic cooperation with Israel. Existing contracts, he said, would be reviewed and reworked or canceled.
[end of JPost article]
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An Indian living in the West writes:
Turkey is a real tragedy. It was once the only country in the Islamic world that looked capable of moving beyond Islamic nutjobbery to something sane. I do believe that Attaturk really did try to modify Islam and “modernise” it. I also believe that he did genuinely admire the West and wanted to make Turkey into a modern nation. Given the sad spectacle of a once great power reduced to a little pawn in the great game between European powers in the 19th century, Attaturk loved his country far too much to watch it turn into the “sick man of Europe” and do nothing.
I think it is safe to say that Turkey is well and truly on the road to completely reversing Attaturk’s reforms and his vision. And since there is no scope for them to rise into another great empire again and they have no oil or natural resources, they will soon turn into a basket case of an economy which will no longer be able to seek Western help (particularly if they continue along this road).
At the risk of stating the obvious, there are modern Turks too. Many are frightened at the direction in which the country has been moving lately. But they are powerless. There are far too many poor religious Muslims in the countryside in democratic Turkey. Attaturk, for all his efforts, could not, unfortunately, create a modern nation. After his death, it was the military (which was also corrupt like everything else in Turkey) which ensured that Turkey remained an ally of the United States and prevented it from turning backwards. During this time, Turkey was run by a corrupt oligarchy that amassed enormous wealth through connections with the political leadership while the average Turk’s quality of life stagnated. Once “democracy” returned, it was a matter of time. The “Kemalists” are in big trouble in Turkey. Edrogan’s government is hounding them now.
The failure of modernisation in Turkey refutes the liberal fantasy that Muslim nations can be modernised. They can only be kept from turning backwards by military force as the examples of Attaturk and the Shah of Iran demonstrate. Sad.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 05, 2010 02:25 PM | Send