Turkey’s Cautionary Tale

From Carolyn Glick’s website:

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Today’s Turkey is a cautionary tale for the West. But Western leaders are loath to consider its lessons.

Ever since Turkey’s Islamist Justice and Development AKP party under Recip Tayip Erdogan won the November 2002 elections, Western officials have upheld the AKP, Erdogan and his colleagues as proof that political Islam is consonant with democratic values. During Erdogan’s June 2005 visit to the White House, for instance, then-president George W. Bush praised Turkish democracy as “an important example for the people in the broader Middle East.”
Unfortunately, nine years into the AKP’s “democratic” regime it is clear that Erdogan and his colleagues’ embrace of the language and tools of democracy was a mile wide and an inch thick. They used democracy to gain power. Now that they have power, they are systematically destroying freedom in their country.
Turkey ranks 138th in the international media freedom group Reporters Sans Frontieres country index on press freedom. Sixty-eight journalists are languishing in Turkish jails for the crime of doing their job. The most recent round-up of reporters occurred in early March. And it is demonstrative of Turkey’s Islamist leaders’ exploitation of democratic freedoms in the service of their tyrannical ends.
h/t Fjordman

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

3 Replies to “Turkey’s Cautionary Tale”

  1. Turkey always was an experiment in trying to divorce Islam and politics, the way they are resorting to Sharia proves that you can’t divorce them, and that in the long run Islam will take over and destroy an secular government that lets it get established in it country.

  2. Turkey is truly a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and the most foolhardy thing to do would be to bring Turkey into the EU. Let’s face it, does Europe really need a larger Muslim headache? Just imagine a horde of folks with EU documents roving all about the borderless EU unchallenged. BTW does anyone think that Turkey could be used as a ‘back door’ to bring in questionable Turkish citizens given citizenship by corrupt officials on orders from the hard line Islamists?

  3. That is why Turkey is working so hard to gain membership in the EU, and why sensible people are working hard to keep them out.