Islamization and anti-Semitism make Turkey unfit for EU

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It’s a familiar pattern.

The citizens of a Middle Eastern state explode with frustration against their corrupt, repressive government. They gather for noisy, impassioned demonstrations in their capital city. The authorities react violently. Images of middle-aged women and wheelchair-bound individuals being tear-gassed, clubbed, and sprayed with water cannon race across social media platforms like wildfire. The protests then spread to other cities. The authorities step up their repression.

And then, inevitably, the country’s political leaders snarl that outside forces are stoking the discontent.

Newspapers and websites are suddenly full of lists of American neoconservatives, illustrated with lurid graphics that superimpose the logos of organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) over pictures of demonstrations. No one needs to say the word “Jew” in order to know who’s being referred to here.

So where is this happening? In Bahrain? Egypt? Tunisia?

Actually, no. What I’m describing is taking place in a non-Arab, inwardly Muslim but outwardly secular candidate nation for European Union (EU) membership.

Turkey.

The protests there began on May 31, when an initially small group of activists gathered in Istanbul to voice opposition to the redevelopment of the city’s Gezi Park. But the anger quickly escalated into an all-out confrontation with the Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Many Turks are fed up with the slow yet inexorable Islamization of their country, which Erdogan has begun.

Specifically, they are fed up with Erdogan’s promotion of conservative Islamic dress codes; with his demand that married couples have at least three children; with his prohibitions on the sale of alcohol and his opposition to abortion; with his scolding of couples who dare to smooch in public; and with his clampdown on freedom of speech and of the media, which has resulted in Turkey having more journalists in prison than any other country in the world. As the German magazine Der Spiegel pointed out recently, Turkey’s enthusiasm for incarcerating journalists — by some estimates, more than 60 are currently in jail — beats the records of even China and Iran.

As the Turkish demonstrations were reaching their height this month, the conservative newspaper Yeni Safak published an article which featured a “rogues gallery” of prominent American neoconservatives — Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and so forth — as well as a photo of a masked protestor flanked by the logos of the American Enterprise Institute think tank and AIPAC. The thrust of the article was clear: the protests are being actively encouraged by a group of Jews hell-bent on war with the Islamic world.

In tone and substance, it was thoroughly in line with other anti-Semitic screeds published by Yeni Safak — for example, a 2005 article that warned “Jewish paranoia” was at the root of the Middle East’s conflicts and predicted that this same paranoia would one day “destroy the Jews themselves.” …

There’s a widespread impression that the Turkey’s EU bid, launched as far back as 1999, is unlikely to result in full membership.But the fundamental question remains unresolved: Should Turkey be admitted to the EU?

Europe, that emerged after the Second World War cannot, by its very nature, tolerate the kind of government that has hospitalized more than 7,000 of its own citizens simply for exercising their right to peacefully protest.

And it certainly cannot tolerate the kind of anti-Semitic agitation that brings to mind the worst excesses of the 1930s.

An unabridged version of this column appears at TheJewishStar.com

Ben Cohen is Shillman Analyst for JNS.org. His writings on Jewish affairs and the Middle East have been published in Commentary, the NY Post, Ha’aretz, and other publications.