Why Austria is right about Blocking Turkey into EU

Turkey is awash with billions of dollars in what is known as "green money," apparently emanating from funds Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states withdrew from the United States after 9/11. U.S. policy-makers are concerned that this unaccountable cash is being laundered in Turkey, then used to finance businesses and generate new revenue streams for Islamofascist terrorism. At the very least, everything else on Erdogan's Islamist agenda is being lubricated by these resources.


Turkey's traditionally secular educational system is being steadily supplanted by madrassa-style "imam hattip" schools and other institutions where students are taught only the Koran and its interpretation according to the Islamofascists. The prime minister is himself an imam hattip school graduate and has championed lowering the age at which children can be subjected to their form of radical religious indoctrination from 12 years old to 4. And in 2005, experts expect 1,215,000 Turkish students to graduate from such schools.


The products of such an education are ill-equipped to do much besides implementing the Islamist program of Erdogan's AKP party. Tens of thousands of them are being given government jobs, replacing experienced, secular bureaucrats with ideologically reliable theo-apparatchiks. Four thousand others are packing Turkey's secular courts, transforming them into instruments of Shari'a religious law.


As elsewhere, religious intolerance is a hallmark of Erdogan's creeping Islamofascist puscht in Turkey. Roughly a third of the Turkish population is a minority known as Alevis. They observe a strain of the Muslim faith that retains some of the traditions of Turkey's ancient religions. Islamist Sunnis like Erdogan and his Saudi Wahhabi sponsors regard the Alevis as "apostates" and "hypocrites" and are subjecting them to increasing discrimination and intimidation. Other minorities, notably Turkey's Jews, know they are likely to be next in line for such treatment - a far cry from the tolerant traditions of the Ottoman era.


In the name of internationally mandated "reform" of Turkey's banking system, the government is seizing the assets and operations of banks run by businessmen associated with the political opposition. It has gone so far as to defy successive rulings by Turkey's supreme court disallowing one such expropriation. The AKP-dominated parliament has enacted legislation that allows even distant relatives of the owners to be prosecuted for alleged wrong-doing. Among the beneficiaries of such shakedowns have been so-called "Islamic banks" tied to Saudi Arabia, some of whose senior officers now hold top jobs in the Erdogan government.


Grabbing assets - or threatening to do so - has allowed the government effectively to take control of the Turkish media, as well. Consolidation of the industry in hands friendly to (or at least cowed by) the Islamists and self-censorship of reporters, lest they depart from the party line, have essentially denied prominent outlets to any contrary views. The risks of deviating is clear from the recently announced prosecution of Turkey's most acclaimed novelist, Orhan Parmuk, for "denigrating Turks and Turkey" by affirming in a Swiss publication allegations of past Turkish genocidal attacks on Kurds and Armenians.



This data point is perhaps an indicator of the Islamists' progress towards also transforming the traditional guarantors of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's legacy of a secular, pro-Western Muslim state: Turkey's armed forces. Matters have been made worse by Erdogan's skillful manipulation of popular interest in the European bid to keep the military from serving as a control rod in Turkish politics.



At the very least, over time, the cumulative effect of having the conscript-based Turkish army obliged to fill its ranks with products of an increasingly Islamist-dominated educational system cannot be positive for either the Europeans or the Free World beyond. Especially as Erdogan seeks to implement what has been dubbed a "zero-problem" policy towards neighboring Iran and Syria, the military's historical check on the gravitational pull towards Islamofascism is likely to recede.