Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Insincere Turkey

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Insincere Turkey

    INSINCERE TURKEY

    Keghart.com
    Team Editorial,
    10 January 2012

    When one considers the long list of reasons why Arab countries cannot
    trust Turkey Recep Erdogan's vaulting ambition to lead the Arab World
    becomes a patently psychiatric case. The prime minister of Turkey
    and his voluble cohort Ahmet Davutoglu must be the only persons in
    the world who believe Arabs-states and people--will buy the "new,
    improved Turkey."

    Arab culture values and nurses long memory. While for Western countries
    the First World War is ancient history, for Arabs the Crusades are a
    relatively recent invasion-so is the brutal 500-year Turkish occupation
    of Arab countries. Arabs remember their martyrs who were slain by
    the Turks during WWI and in the decades prior to that war. It's for
    these reasons that few Arab states have had warm relations with the
    Republic of Turkey since the early '20s. That Turkey was among the
    first countries to recognize Israel, and provided that country with
    essential foods in the late '40s is another reason why most Arab states
    have maintained correct-rather than warm-relations with Ankara. This
    feeling is shared by Arab people whether they live in monarchies,
    military dictatorships or socialist republics.

    Many Arabs also feel insulted by Turkey's decision to replace the
    Arabic alphabet with Latin letters. The switch, by Ataturk, is
    particularly galling to Arabs because to this day Turkey and Turks
    boast that they had dispensed with the "primitive" Arabic alphabet and
    adopted the "progressive" Latin alphabet. In the same breath Turks
    also claim that they had banned the Arab fez because the headgear
    was a symbol of Arab "backwardness." It's no secret that Ataturk's
    decision was intended to symbolize Turkey veering its gaze toward
    the West and disassociate itself from the Arabs and the East. The
    culmination of this aspiration is the decades' long Turkish effort
    to join the European Union. Now, after playing the rejected lover to
    Europe, Turkey is turning its glance toward the Middle East. Arabs,
    of course, know about Turkey's failed tango with Europe. Any Arab
    with integrity would refuse to be Turkey's second-choice suitor.

    Arabs-a proud people despite their many collective failures in the
    20th century-believe that three non-Arab Middle Eastern states want
    to dominate the region. Turkey is one of the trio which includes Iran
    and Israel. When Arabs have fought Israel and Iran to make sure those
    two countries fail in their imperial designs, there's no reason why
    they would tolerate domination by Turkey-a country whose cruel yoke
    they bore for half a millennium.

    The 22 Arab states have a population of 355 million. Turkey has a
    population of 75 million. Egypt, with 82 million people, has a bigger
    population than Turkey. When 15 million Kurds-who have no love for
    Turkey-are discounted from that country's population Turkey becomes
    a madly ambitious frog which wants to swallow the cow.

    The choice of the "cow" descriptive is not accidental. Turkey considers
    the Arab countries fat cows ready to be milked. As well, to this day
    many Turks refer to Arabs as "hayvan" (animal) or "esshek" (ass).

    Soon after the termination of WWI, Sharif Hussein of Mecca (the leader
    of the Arab Revolt) and later his son, Emir Abdullah of Transjordan,
    tried to become leaders of the Arab world. They failed, just as
    Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser did in the '50s and the '60s.

    Arab states and people refuse to have a single leader representing them
    from the Atlantic to the Gulf. Why would they accept the leadership
    of a foreign and untrustworthy Turkey when they have refused single
    leadership by one of their own? Not just foreign leader but an
    irascible, double-talking braggart called Erdogan.

    Well-informed, sophisticated Arabs also know that Turkey still nurtures
    its racist Turanic Empire dream--one Turkic state from the Bosporus
    to Bhutan and the Chinese border. This imperial and exclusivist dream
    is a nightmare for any thinking Arab.

    Erdogan, Davutoglu and Gul ("The Three Tenors") are marketing Turkey
    as a progressive force and country which would help Arab achieve
    democracy, tolerance, equality... Yet one look at the Middle Eastern
    headlines reveals that Turkey continues to kill Kurds and mistreat
    millions of Turks, in addition to millions of Alevis, Armenians,
    Assyrians, Greeks, Jews, and Zazas. Even Turks-hounded by various
    unjust laws-are far from being free people.

    Arabs have yet another reason to suspect Turkey's goodwill. A glaring
    characteristic of Turkey's (Ottoman and current) strategy and policies
    in the past two centuries has been what North Americas Native Nations
    call "talking with a forked tongue." Double speak, in other words.

    Turkey says one thing and does another. Threatened by European powers,
    Ottoman Turkey promised reforms and a democratic constitution in the
    19th century. Instead, the empire's minorities were persecuted and
    many of them slain or deported to create a homogenous Turkish country.

    Ataturk's "modern" Turkey continued the dishonest policy... became
    friends with the Soviet Union then became an ally of USSR's foes.

    Pretending to be a democracy, modern Turkey has been a dictatorship
    for most of its recent history. It remained neutral during WWII
    but declared war on Germany a few months before the defeat of
    that country. It was friendly with Israel while pretending to be a
    Moslem country sympathetic to Moslem interests. These days Turkey is
    "friendly" with the West while remaining friendly with Iran-the West's
    enemy. Erdogan's foreign minister-Ahmet Davutlogul-pontificates about
    Turkey's foreign policy of "zero problems with neighbors" while at
    the same time preaching neo-Ottomanism-a policy which by its very
    definition-would be unfriendly to the Arabs.

    It's the height of hubris for a state like Turkey to imagine that it
    can become Big Brother to a people who have contributed a thousand
    times more to human civilization than the violent loudmouths of Ankara.

    Finally, a country where "Armenian" is considered a swear word, a
    word politicians deploy to destroy the career of a rival can't call
    itself a country which others should consider a sincere, tolerant,
    progressive or admirable.




    From: A. Papazian
Working...
X