Turning Back the Clock in Turkey: Kemalism on the Way Out?

sheikyermami — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 23:30:18 +0000

How Ataturk Destroyed Islam in Turkey

The following is from an Islamic website run by Turks and Muslims who don’t want Kemalism. They want to replace secular Turkey’s Kemalism with Ottoman islamic supremacism. Population explosion in the rural areas like Anatolia, Saudi money, Salafist preachers and radical mosques ensure another ‘Islamic revolution’. Turkey is a powder-keg. If the Army doesn’t remove the Islamic Erdogan-Gul revival government, nothing else will prevent Turkey from becoming another Islamic Republic.

Bismillah,
Turkey is gradually regaining the global attention it once enjoyed albeit for different reasons. The main international focus has been on Turkey’s EU entry talkswhich began in October 2005 on joining the European Union (EU). But the subtler and the less pronounced is the revival of Islamin Turkey despite nearly 90 years hostile secular Governments.

* Latest offerings from the RoP:

Iraq: Car bombs kill 34

Husband chops off wife’s nose because of her alleged infidelity

Obama wants to “strengthen Ataturk’s vision”

Although today Turkey seldom figures in Muslim or Islamic discourse, it was for five centuries the center of the Muslim world, until that fatal day, March 3rd, 1924, when Mustafa Kemal Pasha Ataturk abolished the Caliphate -office of the successors to prophet Muhammad, the supreme politico-religious office of Islam, and symbol of the Turkey sultan’s claim to world leadership of all Muslims—was abolished.

Today 98% of Turkey’s population is officially Muslim but the proportion of practicing Muslims is as low as 20%. However unlike in Europe where church attendance gradually fell in Turkey it is the result of a systematic attempt to constrain and weaken Islam by successive Kemalist secular governments and the military.

The hostility towards Islam began in early 1920s. A military commander, Mustafa Kemal Pasha led the Turkish War of Independence to form the Republic of Turkey as the successor state of the defunct Ottoman Empire. For this Mustafa Kemal became very popular and adored by all Turks. Thereafter he became the first President of the Republic of Turkey. The Turks venerated him so much he was given the name ‘Atatürk’, meaning Father of the Turks, (honorific name formally presented to him by the Turkish Grand Assembly in 1934.)

But Mustafa Kemal Pasha Ataturk was no ordinary leader. He was an astute statesman and strewed strategist. He didn’t express to the public how he would develop Turkey until he got the power to execute his vision (i.e. not until he was President of Turkey.)

Then Atatürk carefully constructed and deployed a master plan, today known as the Kemalist ideology or Kemalism. Believing in this strategy Ataturk and his associates started to publicly question the value of religion and held the view religion was not compatible with modern science and secularism was imperative for modernity.

Thus Ataturk regime began step by step to implement the Kemalist ideology with a radical reformation of the Turkish society with the aim of modernizing Turkey from the remnants of its Ottoman past. In line with their ideological convictions the Ataturk government abolished Islamic religious institutions; replace the Shariah law with adapted European legal codes; replaced the Islamic calendar with the Gregorian calendar; replace the Arabic script which was used to write the Turkish language with the Latin script and closed all religious schools.

In addition Ataturk took over the country’s 70,000 mosques and restricted the building of new mosques. Muftis and imams (prayer leaders) were appointed and regulated by the government, and religious instructions were taken over by the Ministry of National Education. Mosques were to preach according to the Ataturk’s dictates and were used to spread the Kemalist ideology.

For Sufi Muslims it was worse. Atatürk confiscated Sufi lodges, monasteries, meeting places and outlawed their rituals and meetings.

According to Ataturk modernity was valued and represented as not wearing any religious dress or being non-religious. So he ordered what cloths Turkey’s citizens should wear. The traditional garb of local religious leaders was outlawed. The fez (Turkish hat) was banned for men and the veil and hijab (headscarves) were discouraged and restricted for women.

Atatürk and his colleagues even wanted to Turkify Islam. They ordered Muslims to use the Turkish word Tanri instead of Allah for God and use the Turkish language in Salaath (the 5 times prayers) and Azaan (the call for prayers). These preposterous changes deeply disturbed the faithful Muslims and caused widespread resentment, which led in 1933 to a return to the Arabic version of the call to prayer.

After some time the Atatürk regime moved towards more extreme measures. Ataturk prohibited religious education. The existing mosques were turned into museums or used for the regimes secular purposes.

The faithful Turkish and Kurdish Muslims be they Sunni, Shia or Sufi were powerless against Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s regime and his military. But they tried to resist the oppression and even led rebellions. But he was too strong for them and Ataturk suppressed the rebellions after massive bloodsheds. (e.g. Seyh Sait rebellion in southeastern Turkey which claimed nearly 30,000 lives before being suppressed had its roots in religious grievances.)

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk died in 1938. After that some of his preposterous laws were revoked by his successors due to their harshness and the fact that Islam was always a strong force at the popular level despite the suppression.

Since then there have been occasional calls for a return to Islam. But the secular governments and military true to the Kemalist ideology have managed to suppress them. Amidst this environment in the 1980s a new generation of educated, articulate and religiously motivated leaders emerged to challenge the dominance of the Kemalist political ruling elite. By their own example of piety, prayer, and political activism, they have helped to spark a revival of Islamic observance in Turkey.

But the Turkish military and the state bureaucracy are infiltrated with (Kemalist) secularists and act as the guardians of Ataturk’s reforms and work to preserve Kemalism and weaken Islam. This situation has gradually led to a polarization of the Turkish society and today Turkey remains as someone observed a ‘torn society’.

From an article, several years ago, on Erdogan’s unbanning of the hijab on Turkish campuses:

“The Turkish government’s plans to allow female students to wear the Muslim headscarf at university will provoke campus chaos and street violence and end up destroying the secular state, university rectors said on Friday.

The rectors are part of a Turkish secular elite, which also embraces army generals and the judiciary, that sees the headscarf as a symbol of political Islam and thus a threat to the separation of state and religion.

Parliament is expected to approve next week a constitutional amendment sponsored by the ruling AK Party, which has Islamist roots, and the MHP nationalist opposition party, aimed at easing the ban on the headscarf for university students.

“After such changes in the constitution and the law, the Republic of Turkey would inevitably turn into a religious state,” Mustafa Akaydin, head of Turkey’s inter-university council, said to loud applause from dozens of academics.

“We are worried that the universities will be plunged into chaos… Universities are the venue for knowledge, not for (religious) faith,” he said, reading out a statement unanimously approved by the rectors after an emergency meeting in Ankara.

Some professors chanted “Turkey is secular and will remain secular” and held up a banner that read: “Enough already, wake up! Let’s protect the principles and revolution of Ataturk and the secular republic!”

Kemal Ataturk is the revered soldier-statesman who founded the secular Turkish republic in 1923. Secularists plan a rally against the headscarf on Saturday at his Ankara mausoleum.

PRESSURE

Under the government plan, the ban on the headscarf would remain for teachers and civil servants, but Akaydin said the change would “inevitably” spread in time to the civil service.

The rector of Ankara’s Middle East Technical University warned of a return to the kind of political street violence that shook Turkey during previous decades if the reform passes.

“University tensions spilled into the streets in the 1960s and 1970s. Now there is a danger once more of them spilling onto the streets,” Ural Akbulut said.

Members of Turkey’s judiciary and top businessmen have already slammed the headscarf plan and the main opposition party, the secularist CHP, has said it will try to block the reform through the Constitutional Court.

Turkey’s powerful military, which views itself as the ultimate guarantor of the secular order, has made clear it is closely watching the debates but has so far refrained from directly commenting on the headscarf proposal.

The army has ousted four governments in the past 50 years, acting most recently in 1997 with broad public support against a cabinet it deemed too Islamist.

But opinion polls suggest a majority of Turks back a relaxation of the headscarf ban in a country where some two thirds of women cover their heads.”

Reader Cruzador on Ataturk and Obambi:

Ataturk was no saint. He continued the genocide of Armenians invading their newly founded republic and seizing more land. He drove them and the French from Cilicia and burned the Christian sector of Smyrna to the ground. He gave amnesty to the former govt. which initiated the genocide. He modernized the country allright, after he “ethnically cleansed” it through violence. To watch this undocumented idiot posing as a president bow down to the saudis and now the Turks is pathetic. Islam as practiced in most of the world and as seen through its violence is repulsive to americans and most of the free world. There is no freedom of religion in Turkey-just try to get a permit for a new church. Obama is an embarassment and needs to be impeached.

Proof that Terrorism Works

A link to Brian Akira

Mr Barack Obama today and tomorrow visits occupied “Turkey”, a Muslim country that the US is now more dependent upon as a go-between with Iran, and a troop transit-route for the US adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Washington is allegedly beholden to The Turk, in order to solve confrontations from Bosnia to Iran to Adjara to Afghanistan.

Obama’s two-day visit is a nod to Turkey’s regional reach, economic power, and diplomatic contacts. Mr Obama also feels that Turkey could be the role model of the ideal moderate, secular Muslim nation-state. Unlike the US puppet-state in Afghanistan — where Christians face the death penalty — in Turkey, Christian clergy are only forbidden from wearing their clerical garb and proselytizing, and there is only widespread discrimination against Christians, interspersed with the occassional pogrom.

“The president will discuss the need for the U.S.-Turkish partnership to address regional challenges like the threat from terrorism, the war in Afghanistan, relations with Iran, and the shared goal of lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors,” the White House said.

Hmmm … Strange flag for a “secular state”. Muslim Crescent + Satanic Star.

The U.S.-Turkish relationship suffered in 2003 when the NATO ally refused to let U.S. troops deploy on its territory. Turkey also expects the US to crack-down on the Kurds of Northern Iraq.

Turkey is a major transit route for U.S. troops and equipment destined for Iraqas well as Afghanistan, with the Incirlik air force base playing a key role. And of course Turkey continues its occupation of Cypriot territory. The war against Serbs was not the first US-British-Turkish action against Orthodox Christians, and will certainly not be the last.

On the election trail, O’Bomber condemned Turkey for the Armenian Genocide, trying to get Armenian votes, but forgot to mention it when slobbering up the Kemalists face-to-face. Governments should not be writing history — it’s not the role of government to establish historical truth — but Turkey should be condemned, on principle, anytime, without the need for a congressional or presidential statement. However, it has become the habit for governments to pander and write history in response to political pressure (the Holocaust, the Irish Famine, Armenians, etc), and the Democrats introduced anti-Turkish legislation in a cynical bid for Armenian votes. The Armenian lobby is very persistent and well-organized, and of course this is their main concern. But now that The One is in charge, he seems to have forgotten the Armenians.

The Turks have of course played a key role in international affairs since their invasion and occupation of Byzantium. Following the Fall of Constantinople and centuries of oppression over Greeks, Armenians, Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Romanians and Bulgarians, and others, Turkey went into a bit of a decline. Accordingly, in the past century the only significant Turkish actions have been the Armenian Genocide and the invasion of Cyprus. However, the US war against the Serbs and NATO’s Georgian adventure have increased the regional status of the Turks and their fascist army.

“Given Turkish activity and credibility in the wider region stretching from Afghanistan to the Middle East, passing over energy transit routes, Obama wants to give new blood to a real strategic partnershipwith Turkey,” said Cengiz Candar, a leading Turkish commentator and Middle East expert.

Polls show most Turks hate America, but Obama, as a fellow Muslim, is very popular there. Turkish newspapers heaped praise on “President Hussein”, with top selling newspaper Hürriyet shouting from its front page: “Welcome Mr. President.”

There were scattered waves from onlookers along the motorcade route to the tomb of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the revered founder of modern Turkey who created the republic and declared war on God. His name was Mustafa. Kemal, meaning “perfection”, was his military name. And he was proclaimed Atatürk, “Father of the Turks”, in 1934.

“I look forward to strengthening relations between the U.S. and Turkey and support Ataturk’s vision of Turkey as a modern and prosperous democracy,” Obama wrote in the guestbook at the godlike Atatürk’s tomb. Obama praised Atatürk’s “vision and courage”. Hitler also greatly admired Atatürk’s dictatorship and the successful Turkish slaughter of the Armenians. As he said, “Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier?” (”Who today remembers the destruction of the Armenians?”)

“Atatürk? Oh yeah! He the man! I agree with Obama.“

As part of his vision, he was also, like Lenin and Hitler, virulently atheistic. Mustafa Kemal banned the veil and the fez, and the word “Allah” for the Muslim deity. The dictator decreed that the Muslims worship Tanri. He ordered that the phrase “Tanri Uludur!” be used instead of ”Allahu Akbar” (”Islam’s god is great”). Faced with Muslim riots, and after a few brutal crackdowns failed to subdue the faithful, the tyrant reluctantly relented.

Many of his supporters were disappointed, because due to his hatred of the Greeks and Armenians, they had come to believe that he was a champion of Islam, and called him “Ghazi, Destroyer of Christians”(Ghazi means a Muslim raider.)

Mustafa Kemal was a drunkard, which is why he died from cirrhosis of the liver. He was bad-tempered, brutal, unreasonable, and sarcastic. His only marriage, to a woman twenty years younger, lasted two years.

His wife’s name was Latife Hanime [Latife Usakligil, Latife Uşşaki, after the reform of names decree]. Mustafa Kemal got rid of her and issued his own divorce decree, after many fights, arguments and separations. He at first admired her outspokenness and drive, but soon considered her uppity, over-educated and hysterical. Now she is uncritically revered by Atatürk’s worshippers as a pioneer feminist role model for Turkish women. In reality, she was more often than in a Muslim potato sack and/or headscarf, and was discarded and suppressed after getting too yappy about the oppression of women.

“Oh, why did I marry that weird bastard?”

Turkish journalist Ipek Calislar was prosecuted for writing a biography of Latife in which she wrote that Mustafa Kemal was a transvestite. According to Turkish Penal Code Article 5816, it is a crime to insult the memory of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the Turkey god. He fathered no children, but let other men do the dirty work with women, and adopted.

Latife had studied law in Paris and London, was fluent in English and French, and spoke Arabic and Persian, and played the piano. Her family was rich. They met four months before the marriage. She challenged Mustafa Kemal on a number of topics, especially women’s issues. She wanted to become a member of parliament, but Mustafa Kemal opposed women being allowed to vote or run in election. He told her, “This is not appropriate, how can you want to be a MP when you are my wife?” However, many people still voted for her by writing her name on the ballots, which infuriated him. He made her cover her head after marriage, but because she went around unveiled, before he banned the veil, people laughed at him and said, “Kemal’s his wife goes around naked!”

Turks general believe that Latife was very plain, squat, cerebral, nervous and shrewish, in contrast with Mustafa Kemal, who is regarded as handsome, dashing and dynamic.

She also couldn’t keep her big mouth shut, and was a dominating presence. When foreign diplomats and politicians would visit the presidential palace , she always met with them and butt into conversation, increasingly angering her dictator husband, until he put her away and she faded into obscurity. Latife is widely respected for not revealing the true reasons the divorce. Her diaries and letters have been kept locked up at the Turkish History Institution.

She was as much-admired by the foreign press, as she was despised by most Turks. She showed her face with a shocking defiance. The New York Times reported: “Her clothes are a pledge of reform. Her riding breeches indicate her intention of sweeping away harem conventions.” Mustafa Kemal brought her around Anatolia on their honeymoon, show her off, unveiled, as a lesson in reform. Foreign correspondents wrote that she symbolised “the birth of a new Turkey”.

After the divorce, Mustfa Kamal granted her permission to go to France, but upon her return he had her passport confiscated and she remained trapped in Turkey until her death. She tried to form an opposition political party, but all opposition was banned until after Atatürk’s death. She lived in fear of assassination, always carried a pistol, and often repeated thing things like, “I am alive but dead,” and “A dead person is the only person immune to jealousy.” Her favorite saying was, “There are people who must die so that others can know their worth.”

Mustafa Kemal had passed the Maintenance of Order Law in 1925, which gave the government emergency powers for the next four years and allowed it to outlaw organisations it deemed subversive, meaning anybody who opposed his reforms. In 1926, he dissolved his own CUP party after having 15 of his allies hanged as traitors, and exiling others. The following year he was elected president, which he remained until his alcoholic death. He had Turkey declared a secular state in 1928. And in 1935 had it written into the constitution that the state must manage the economy.

During Mustafa Kemal’s anti-Muslim campaign, when a member of his Cabinet suggested that it was unseemly for Turkish ladies to dance in public, he threw a Koran at him.

“For five hundred years these rules and theories of an Arab sheik,” he said, “and the interpretations of generations of lazy, good-for-nothing priests have decided the civil and the criminal law of Turkey.”

“They had decided the form of the constitution, the details of the lives of each Turk, his food, his hours of rising and sleeping, the shape of his clothes, the routine of the midwife who produced his children, what he learnt in his schools, his customs, his thoughts, even his most intimate habits.”

“Islam, this theology of an immoral Arab, is a dead thing.”

“A ruler who needs religion to help him rule is a weakling. No weakling should rule.”

Mustafa Kemal especially hated imams. He chased them out of the mosques. He chased the Sheik-ul-Islam out of his office and threw the Koran after him. He hated both God and Allah. For him, Islam and civilization were a contradiction, and he wished to make Turkey like France. “If only,” he once said of the Turks, with a flash of cynical insight, “we could make them Christians!” He created a strong centralized Government, run by Western elites, backed by a powerful army.

Saint Demetrius of Thessaloniki

Many Turks beieve that Atatürk was a Crypto-Jew, or a Dönmeh[Doenmeh/Donme]; a Sabbatean; a follower of Sabbatai Zevi [Shabatai Szevi'/'Zvi or Mehmet Aziz Efendi]. Zevi was a Cabalist Rabbi in Smyrna (present-day “Izmir”), who had many followers in the Balkans, Jerusalem, Cairo and northern Africa. Influenced by English Calvinist millenialists, he believed that Christians believed that a Messiah would show up in 1666, and calculate that according to Jewish belief, the Messiah would pop up in 1648. Therefore, in 1648, he declared himself the Messiah to the Jews, with his mission to the Christians and Muslims beginning in 1666. He was denounced by the Chief Rabbi of Smyrna, and exiled from the city. He moved to Thessaloniki in 1650, with his followers, until he was again driven out of town. Then to Athens, then Constantinople; then back to Smyrna where he was declared as Christ and King on New Year’s Day, 1659.

In fact, Sabbateism was the most notorious response to the declining status of Jews in Anatolia, as their monopoly on wool clothing manufactory was being hurt by Venetian imports, and they were increasingly oppressed by their Muslim overlords. A messianic current developed in the Sephardic world; the Redemption, marking the end of the world, which seemed imminent. This idea was fueled both by the economic decline of Thessaloniki, and the continued growth in Kabbalistic studies based on the Zohar. The end of time was announced successively in 1540 and 1568 and again in 1648 and 1666. This messianism also plays a part in the bizarre rise of Obamism, of course, especially the hysterical Obamite idolatry on the part of American Jews.

Zevi proclaimed unto the Israelites:

“The first-begotten Son of God, Shabbethai Ẓebi, Messiah and Redeemer of the people of Israel, to all the sons of Israel, Peace! Since ye have been deemed worthy to behold the great day and the fulfilment of God’s word by the Prophets, your lament and sorrow must be changed into joy, and your fasting into merriment; for ye shall weep no more. Rejoice with song and melody, and change the day formerly spent in sadness and sorrow into a day of jubilee, because I have appeared.”

Zevi greeted emissaries from Germany and Poland, and then went to Cairo and Jerusalem. He demanded that the Sultan abdicate, as he, Zevi, was the true ruler of the world. Koprulu Fazil Ahmed Pasha [Aḥmad Köprili] ordered Zevi’s arrest, and had him imprisoned in in January, 1666. Then he was exiled. After Zevi started spouting offagain about his messianic nature, Sultan Mehmed IV had him prosecuted and threatened with execution. Zevi then converted to the Bektashi Order and was thereafter known as Mehmet Aziz Efendi. He was later exiled again, to Albania, where he died.

Some of his acolytes also converted to Mohammadanism, others returned to Judaism, and others continued to worship him in secret, especially in Thessaloniki, Atatürk’s hometown. Three hundred of the richest Thessalonikan Sabbatean families converted to Islam in 1686, to avoid prosecution from rabbinical authorities. They were given the Turkish surname “Donme” (”renegades”), and further sub-divided into Izmirlis, Kuniosos and Yacoubi. Even after officially giving their souls to the Meccan moon god, they did not assimilate with Turks, practicing strict endogamy, living in separate quarters, building their own mosques and maintaining a specific liturgy in their language. They participated greatly in the 19th century in the spread of modernist ideas in the empire.

An Israeli journalist Itamar Ben-Avi [Ben-Zion Ben-Yehuda], the first modern speaker of Hebrew as a native language, claims that a drunk Atatürk personally told him he was Jewish and recited some of the Hebrew prayer Shema Yisra’el (”Hear O Israel”), in the bar of a Jerusalem hotel in 1911, when Atatürk was en route from Damascus to Libya. The Zionist writer Hillel Halkin has written in theNew York Sun about Atatürk’s alleged Jewish roots:

Ataturk’s Jewishness, which he systematically sought to conceal, explains a great deal about him, above all, his fierce hostility toward Islam, the religion in which nearly every Turk of his day had been raised, and his iron-willed determination to create a strictly secular Turkish nationalism from which the Islamic component would be banished.

Who but a member of a religious minority would want so badly to eliminate religion from the identity of a Muslim majority that, after the genocide of Turkey’s Christian Armenians in World War I and the expulsion of nearly all of its Christian Greeks in the early 1920s, was 99% of Turkey’s population?

Atatürk was born and raised in Thessaloniki, a heavily Jewish city in his day, that had a large Doenmeh population, He attended a grade school known as the “Semsi Effendi School,” that was run by a religious leader of the Dönmeh community named Simon Zvi.

Perhaps, as a crypto-worshipper and practioner of taqiyya, Mr Obama feels a certain affinity for the Crypto-Jew Atatürk?

Obama expressed his deep admiration and love for Atatürk, but gave no opinion on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s play, “Makomya. Erdoğan wrote, directed and acted in the hate-filled work of propaganda, full of attacks on the “Masons” (Ma) and the “Communists” (Kom) and the “Jews” (Ya-hud)? Certainly no sensible person can have much sympathy for meddling Freemasons or bloody-minded Communists, but obviously that means that Erdoğan must be antagonistic towards the people who installed Obama in the first place. Perhaps best not to talk about it.

In the “democracy” of Turkey, non-Muslims are not fully equal citizens. The cult of “the Turk” is the Godless Atatürk’s replacement for the cult of Islam, and the cult of Atatürk himself is an attempt to supplant the cult of the Pedophile — but Islam is still there, molding minds and attitudes. It would be best for Obama to avoid the greatly-reduced populations of Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, if he wishes to avoid instigating a riot.

Obama has had an eye to ties with Turkey during his tour. In Prague on Sunday, Obama urged the European Union to accept Turkey as a full member. He said Turkey’s accession would send an important signal to the Muslim world and firmly anchor it in Europe.

“The United States and Europe must approach Muslims as our friends, neighbours and partners in fighting injustice, intolerance and violence, forging a relationship based on mutual respect and mutual interest,” he said.

“Moving forward towards Turkish membership in the EU would be an important signal of your commitment to this agenda and ensure that we continue to anchor Turkey firmly in Europe.”

His remarks rejected outright by France and met coolly by Germany. But French President Nicolas Sarkozy said it was up to the EU itself to decide who joined the bloc – and that he had always been personally opposed to Turkey’s entry. ”When it comes to the European Union it’s up to member states of the European Union to decide,” he responded.

If the EU continues to reject Turkey, and since the US loves the Turks so much, perhaps Turkey could join the United States.

Apart from certain corrupted elites, Western Europeans are either reserved or hostile regarding possible Turkish EU-membership, considering the Turks are only in Europe in the first place because they invaded, overthrew the Roman Empire, dominated and enslaved the Balkans and attempted to conquer Austria and Poland.

Turkey said it dropped objections to Anders Fogh Rasmussen becoming the next head of NATO after Obama kowtowed to Ankara and guaranteed one of the Dane’s deputies would be a Turk. PM Erdoğan expressed his appreciation for Obama’s slavishness, but suggested that Mr Obama is not to be trusted: “He put forth a lot of positive energy. We responded positively to this. We hope that the promises made are kept.”

The Turks hate Rasmussen because he failed to punish a cartoonist who allegedly insulted their pedophile “prophet”. Turks are dissatisfied with Rasmussen’s promise to “pay close attention to Muslim sensibilities” in his role as NATO chief.

Obama also has problems because during his election campaign, he pledged to correctly call the Armenians Holocaust “a genocide”, and a resolution to so designate the slaughter of 1,500,000 Armenians was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives last month.

Security is extremely tight for Mr Obama’s visit. Snipers and riot police have been deployed and military aircraft are patrolling a no-fly zone over Ankara. Almost 9,000 police will be deployed for Mr Obama’s visit to Occupied Constantinople. Several small, brave groups have been holding anti-US demonstrations in both cities.

Turkey will not be the venue for Obama’s promised major speech in a Muslim capital, but his stop will still be a way to emphasize his message of goodwill to Muslims. Obama will give an address at the parliament in Ankara, and during a visit to Istanbul he will meet with students at an Islamic museum, celebrating the invasion, conquest and occupation.

In Turkey, women are forbidden by law from covering their heads in many places and situations. Many or most women at universities wear wigs so as to cover ther heads, since haed-scarves are forbidden

The Ottoman Empire was based on Islam, meaning war, terror, Jihad, slavery, oppression. And Mustafa Kemal Atatürk believed that the only way that Turkey could manage as a post-imperial nation-state was by suppressing Islam. He was violently anti-Islam, and an atheist. Of course Turkey also suppresses Christianity.

Armenian Genocide, at the hands of the Turks, 1915-23

Armenia, 80 BC

On Kamal Atatürk

“Squinting skyward last week, Turks looked for the new moon. When they should see it Ramadan would begin. Ramadan is the mystic month in which the Koran was revealed to Prophet Mohammed. This year the first glint of the new moon had a special, dread significance. Turks had been ordered by their stern dictator, Mustafa Kemal Pasha who made them drop the veil and the fez, that beginning with Ramadan they must no longer call their god by his Arabic name, Allah.

No godly man, Dictator Kemal considers that there is no reason why Turks should not call Allah by his Turkish name Tanri. There is no reason except centuries of tradition, no reason except that Turkish imams (priests) all know the Koran by heart in Arabic while few if any have memorized it in Turkish. Strict to the point of cruelty last week was Dictator Kemal’s decree that muezzins, calling the faithful to prayer from the top of Turkey’s minarets, must shout not the hallowed “Allah Akbar!” (Arabic for “God is Great!”) but the unfamiliar words “Tanri Uludur!” which mean the same thing in Turkish.

When imams threatened to suspend services in the mosques and hide the prayer rugs, the Government announced that it was holding 400 brand-new prayer rugs in reserve, threatened to produce “newly trained muezzins who know the Koran in Turkish and are ready to jump into the breach.” …

Nearer and nearer crept the moon to crescent. Ramadan was almost upon Turkey when officials of the Department of Culture (which includes religion) screwed up their courage and told Dictator Kemal that he simply could not change the name of Turkey’s god – at least not last week. Already several muezzins had been thrown into jail for announcing that they would continue to shout “Allah Akbar!” The populace was getting ugly, obviously sympathized with the Allah-shouters.

Abruptly Dictator Kemal yielded “Let them pray as they please, temporarily” he growled. Beaming, his Minister rushed off to proclaim the glad respite only a few hours before the new moon appeared. “On account of the general unpreparedness of muezzins and imams,” they suavely declared, “prayers may be offered and the Koran recited in Arabic during the present month of Ramadan, but discourse by the imams must be in Turkish.”

During Ramadan all Moslems are especially irritable because they eat nothing during the hours of daylight. After the fasting is over Turks will be more tractable, may accept from their Dictator a new name for their God.

- TIME, January 9, 1933: p. 64.

Word for God

A hard father to his people, Mustafa Kemal told his Turks last December that they must forget God in the Arabic language (Allah), learn Him in Turkish (Tanri). Admitting the delicacy of renaming a 1300-year-old god, Kemal gave the muezzins a time allowance to learn the Koran in Turkish. Last week in pious Brusa, the “green city,” a muezzin halloed “Tanri Uludur” from one of the minarets whence Brusans had heard “Allah Akbar” since the 14th Century. Raging at Kemal Pasha’s god, they mobbed the muezzin, mobbed the police who came to save him.

Quick to defend his new word for God, quicker to show new Turkey the fate of the old-fashioned, Kemal the Ghazi, “the Victorious One,” pounced on Brusa, had 60 of the faithful arrested, ousted the Mufti (ecclesiastical judge) of the Ouglubjami mosque and decreed that henceforth God was Tanri.

- TIME, February 20, 1933 p. 18.

During the early days of Kemal’s career, many of his followers were under the impression that he was a champion of Islam and that they were fighting the Christians. “Ghazi, Destroyer of Christians” was the name they gave him. Had they been aware of his real intentions, they would have called him “Ghazi, Destroyer of Islam.”

- Emil Lengyel, Turkey, 1941, p. 140-141.

He was drinking heavily. The drink stimulated him, gave him energy, but increased his irritability. Both in private and public he was sarcastic, brutal and abrupt. He flared up at the least criticism. He cut short all attempts to reason with him. He flew into a passion at the least opposition. He would neither confide in nor co-operate with anyone. When one politician gave him some harmless advice, he roughly told him to get out. When a venerable member of the Cabinet suggested that it was unseemly for Turkish ladies to dance in public, he threw a Koran at him and chased him out of his office with a stick.

“For five hundred years these rules and theories of an Arab sheik,” he said, “and the interpretations of generations of lazy, good-for-nothing priests have decided the civil and the criminal law of Turkey.”

“They had decided the form of the constitution, the details of the lives of each Turk, his food, his hours of rising and sleeping, the shape of his clothes, the routine of the midwife who produced his children, what he learnt in his schools, his customs, his thoughts, even his most intimate habits.”

“Islam, this theology of an immoral Arab, is a dead thing.”

Possibly it might have suited tribes of nomads in the desert. It was no good for a modern progressive State.

“God’s revelation!” There was no God. That was one of the chains by which the priests and bad rulers bound the people down.

“A ruler who needs religion to help him rule is a weakling. No weakling should rule..”

And the priests! How he hated them. The lazy, unproductive priests who ate up the sustenance of the people. He would chase them out of their mosques and monasteries to work like men.

Religion! He would tear religion from Turkey as one might tear the throttling ivy away to save a young tree.

It was public knowledge that he was irreligious, broke all the rules of decency, and scoffed at sacred things. He had chased the Sheik-ul-Islam, the High Priest of Islam, out of his office and thrown the Koran after him. He had forced the women in Angora to unveil. He had encouraged them to dance body close to body with accursed foreign men and Christians.

- H.C. Armstrong, Grey Wolf, Mustafa Kemal: An Intimate Study of a Dictator, 1934, p. 241-243.

Kemal cared nothing about Allah; he was interested in himself and in Turkey. He hated Allah and made him responsible for Turkey’s misfortune. It was Allah’s tyrannical rule that paralyzed the hands of the Turk. But he knew that Allah was real to the Turkish peasant, while nationalism meant nothing to him. He decided, therefore, to draft Allah into his service as the publicity director of his national cause. Through Allah’s aid his people must cease to be Mohammedans and become Turks. Then, after Allah had served Kemal’s purpose, he could discard him.

- Emil Lengyel, Turkey, 1941, p. 134.

For Kemal, Islam and civilization were a contradiction in terms. “If only,” he once said of the Turks, with a flash of cynical insight, “we could make them Christians!” His was not to be the reformed Islamic state for which the Faithful were waiting: it was to be a strictly lay state, with a centralized Government as strong as the Sultan’s, backed by the army and run by his own intellectual bureaucracy.

- Lord Kinross, Ataturk: The Rebirth of a Nation, 1965, p. 437.

The Constitution of the Secular Republic of Turkey

Article 14: Prohibition of Abuse of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms

c1. (As amended on October 17, 2001) None of the rights and freedoms embodied in the Constitution shall be exercised with the aim of violating the indivisible integrity of the state with its territory and nation, and endangering the existence of the democratic and secular order of the Turkish Republicbased upon human rights. …

Article 24: Freedom of Religion and Conscience

c1. Everyone has the right to freedom of conscience, religious belief and conviction. [contra Islam]

c2. Acts of worship, religious services, and ceremonies shall be conducted freely [contra Islam], provided that they do not violate the provisions of Article 14. [Since Christianity was already restricted, article 14 restricted Islam.]

c3. No one shall be compelled to worship [contra Islam], or to participate in religious ceremonies and rites, to reveal religious beliefs and convictions, or be blamed or accused because of his religious beliefs and convictions. [contra Islam]

c4. Education and instruction in religion and ethics shall be conducted under state supervision and control. Instruction in religious culture and moral education shall be compulsory in the curricula of primary and secondary schools. Other religious education and instruction shall be subject to the individual’s own desire, and in the case of minors, to the request of their legal representatives.

c5. No one shall be allowed to exploit or abuse religion or religious feelings, or things held sacred by religion, in any manner whatsoever, for the purpose of personal or political influence, or for even partially basing the fundamental, social, economic, political, and legal order of the state on religious tenets. [All designed to prevent the state from being corrupted by Islam.]

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