Turkey, Islam, and the West

This article focuses on the populist strategy of the Turkish Justice and Development Party between the 2007 presidential election, when Turkish politics experienced an impasse, and the 2010 referendum over the constitutional amendments. As a means of analysing populism, the symptomatic approach is preferred over other theoretical perspectives, including empiricism and historicism. An analysis of the discourse articulated by Prime Minister Erdoğan leads us to the conclusion that he has continually appealed to the masses with an anti-institutional rhetoric that divides society into ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, thereby fulfilling the criteria of populism according to the symptomatic approach.

"In 1681 Doctor Alessandro Pini (Firenze 1653–1717 Kostantiniyye) was sent by Cosimo III Grand Duke of Tuscany (r. 1670–1723) to Egypt. He disembarked in Alexandria and primarily had the task of making discoveries, but also some other commissions which could be summarized as ‘secret diplomacy’: he had to bring Domenico Cartieri, head of the Pages of Egypt’s Great Pasha to Florence.

When Pini came to Cairo, he was received by the Grand Visir Chiuperlì and he cured him for a thrombosis in the leg. He also observed the customs and everything around him, copied documents and noted as much as possible about, for example, monuments, antiquities, scientific observations; he made exact drawings, collected Arabic manuscripts about mathematics and medicine. He then sent all this material to Italy on a Greek ship that unfortunately sank.

In 1683 Pini returned to Tuscany, to the Grand Duke’s disappointment he had not been successful in bringing Cartieri to Italy. Pini left for Venice where he met Cartieri again, who had fled from the Turks with whom he worked in Egypt, when they attempted the siege of Vienna. Pini, glad to hear of Cartieri’s good fortune, did not want to return to Florence with the latter, being offended by and disappointed with the rumors about himself. After numerous requests to the Grand Duke Pini was allowed to be engaged (in 1684) on a Venetian ship as a doctor. Held this position; from 1699 to 1703 he lived in Venice working for the Serenissima. In 1703 the Bailo of Kostantiniyye, Giulio Giustinian (1640–1715), called him to follow him as a doctor in Turkey. There, Pini married an Italian lady (Elena Masselini, and took up residence in the district of Pera. He lived there until 1715 and then went to Nafplio (Greece) where he was enslaved. He eventually died in 1717 in the prison of Kostantiniyye. During his stay in Kostantiniyye he had the opportunity to study and described several aspects of life on the Bosphorus.

Pini left a description, written in Latin, of the world that fascinated him: De moribus Turcarum (‘On the Customs of the Turks’) (written probably during his stay in Kostantiniyye and Nafplio). He says: “the customs of the Turks were observed by me in such a way that they could be described as an example, because not everyone is allowed to travel in those regions. It was easy for me to penetrate their secret places, since I was not driven by injury, benefit, hate, or by any other feeling, but I was particularly attentive to the common advantage of men, of humankind.” Pini describes various aspects of social life such as education of children, the separation between men and women, the condemnation of idleness, the great generosity towards the poor, and the numerous rules of behaviour and eating habits. He also provides an aesthetic and architectural description of Kostantiniyye with information useful for reconstructing the appearance of the city at that time.

His treatise presents an enthusiasm for the Turkish society and customs Pini became acquainted with during his stay; as doctor in Egypt (1680–1683) and later on in Turkey (Pera of Constantinople, 1703–1715) as spouse, and in Greece (Nafplio, 1715–1717) as slave–he consciously decided to apologetically describe a world that the West saw as its negative ‘alter ego’.

When Alessandro’s son, Antonio Pini, went from Kostantiniyye to Florence in 1740, he took his father’s treatise with him. In Florence, he gave the manuscript to Antonio Cocchi (1695–1758), a well-known erudite doctor and bibliophile: Cocchi’s library today is incorporated in the Fondo Magliabechiano of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. There, Alessandro Pini’s manuscript was rediscovered recently by the author of the present abstract.
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This book is a collection of 5 essays. The first is an introduction into the basics of chant transmission, the modal framework within the eight-mode system, differentiated according to Western and Eastern chant genres. The second is an introduction into the labyrinth of the eight-mode system, which was used for a musical art of memory in Byzantine chant. The third analyses the embellished design of a traditional chant: a hymn for St. Peter taken from the Byzantine sticherarion and from the Roman antiphoner, and its elaboration in monodic kalophonia and polyphonic organum.

A second part is dedicated to two living chant traditions: The fourth essay describes the integration of makamlar among Greek church singers of Istanbul, and the final essay is a portrait of two important singers of the Bulgarian Orthodox tradition.

Ibn Baṭūṭah (Arabic: أبو عبد الله محمد بن عبد الله اللواتي الطنجي بن بطوطة‎, ʾAbū ʿAbd al-Lāh Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Lāh l-Lawātī ṭ-Ṭanǧī ibn Baṭūṭah), or simply Ibn Battuta (ابن بطوطة) (February 25, 1304 – 1368 or 1369), was a Moroccan explorer of Berber descent. He is known for his extensive travels, accounts of which were published in the Rihla (lit. "Journey"). Over a period of thirty years, Ibn Battuta visited most of the known Islamic world as well as many non-Muslim lands. His journeys included trips to North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Africa and Eastern Europe in the West, and to the Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and China. Ibn Battuta is considered to be among the great travellers of all time.

After reviewing the emergence of Turkish Euroscepticism in the context of the evolution of Turkey–European-Union relations between 1963 and 1999, the paper analyses party and popular Euroscepticism after 1999. The Turkish case appears to confirm the Taggart– Sitter thesis concerning the strategic Euroscepticism of opposition parties. The exception of the Kurdish nationalists suggests that strategic Euroscepticism does not apply to ethnic minority parties. In Turkey there is both ‘soft’ Euroscepticism (centre-left parties) and ‘hard’ Euroscepticism (nationalist and Islamist parties), the latter usually based on identity. At the popular level, identity Euroscepticism revolves around four key issues: national sovereignty; morality; negative discrimination; and Europe’s alleged hidden agenda to divide and rule Turkey (the so-called ‘Sevres Syndrome’).

This paper is an attempt to account for the complex dynamics, its principle constituents and actual contentions that lead to the emergence and exacerbation of the headscarf issue in Turkey, which finally resulted in the constitutional crisis in summer 2008. I argue that the notions of secularism and religious freedom as inscribed into the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey determine and enhance the escalating dynamics of the headscarf issue despite changing constellations and alliances in Turkish politics. The wearing of the Islamic headscarf exemplifies and perpetuates the inherently paradoxical notion of secularism inscribed in the Turkish constitution. I argue that the two opposing sides, the Kemalists and Islamists, take the constitutional principle of secularism or the universal freedom of religion respectively as the imprescriptible foundation as a means to delimit its respective complement. This implies that the conflict, in principle already inscribed in the constitution, is unavoidable. It resumes in the Turkish society in the heatedly contest on the Islamic headscarf by fostering or condemning the governmental prohibitions against it. I show how the headscarf issue in Turkey unfolds in continuous reference to the constitution of Turkey and how the defense of secularism and the protection of human rights in Turkey almost exclusively focused on the headscarf issue.

Emre Erdogan ile birlikte yazdığımız "Bizi Yanlış Tanıyorlar! Avrupalıların Türkiye ve Türkler Hakkındaki Algıları" adlı kitabımız İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları'ndan çıktı.

Avrupa kamuoylarının Avrupa kimliği hakkındaki görüşlerini; Türkiye hakkındaki bilgilerini, algılarını, imgelerini; Türkiye'nin AB üyeliği karşısındaki tutumlarını; bütün bu algı ve tutumların gerek ülkelere, gerekse de gelir, yaş, parti, din gibi sosyoekonomik, politik, demografik alt gruplara göre nasıl farklılaştığını merak edenlere hararetle tavsiye olunur!

Kitapta, 2009 sonbaharında Almanya, Fransa, İngiltere, İspanya ve Polonya'da toplam 5000 kişi ile görüşerek yürüttüğümüz, ve bu alanda tek olan, kapsamlı ve derinlikli saha araştırmamızın bulgularını kimlik, genişleme, derinleşme, bütünleşme kuramları çerçevesinde analiz ediyoruz.

The paper explores the dynamics of internalisation and externalisation of the self in relation to transcendence within reading practices of key Islamic texts in the Suffa community in Istanbul. Based on fieldwork and textual analysis, it illustrates how the imagination of the self as part of a cosmological framework is central to exercises of meditative reflection (tefekkür) within this community. The paper engages with emerging anthropological and philosophical scholarship on transcendence and argues that only some resonance can be traced between Sufi-inspired conceptions of the self at Suffa and their so-formulated modern equivalents. By highlighting the place of the imagination and transcendence in Islamic practice, it obliges us to rethink current debates within the anthropology of Islam by going beyond self-enclosed models that emphasise processes of subjectivity and self-fashioning.

The 'Turk' was greeted in various ways, but generally with hostility by Early Modern Europeans. The advancing army of Suleiman the Magnificent attacked Vienna in 1529, prompting apocalyptic fear from Christians throughout Europe. Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Nicolas Senecker, etc identify the Turks with prophecy (e.g. Gog and Magog from Ezekiel 38 and 39 and the little horn of the beast in Daniel 7) and interpreted their approach towards Europe accordingly. They also identified a need for deeper knowledge of Islam. This prompted a number of publications including Johann Albrecht Widmanstetter’s Mahometis Abdallae filii theologia dialogo explicata, ... Alcorani epitome and Theodore Bibliander's Machumetis Saracenorum principis, eiusque successorum vitae, ac doctrina, ipseque Alcoran, both of which were published in 1543. This paper examines both of these works but particularly Bibliander's Machumetis Saracenorum. It explores the reasons why Bibliander produced it through a comparison of it with Bibliander's earlier Ad nominis Christiani socios consultatio, qua nam ratione Turcarum dira potentia repelli possit ac debeat a populo Christiano.

The debut of Turkish-language translations of the Qurʾan in the newly founded Republic of Turkey sparked lively debates over whether Qurʾan translation was possible or desirable, who should engage in interpretation of the text, and what characteristics a Turkish-language rendering of the Qurʾan should have. Whereas the abolition of the Islamic caliphate, closure of the medreses, and prohibition of the Sufi orders have received considerable attention in histories of early republican Turkey, the state-sponsored translation of the Qurʾan into Turkish remains both neglected and misunderstood. Muhammad Rashid Rida, who was highly influential in shaping opinion in the Muslim world, portrayed the state-sponsored project as a long-term plot to displace the Arabic Qurʾan. Other accounts misrepresent the involvement of President Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) in the promotion of Qurʾan translation by anachronistically suggesting that he sparked the initiative and led a “campaign” in support of it. Mustafa Kemal had no hand in the composition of Turkish Qurʾan translations published in 1924, other than helping create the political context in which they could be published. Their composition began well before the foundation of the Turkish republic, and their inspiration emerged from the intellectual milieu of the late Ottoman public sphere.

In an earlier article concerning the 50-year celebration of European treaties and reunification efforts, we characterized European establishments as Manichaean in terms of contents and form, predicting a total failure in the ill-conceived and malignantly-executed patchwork of grandeur and arrogance. The recent developments in Turkey, the first turn of the presidential vote, the General Staff statement, and the aberrational stand European authorities have taken corroborate our verdict. This Europe has no future.
The Secret Plans of the Cannibalistic, bogus-Islamic Premier of Turkey
Turkey is at the crossroads. Bought up by Saudi, Qatari, Kuwaiti, and Emirati bogus-princes and tyrants masqueraded as ‘kings’, the anti-Turkish gangsters that prevailed within Turkey’s Islamic party advance day by day their vociferously anti-Turkish and anti-European agenda; their intentions are very clear.
The quasi-analphabetic thugs of Erdogan intend to turn the illuminated, laic, secular and republican Turkey, built with great sacrifice and unique vision by Kemal Ataturk and his followers, to a bogus-Islamic realm of vulgar barbarism that will end up in an obscurantist, backward theocracy like Egypt, Syria, Arabia, Nigeria and Pakistan.
They want to turn the civilized and occidental Turkish society to a hideous and chaotic abode, similar to the so-called ‘Arab’ barbaric and cannibalistic societies whereby bestial men – who consider themselves ‘true Muslims’ – rape uncovered women in the dark streets of filthy slums only to later accuse them of adultery and to have them killed without trial.
In doing so, Erdogan and his lewd Foreign Minister have been masqueraded as Democratic supporters of the European integration of Turkey; this is a terrible lie. They do not want Europe, and they know that Europe does not want them.
The vitriolic hatred and anti-European hysteria of Erdogan and Abdullah Gul are not and will never be expressed in public; these filthy, inhuman feelings, their hypocrisy, duplicity, and mendacity are typical to that of the Wahhabi sheikhs who are their tutors. They mendaciously extirpated European support for nominal changes of democratization in Turkey, at the same moment they unleashed the forces of darkness throughout the country.
First published in American Chronicle, AfroArticles, and Buzzle on 28th April 2007
Republished in Aram Naharaim on 29th April 2007
http://www.aramnaharaim.org/English/FutureOfTurkey1_29_4_2007.htm

It is argued in this study that Turkey’s ambition to play a key regional role and become a global actor is not novel. There have been at least two similar initiatives in recent history that defended Turkey’s extraordinary strategic potential and aspired to put it into the heart of global politics. What has, however, been indeed novel and has lent credibility to the whole experiment is Turkey’s recent economic dynamism and political reforms. While such a trend is indeed reasonable, Turkey’s claims for a global strategic role and a value-based foreign policy may be already overblown. Turkey is bound to play a key regional role and may indeed become a global actor in the years to come; its capabilities, however, are not infinite, and significant risks may lurk in their overestimation.

Modern Türkiye’nin kurucu kadrosunun partisi olan CHP, bu ülkenin en uzun iktidarda kalmış siyasi partisidir. Almış olduğu kararlarla, Türkiye’nin geleceğini ve yerini belirlemiştir. Partinin yol haritasının belirlendiği olağan ve büyük kurultaylar, Türk siyasi tarihi açısından oldukça büyük önem arz eder. Bu makalenin konusu, 1940’lı yıllarda başlayan ve CHP’nin 1947 Olağan Kurultayı’nda kristalleşen laiklik söylemindeki değişim ve bu değişimin siyasal hayata yansımalarıdır. Bu çalışmanın, 1945’den itibaren yaşanan değişimi demokratikleşme perspektifinde değerlendirmek; Türkiye’nin din politikasının başat faktörü olan laikliğin dönüşümünü tarihsel veriler bağlamında yorumlamak; demokratik bir zorunluluk haline gelen siyasal sistemin ve din politikasının değişiminin sonuçlarını ortaya koymak gibi amaçları bulunmaktadır. Çalışmanın ilk bölümünde,1945 yılından 1947 yılına kadar yaşanan demokratikleşme süreci ve sürecin laik anlayışa etkisi; ikinci bölümünde, Yedinci Olağan Kurultay’ın demokratikleşme açısından önemi ve ilk defa ortaya çıkan laiklik tartışmaları; üçüncü bölümünde ise yaşanan değişim ve değişimin sonuçları ortaya konulmuştur.

From the Preface:
"This book is a journalistic account of a scholarly discussion about the origins of the Islam. This discussion has already been smoldering for about 150 years, but has flared up in the past seven years.
This is a high stakes debate.  It revolves around core tenets, opening questions of whether Muhammad was a historical person or not, and whether the Koran was truly revealed within twenty-three years to a single person or if it is a book compiled by many authors and editors over a period of centuries.
Since the nineteenth century, Christians have become used to scholars critically studying the historicity of Jesus and the origin of the various biblical passages. Until now, the Muslim world has been less open to subject their own religion to academic research and even a number of western Islamicists shudder  to apply the same ‘clinical,’ skeptical approach to Islam that has been applied to Christianity.
There is one thing upon which everyone agrees: between 600 CE and 800 CE something remarkable happened in the Middle-East. In 600 CE Islam did not exist. However, two hundred years later, Islam was the dominant religion in a world empire that extended from Spain to the Indus. That much is clear, but the question is what happened in the meantime.
The opinions about this vary tremendously. The classical, orthodox account can be found in almost any popular introduction to Islam or biography of the Prophet Muhammad.  A reader looking for general knowledge about Islam in a random book is likely to get only this orthodox account, if they are lucky with some critical notes.
Western scholars studying Islam, Islamicists, will naturally not say that Muhammad received his revelations from the angel Gabriel, because this is a statement of pure belief, which one can only support as a confirmed Muslim.  They often doubt the hadith, transmitted statements attributed to Muhammad, as well. However, they adopt other important elements of the orthodox account. Surprisingly, many ex-Muslims who left their religion do the same thing.
One of them is none other than Salman Rushdie, the author of the book The Satanic Verses. In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran called upon Muslims throughout the world to kill Rushdie because of his “blasphemous book.”  In the summer of 2005 in an article in Trouw [a Dutch newspaper], the same Rushdie made a plea for reform to guide Islam into modernity. Within his argument, one sentence attracts the attention: “It should be very important for all Muslims to realize Islam is the only religion with a historically fixed origin. Its origins are totally rooted in facts, not in legends.”1
Rushdie, the epitome of Muslim renegades who was sentenced to death by Khomeini, accepts the transmitted account of the ancient Islamic history without any critique.
Revisionist Islamicists do not uncritically accept this account. This book is about their ideas. They aim their critique on the traditional account at different facets.  For instance, they refuse to use old biographies of the prophet Muhammad as historical sources for academic research on his life as they are barely supported by the Quran. The Quran does not have much to say about Muhammad; one cannot find his detailed biography in the holy text. According to revisionists, it is only possible to have an uninhibited approach to the Quran when scholars let the text speak for itself detached from unverifiable and often improbable stories about the prophet and statements attributed to him.
They want to apply the methods, which have been used since the 19th Century to research the Bible academically uninfluenced by religious convictions, even if this should, for example, lead to the conclusion that the Quran had more than one author with many of its different sections coming from various centuries.
Revisionists attribute a great importance to archeology, archeo-linguistics and numismatics (the study of coins). When archeological evidence disagrees with traditional Islamic histories, these scholars side with archeology. In particular, coin inscriptions from the earliest period of Islam often contradict what previous historians have claimed. Coins are contemporary witnesses whereas Islamic history only began to be written a few centuries later, hence the preference by revisionist scholars for the coins."

When Turkey was trying to recover from the 2001 financial crisis and reform efforts by the European Union (EU) were gaining momentum, the secretary-general of the powerful National Security Council (Milli Güvenlik Kurulu, MGK), General Tuncer Kılınç, claimed during a conference at the Istanbul Military Academies Directorate on March 7, 2002, that he opposed Turkey's membership in the EU, adding:
Turkey absolutely needs to seek new alliances. In my opinion, the best direction would be to seek an alliance with the Russian Federation, which would include Iran, without ignoring the United States — if possible. Turkey has not received any help from the European Union. The European Union has negative approaches to the problems that concern Turkey.
This statement caused shock; the army was thought to support, if not Turkey’s democratic consolidation, at least its Western orientation.

This study explores the meanings of organ donation, with emphasis on donating eyes and hearts, comparing people across gender and across two ethnic groups. Four focus group interviews were conducted with people living in the North of England: (1) five Muslim women of Pakistani origin, (2) five Muslim men of Pakistani origin, (3) nine white English women, and (4) eight white English men. The focus group interviews were analysed using grounded theory and a conceptual micro-model created for each group. The main finding was that the act of organ donation can be perceived as involving a personal cost. The Muslims of Pakistani origin related costs with their religious beliefs. In contrast, the white English associated costs with their distrust of the medical system. Women were concerned about the transmission of disease or of personality, whereas the white English men highlighted their personal rights. We conclude that the meaning of organ donation is more than about being and having a body. It is bound up in metaphors of embodiment, religious considerations, and moral judgement of scientific and medical conduct.

Focusing on Mazlumder, an Islamist human rights organization, the paper sheds light on the complex articulation of Islamism and human rights discourse in post-2002 Turkey. Based on fieldwork and on the analysis of the organization's press releases and reports on controversial public issues such as the Gezi protests, the paper argues that Mazlumder's effort should not be read through normative lenses that reduce the issue to a matter of compatibility between Islam and human rights, and suggests that the analysis should instead take into account the positional shifts of the conservative front in relation to recent internal and external turmoil.

This research aims at investigating the idea of Europe as reflected in historic board games and playing cards from the early modern period. It argues that the sense of Europe in games was developed after the geographical discoveries and the rise of the Ottomans. While on one hand
the expanding-world knowledge created a sense of European ‘Self’ as opposed to the inhabitants of newly discovered places, short-term but consistent holy leagues against the Ottomans, on the other hand, resulted in a centralized idea of Europe. This perspective reveals itself mostly in geographical board games and playing cards in which the center of the world is Europe and those in the peripheries are regarded as Europe’s Other. In a rare example, a game created by the Bolognese artist Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (1634–1718) combined three major sects of Christianity (Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox) to take a position against the Ottoman Empire. Thus, early modern games can pronounce the idea of a united Europe regardless of religious stratification. This idea will be explained by selected historic games that were published mainly in Italian, German and French speaking states between the 16th and 18th century.

Her değişim morfogeniktir.
Yani içinde düzen barındıran kaotik bir özelliğe sahiptir.
Bu anlamda Avrupa ve ABD'nin oluşturduğu Atlantik İttifakı, "avant la lettre" ile ifade edebileceğimiz adı henüz konmamış bir yıkımı/değişimi yaşıyor.
Ancak ne kadar anarşik görünse de bu yıkımdan yeni bir küresel güç mimarisi ortaya çıkacaktır.
Bundan kimsenin kuşkusu olmasın.
Rus kökenli Fransız filozof Alexandre Kojeve'nin "rejapanized" terminolojisiyle söylersek küresel sistemin yeniden organize edildiği bir süreçten geçiyoruz.
Liberal uluslararası ilişkiler dünyasının dayandığı bütün ideolojik, askeri, ekonomik, felsefi ve sosyolojik aksiyomlar, yeni baştan revizyona uğruyor.
Çünkü Batı dünyasının büyü-bozumu hızlandı.

The twenty-first century exploded into the global imagination with unforgettable scenes of death and destruction. An apocalyptic “clash of civilizations” seemed to be waged between two old foes – “the West” and “Islam.” Much of the interaction between them is characterized by a mutual lack of awareness of the vital role that each has played historically in shaping the other. Western and Muslim civilizations have demonstrated a vast capacity for productive engagement. But this long record of collaborative exchange has not prevented a contemporary escalation of the “clash of ignorance” on both sides. The complexities and subtleties of their mutually beneficial relationship are overshadowed by portrayals of unremitting conflict that promote a continuing cycle of terrorism and war. Canada and other countries have paid dearly in blood and treasure in the last one and half decades of strife, which seems fated to continue for many more years. It is time to re-imagine Western-Muslim intersections.

Μυμτάζ Σοϋσάλ, «Το πνεύμα του Νταβός και οι σχέσεις Τουρκίας-Ελλάδος», Dış Politika 2 (Ιούλιος 1988), σελ.118-127
Μümtaz Soysal, «Davos ruhu ve Türk Yunan ilişkileri» Dış Politika 2 (Temmuz 1988), s.118-127
Μümtaz Soysal, «The Spirit of Davos and Turkey-Greece Relations» Dış Politika 2 (July 1988), pp. 118-127

Both anti-democratic rulers, Kremlin's tyrant and Ankara's perfidious Islamist simulator, have good reasons to join forces. Both know that their countries will be rejected by the Berlin – Paris axis; both have open accounts with the West and for different reasons. The pathetic European Liberals, who offer a support to the Islamists of Turkey in order to cheat them, will be rewarded with unprecedented treachery from Erdogan's Islamists, if they win the forthcoming elections; it will be their way of reaction to the French Free Masonic hysterical anti-Turkism.

Both Putin and Erdogan hate America and passionately expect the ultimate confirmation of the US defeat in Iraq. The two loathsome and anti-democratic rulers know that they are rejected at home; Erdogan by the majority of the people and the military; Putin by the dozens of millions of oppressed peoples, and the democratic Russians of the persecuted parties of the opposition. That is why they need each other.

As their aficionados put it "of course Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin have done much to improve bilateral relations". The leaders created a miracle. Ten years ago it was impossible to imagine that Turkish and Russian leaders would come together for cooperation. However, today both leaders exert their utmost effort to improve commercial and cultural relations. Furthermore the strengthened ties do not bother other major world political players, including the US and the EU. There is no doubt that this is a huge diplomatic success. The Turkish public's good feelings for Putin and the Russian public's sympathy toward Tayyip Erdogan is just like a dream."

That is why they conclude that "There is no going back in Turkish-Russian relations. Above all remarkable bridges were built between the two countries; authorities from both countries who overcame huge obstacles in the fields of education, economics and culture made enormous progress by which their peoples were pleased. For this reason state figures would by no means take any steps that could be regarded as retreat from the current situation since such a move would be disruptive to historical friendship."

Russia, Turkey, Israel, and the US

The case would be still a simple political equation, if the Turkish military were still in good terms with the US.

First published in AfroArticles, American Chronicle, and Buzzle on 24th June 2007

When it come to the subject of ISIS, Turkey is the only major factor who involved in creation and support ISIS in very beginning up to now. The Turkish government, like Saudi Arabia, encouraged the rise of jihadist groups in Syria because it saw this as the best way to topple The Kurds. Turkey has a long border with Syria and has long allowed jihadists to move in freely. Once ISIS rose, Turkey support logistically and military, economically and also help them to recruit. ISIS is at war with Kurds, and Turkey is fighting Kurds for decades and of course Kurdish enemy (ISIS) is welcomed by Turkey. While the world is concern about the rise of the threat and risk of ISIS, Turkey as a NATO member and EU partner began an airstrike campaign and mass military action against one of the most effective forces (PKK, YPG) that has been crucial to stopping the advance of the ISIS terrorist. Turkey declare war against the Kurdish nation and while committed genocide in front of the world views but EU and US keep silence. European Union is turning a blind eye also to the human rights violations, war crimes and attack on the Kurdish areas of Syria, committed by the Turkish Government in order avoid refugees coming through Turkey to Europe. This is not only a neglect of the democratic forces and European values this could also lead to a brutal civil war in Turkey with thousands of civilian casualties and huge numbers of refugees. Furthermore this aggressive policy from the Turkish Government could further increase violence in the whole region. The EU is to speed up the allocation of €3bn in aid to Turkey to ''help'' migrants. Now EU face consequence. Paris massacre and Brussels massacre are the result of EU's genericity toward Turkey who create ISIS, refugee crisis, radical Islam, fascism and brutality! Who else to blame?!