Home How European Tolerance Islamized Turkey
Home How European Tolerance Islamized Turkey

How European Tolerance Islamized Turkey

There was a time when Turkey was a modern example to the rest of the Muslim world. And there was one fundamental reason for that. It was because Turkey realized that it could either be a backward Muslim colony of Europe, or it could put Islam in its place, and reform in order to try to keep up with Europe. And there is also a fundamental reason why that brand of reform has not come to the rest of the Muslim world. It is because they never had to learn that same lesson.

While the Ottoman Empire had once threatened Europe when both were getting by on the remnants of skills and knowledge from the Roman days, but as Europe progressed, the conquerors of Byzantium could not keep up. And so the Ottoman Empire became the Sick Man of Europe, and the nations of Europe fought major wars over who would have first dibs on carving up its territory. The last of those conflicts was World War I. And so Turkey was faced with a decision. To try and compete with Europe by becoming like the Europeans, or becoming just another colony.

But while Turkey modernized, the Muslim nations of the Middle East instead followed a completely different paradigm. And they succeeded for two reasons. Oil. And the willingness of First and Second World powers to pander to them. Where Turkey had to learn to do things the hard way, to separate mosque from state and try to build modern institutions, a bunch of backward desert sheiks were lucky enough to take control of barren regions where infidel geologists found oil. Those sheiks were also lucky enough to stumble into a perfect era of infidel infighting that allowed them to play Americans against the Europeans against the Russians. Not long after the sheiks had more money than they could count, which meant that they didn't need to modernize, instead they could buy all the American and European technology they wanted, and even import actual Americans and Europeans to do the work for them.

Of course the Saudi, Emirati or Kuwaiti way was none too feasible for Muslim countries without a whole lot of oil under their feet-- but that didn't matter. Because money bought them a whole lot of cultural warfare. While US troops guarded the fat sheiks from any neighbors who were investing their money into building a military-- the Saudis spent their money on foreign investments and on building up the Islamic takeover of Europe and America. Where post-war terrorism by Muslims had begun as Soviet proxy attacks on Britain, America and Israel-- it discarded its red Marxist outer shell to reveal its green Islamist interior. Not long after the the USSR fell, Middle Eastern terrorism was swiftly taking on a wholly Islamist coloration. A coloration heavily funded by oil money.

The Saudi model showed that modernization did not require modern thinking. It showed that Muslim countries could still be Islamist, and still have all the benefits of modern living. All it took was money. While Turkey was busy being Europe's backward cousin, the Saudis were gorging themselves on Western delicacies, importing foreign architects and landscape planners, models, entertainers and huge numbers of slaves from Southeast Asia. In doing so they made their larger point, which is that Western civilization was a commodity that could be bought, and that it was possible to have it all, the raw meat of Islam and the fruits of the West on one plate. Western civilization was for sale.

Turkey had reformed because civilization had proven to be the strong horse, and Islam the weak horse. When the balance shifted, civilization was revealed as the weak force, and Islam as the strong force. And not only did we not try to turn the tide, our governments affirmed this with everything they did, both in their domestic policies toward Muslim immigrants, and their foreign policy toward Muslim nations. Call it appeasement or dhimmism, what they did not only devalued them individually and nationally, it devalued the very idea that civilization was superior to medieval barbarism, and destroyed the very forces that might have modernized the Muslim world.

A generation later, the tide of Muslim immigrants to Europe learned the same lesson as well. After some initial fuss about integration, they could also combine Islamism and Western civilization. It was possible for them to be doctors, dentists, lords and engineers-- while at the same time believing they had a duty to force their new hosts to bow to the god of Islam, first seen by Mohammed on a three day bender in the desert. And if they had any qualms about it, their local petrodollar mosques were sure to fix that. And if not them, then their children.

Turkish guest workers saw this all firsthand. Which made the idea that Turkey had to be secular in order for Turks to benefit from the modern world seem all the more absurd. That sort of thinking might have made sense back in the day when Her Majesty's Armies were administering an empire, but not when Islamist preachers were hectoring the masses and jeering at returning soldiers in the heart of her kingdom.

Western civilization had not only shown itself to be for sale, but its secularism and modernity were instead revealed to be weaknesses. Any Muslim in Europe could not help but realize that it was the very lack of principles that made it so ripe for the plucking. The way of Ataturk had ceased to make sense. The way of the House of Saud on the other hand was looking pretty good. Or even the Way of Bin Laden.

European tolerance for Islam eliminated any real reason for Turkey not to become Islamist. As Erdogan has demonstrated, it is possible to run a country that continues to deny genocide, oppresses minorities and has jails filled with political prisoners. That openly supports terrorism and Islamism-- and yet is on track for membership in the European Union. Erdogan does not need to dig up Ataturk and turn him upside down-- the Great Tolerators of Europe were already doing it for him.

Where Ataturk knew that Turkey had to modernize, the Islamist believes that modernity is a sham. That Islamic science has already discovered everything worth discovering and that what the West calls modernity is nothing more than an excuse for wanton immorality and a lack of principles. The modern European Muslim is increasingly coming around to that way of thinking. And thought that way of thinking may be a sham, it is a reasonably successful one, because Europe itself is propping up its underlying assumptions.

Where the Sick Man of Europe had to choose between modernity and Islam-- the modern Muslim need make no such choices. He can listen to Islamist preachers ranting on YouTube, compel patients at his medical office to comply with Islamic laws and have his wife cover her face when she goes outside.

Progress comes from challenges. Challenges demand that you overcome the obstacles holding you back. The Muslim world no longer has challenges. Instead the door has been thrown open for them with no demands or expectations. Islam is not held accountable in the way that other religions are. Muslims are not held accountable for one of the world's largest and longest ongoing killing sprees. Muslim countries are not held accountable for everything from the genocide of millions to barbaric acts of torture and mutilation.

This is the soft bigotry of low expectations. Nothing is expected from Muslims, which only helps the Islamists make the case that Western civilization is hopelessly decadent and weak, and that imitation it would be a mistake. All the fawning praise directed at the "Religion of Peace" feeds that cycle, reaffirming the Islamists' arrogance and sense of destiny as those they think of as enemies foolishly give way to them. That is the attitude Hitler had as he realized that the nations that seemed overwhelmingly powerful were not going to stop him. It is the same attitude you can easily see among Islamists, whose sense of cultural invulnerability is running at an all time high.

Build a mosque near Ground Zero, and you prove that the West does not even value the graves of its martyred dead. Set off a bomb in a crowded cafe and snicker as the governments of the dead rush to assure you that they hold no ill will toward the same ideology responsible. Cover your wife from head to toe on pain of death and watch feminist organizations assure the public that it is the feminist thing to do. To Muslims, Western civilization has gone from a bogeyman to a pathetic joke. Which meant that the Islamization of Muslim countries that had made some concession to Western civilization was a foregone conclusion.

Paradoxically enough it was European tolerance that helped Islamize Turkey, as it has helped Islamize its own resident Muslims. Its tolerance has only fed intolerance. By acting like the conquered, they have only attracted conquerors. By failing to challenge Islam, they discredited their nations and their way of life in the eyes of men faced with a choice between honorable barbarism and dishonorable accommodation to civilization's burdens. And the children of those men are murdering them in the streets of their own cities today.


(Spanish language translation at REFLEXIONES SOBRE MEDIO ORIENTE Y EL MUNDO)

Comments

  1. You wrote:

    Build a mosque near Ground Zero, and you prove that the West does not even value the graves of its martyred dead. Set off a bomb in a crowded cafe and snicker as the governments of the dead rush to assure you that they hold no ill will toward the same ideology responsible. Cover your wife from head to toe on pain of death and watch feminist organizations assure the public that it the feminist thing to do. To Muslims, Western civilization has gone from a bogeyman to a pathetic joke.

    That sir, is pure gold.

    Thank you.

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  2. Turkey needs to get stuffed.
    I like the Erdogan/hitler photoshop.

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  3. Sammish15/6/10

    Excellent description of an often misunderstood concept of "cultural lag". In this case, this lag is progressively regressive and exponentially growing in changing the cultural landscape of western democratic values to the worst possible outcome.
    Sociologically speaking the concept of cultural lag means that there is a discrepancy or incompatibility between ideology (how people think, believe, ideas in general etc...) and technology (material culture, as all the things people creates: artifacts, commodities, as such money, medicine, oil).
    Islamic cultures have been for quite a time the main examples of cultural lag, because their way of thinking which is religiously based, does not concord with modern technology. People can simply deny women driving cars, although the car remains the most reliable and the simplest method for women to be free and be secure in privacy in their front car seat. The same analogy applies to modern electronic gadgets. How can this be? The case of western countries was totally different. Western civilization adapted to these technological advancements. For example, one cannot simply allow and give women birth control methods without allowing them to be productive part of society with their education, skills, knowhow and FREEDOM. To deny them this, is simply social engineering and a bleak reminder of Orwellian and Zemayatin negative utopias.
    Although the Islamic world does not in its entirety deny women the use of contraceptives, it is still not widely accepted (even among the so-called secular countries) maybe because of its impact of women possible control of their reproductive rights and hence their social freedom of patriarchy and religious conformity. It is this lag that you talked about that is at the heart of the problem that western countries need to face. This lag can no longer be called lag in its conventional definition. It should be renamed appropriately as push over button that Islamic culture is deliberately using in order to exert its influence (if not to say control) worldwide.
    The use of technology to further one's ideological and religious agenda has been with us for a long time. Western technology can no longer be seen as a vehicule for secularization of Islamic nations as once was thought by social scientists. They naively thought that through diffusion of technology and ideas from one culture to the other that adaptation or mutation mechanism will take place in which fundamental change will occur in the recipient culture. How can one be Bedouin if irrigation is developed? How can one remain traditionalist and insular if cars, pills, modern campuses, TVs became the norms? Unfortunately I believe that the reverse is at play right now. An insidious reversal of fortune in which the recipient culture is using the technology and modern knowhow to subvert and highjack the mother culture from which the technology has emerged. In Islamic countries, technology is the Modus Operandi to expand its influence, not a vehicule for its internal adaptive changes toward democratic and universal values.

    This process is at least put to roll on behalf of Islam in Western countries. I said insidious before. Its early success may rely on its stealth cover and its Taqiya methodology the deceptive strategy of war of ideologies. Technology can be used to undermine societies, because what matter the most here is ideology an Islamic ideology that does not change no matter what or who challenges it. It could be that the principles of democratic values and freedom of speech so often taken for granted in the West in association and tandem with modern technological knowhow are used to propel this new "solution" to “their “ Islamic cultural lag into social and cultural experimentation. And I believe that this experimentation is bearing some fruits as the cases of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Gulf states have shown.

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  4. I fully concur that Islam itself is the enemy and, for the reasons stated.

    You correctly state, "The Saudi model showed that modernization did not require modern thinking. It showed that Muslim countries could still be Islamist, and still have all the benefits of modern living. All it took was money."

    From that observation you further conclude, "Western civilization had not only shown itself to be for sale, but its secularism and modernity were instead revealed to be weaknesses."

    The money will end. Historically, oil is a transitional fuel source for a modern civilization. When the M.E. oil fields decline so will the money. This is a primary reason why the West should be pursuing long-term research into practical, economically vital alternative energy sources. While pursuing nuclear and coal resources and developing our own oil reserves.

    Secularism and modernity, per se are not inherently weak.

    It is post-modernism with its attendant nihilism, PC concepts like social justice and Just War Theory and socialism that are driving the West's capitulation and appeasement.

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  5. Anonymous16/6/10

    until I saw your blog, I could not believe such sites exist! incredible..

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  6. Anonymous17/6/10

    Very good indeed.

    Yet islam has no true future prospects, because it has ceased to be alive.

    By this I do not mean that islam was once a great and wonderful civilization. It never was.

    But once it was alive, meaning that once it had a purpose as a spiritual religion. No it was never moral. Yet for brief span of centuries a true religion none the less.

    The fall of the ottoman empire sealed its fate.

    It is now nothing more than the sex-death-crime cult of good old sick Muhammad it started out as.

    Too bad many, many more people still have to die before it withers away.

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  7. The Achillie's heel of Islam is Mecca, Media and Qom. With the loss of Adolph Hitler, the Nazi ideology of 'National Socialism' evaporated. The same will happen with the thermonuclear obliteration of these cities. With nothing but smoking craters to signal the direction in which to point their butts at God, Islam will fold. Islam worships violence above all other things.

    At some point, the outrages of Jihadists armed with WMD will wake the west up and force its hand. In a final existential confrontation of the West vs Islam, the outcome is an ugly but foregone conclusion.

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  8. The Infidel Alliance20/6/10

    Dear 'el vompo',

    The Achillie's heel of Islam is not its three 'holy' cities, but rather its one 'holy' prophet, Muhammed.

    According to Islamic lore, Allah selected Muhammed to be a messenger of Islamic morality and Islamic law, and through the mouth of this illiterate messenger, Allah projected his unalterable, immutable words as recorded in the Koran.

    In his omniscient perfection, Allah proclaimed in his immutable words “Wa-innaka laAAala khuluqin AAatheemin” or "And verily, you (O Muhammad SAW) are on an exalted standard of character."( Koran 68:4al-Qalam (The Pen) )

    Upon this foundation, Islamic tradition uphold Muhammed as 'al-insan al-kamil' or 'the perfect man', the moral compass and role model for all Muslims to emulate.

    But the hard truth about Muhammed, as recorded in the Islamic 'holy' texts, is that far from being a a 'holy prophet' Muhammed was a sadistic sociopath.

    Muhammed was a murderer, torturer, amputator, decapitator, slaver, looting stealing thief, rapist, human trafficker, perfidious liar, sex trafficker, pedophile rapist, sexual deviant, genocidist and self proclaimed terrorist.

    Muhammed was perhaps one of the most vile men in the pantheon of human history, a brutal barbarian consumed by unquenchable sexual lust, greed and power.

    By any objective standard, Muhammed should have been incarcerated not venerated, reviled not revered. Yet this is the man who provides the 'moral' foundation of Islam???

    To destroy Islam, we need to destroy the foundation that it was built upon. That foundation is the myth of Muhammed. If we destroy the myth of Muhammed, not with guns, bombs or thermonuclear devices, but rather with the simple truth, Islam will collapse under the weight of the truth.

    The destruction of Islam is the greatest human rights imperative that mankind has ever been called to. Please help by exposing the truth about Muhammed.

    ~The Infidel Alliance

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  9. Infidel Alliance,

    What you say is true, which is not to say that it will be easy or quick for how do you destroy a myth?

    Muslims will simply say (and believe) that it's all a lie. Human beings rationalize. Just look to the 41% support Obama still has, even now. Look to the absolute refusal of the majority of liberals to examine their own 'philosophy's' premises...

    So, how do you destroy a myth?

    Laughter, parody, redicule and satire are excellent places to begin; The Three Terrors ;-)

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  10. el vompo: you are right. Think about Muslims getting access to chemical/biological/nuclear/nano tech weapons. Humanity will be luckly to survive the twenty-first century.

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  11. I agree,destruction of mecca etc will only result in anger and violence, destroy the lie that is Mohammed with the truth.The Roman Empire fell from within and so must Islam.

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  12. everything with Muslims results in anger and violence,

    and very few people if ever have been convinced by the truth

    I don't believe that Islam will ever have a stable caliphate, barring the rise of an effective tyrant, but that will only be a temporary matter too

    that is not the problem.

    Much of the world has been made Muslim through conquest in different forms

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  13. Tolerance of Islam in Europe against the better instincts of any rational human being did not start with the flood of Islamic immigrants. It started with the end of the wars for freedom from the Catholic church. Tolerance rose from the Cold War in Protestant countries who believed that open societies were the greatest weapon against Catholic tyranny to become a social institution of itself. This "tolerance" was slowly milked by the Catholics until they have taken power in Protestant countries and have used their authority to let the Muslims in. And who are we obliged to look for guidance away from this plague except Catholics themselves. And this is not the first time that Muslims have taken over Europe.

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  14. Anonymous23/3/13

    I completely concur with your views on Islam, may i also add that , the Quran was a fabrication based on stories from the Torah and Bible .These were modified to suit the Mohammed (an illiterate douche )and his pedophilic and disgusting lifestyle of hate and intolerance to non Muslims(Arabs)and women(treated them as sex objects )
    If you observe international affairs, there are grave tensions where ever there is a Muslim presence :North Africa ,Nigeria, Somalia,West Asia (Israel against its neighboring Arab countries),Philippines, India, Myanmar,more recently migrants Muslim populations in France, England other European states.

    Islam preaches hate , intolerance.It has done this from its inception ,it shall do it it till its demise.Its Quran is the world deadliest weapon, cause it corrupts the mind.

    ReplyDelete

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