Here's a picture of a Turkish woman carrying a cannon round to the front during WW1:
Posted on 11/22/2003 9:19:41 AM PST by quidnunc
In the fanatic Islamist mind, there are a thousand reasons to hit Turkey. It begins with history, and the fact that the Ottoman Empire, with its metropolitan centre in Istanbul, was the last universal Muslim caliphate. This fell in the upshot of the First World War — the empire was dissolved and distributed among the victorious European powers — but the Turkish heartland remained independent, becoming the nation-state of Turkey. Under Ataturk, it was vigorously secularized and Westernized, with outward signs of its Islamic past suppressed. The country has ever since wobbled back and forth between military authoritarianism and constitutional democracy. To this day, the Turkish army is recognized as having the right to enforce the constitution against any errant elected government.
In the rhetoric of Osama bin Laden, and other Islamists, the Ottoman Caliphate is frequently evoked. The theme of Turkish apostasy is also played upon to Arab audiences with an historical memory of Ottoman imperial rule. In Europe, in the old days, the Ottomans were called the "infidel Turk," and curiously, the same expression is now common in the Arab countries. The fact that Turkey alone among the Muslim states of the region gives constitutional protection and legal equality to its Christian and Jewish minorities is often mentioned as an outrage. One of the most fundamental Islamic principles is the inferior legal status of non-Muslims.
More recent history has confirmed the unhappy relationship between Turks and Arabs. For the first time in its modern history, a consciously Islamic religious party has risen to power in Turkish elections. There was much anxiety about this in the West, but the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has proved faithful to modern Turkish traditions. It continues to apply (hopelessly) for membership in the European Union. It continues to ignore demands for the institution of sharia law. It continues to belong not only to NATO but to a special tripartite military alliance with the U.S. and Israel. It governs, as the Hindu religious party in India, just as if it were another secular political party, offering mere sops to its more enthusiastic supporters. It has thus tended to confirm that Turkey is permanently a part of the West, not the East.
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(Excerpt) Read more at canada.com ...
Stay safe!
Tia
This made me smile. I think the women in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran are also waiting for a chance to be where the women of Turkey are politically.
Love your comparison of liberals and conservatives on your home page, too. You are so right that the libs always have the 'grown-ups' to fall back on when their experimentation goes awry.
If you want to bookmark his articles discussed at FR: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/k-davidwarren/browse
His own website: http://www.davidwarrenonline.com
His page at the Ottawa Citizen: http://www.canada.com/ottawa/ottawacitizen/columnists/davidwarren.html
Quote from David Warren:
While the actual targets were Jewish synagogues last week and a British consulate and bank this week, it appears that Turkish public opinion was not impressed. The effect of the bombings has been to weld together the Erdogan administration and the Turkish military, who previously looked suspiciously upon each other. And the Turkish generals, commanding the most powerful army in the Middle East, are now aching to strike back at Syria and possibly Iran, which are believed to be sheltering the organizers of the Istanbul bombings. Another sleeping giant has been waked.
Al-Qaeda and its allies have, it seems, seriously miscalculated. Turkey in the future will be a much more reliable and active ally to the U.S. The recent blasts in Saudi Arabia -- in which Muslim Arabs were the intended victims -- have meanwhile tended to confirm that al-Qaeda has lost the financial support of senior Saudi princes (who paid "protection money"). The failure to mount terrorist strikes in London during U.S. President George W. Bush's visit speaks for itself; Istanbul was the closest they could get.
All these things, on top of new regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, are evidence that Bush and company are making progress. But the bloodletting is far from over.
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