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2 Why does Turkey hate
America? By Spengler
With Turkish troops poised to invade the
Kurdish sector of Iraq over Washington's protests,
it seems helpful to understand why Turks hate
America more than any other people in the world.
This is surprising given the 60-year history of
military alliance, a thriving Turkish economy and
functioning democratic institutions.
In
June 2007, the Pew Research Center polled citizens
of 47 countries on their attitude toward the US.
Turkey turned up at rock bottom, with 83% of
respondents holding an unfavorable view
of the
United States and only 9% of Turks expressing a
favorable view, compared to 21% of Egyptians and
29% of Indonesians. [1] In 2000, 52% of Turks
expressed a favorable view of the United States.
This is not a general result. Only 46% of
Nigerians held a favorable view of the United
States in 2000, for example, compared to 70% in
2007.
A national tantrum against the
United States is in full flourish, expressed in
popular culture through such things as the rabidly
anti-American film Valley of the Wolves.
Wildly successful, and hailed by most of Turkey's
leading politicians, the film shows American
soldiers shooting Iraqi civilians in order to
harvest their organs for sale to Jewish doctors.
From the American way of looking at things, the
Turks seem to have gone barking mad.
There
are many obvious reasons for Turkish discomfort
about America, but the intensity of Turkish hatred
had me puzzled - until I read a two-year-old paper
by Omar Taspinar, the resident Turkey expert at
the Brookings Institution. [2] The culprit, he
argued convincingly, is Washington's misguided
promotion of Turkey as a model of "moderate
Islam". The abominable stupidity of American
policy towards the region - I would use stronger
words if I could find them - is in large measure
responsible for the looming catastrophe.
Professor Taspinar, who also teaches at
the National War College, is one of America's
best-known experts on his native country, and I am
chagrined to have overlooked his analysis until
now. He places most of the blame on Washington's
portrayal of Turkey as a paragon of the "moderate
Islam" it wants to sell to the rest of the Muslim
world.
As I wrote last week, the
humiliating spectacle of Washington trying to
squelch a congressional resolution on the Armenian
genocide points up fundamental failings in
American foreign policy, as well as foundational
flaws within Turkey itself. Taspinar’s paper in
the main reinforces my view of Turkey’s weakness;
Turkish rage and paranoia express conflicts in its
national identity.
Dr. Taspinar writes,
As the Cold War came to an end, so
did the era of ideology. It was as if Turkey had
suddenly once again returned to its formative
decades of the 1920s and 1930s, during which
Ataturk's Ankara faced multiple Kurdish-Islamic
rebellions challenging the secularist and
nationalist precepts of Kemalism. This is mainly
because the central point that I would like to
emphasize is that Turkey’s anti-Americanism
essentially stems from Turkey’s own identity
dilemma. At its roots, Turkey’s current wave of
distrust of the United States is Kemalist
identity problem.
By promoting
"moderate Islam" on the Turkish model, Taspinar
adds, America undermined the secular state founded
by Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern
Turkish state after the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire after World War I. That is why secular
Turkish nationalists hate America just as much as
Turkish Islamists.
Taspinar writes:
America's advocacy of "moderate
Islam" against the "radical Islam" in the Middle
East worries Turkey the most. Turkey being
portrayed as a model within the moderate Islam
project has been conceived as a support for the
moderate Islam in Turkey, thereby led to a clash
between America’s approach and Turkey’s laic and
Kemalist identity. Already alarmed over the
landslide victory of Justice and Development
Party (AKP), the Republic’s laic reflexes have
become overwhelmingly concerned with the "model"
expression of the US, which allegedly promoted
Turkey’s moderate Muslim identity. In the
aftermath of his victory, Washington’s
invitation to the AKP Chairman Tayyip Erdogan,
who was not confirmed as a prime minister then,
was perceived [by the Turkish intellectuals] as
the weakening of the secular foundations of
Ataturk’s republic by the United
States.
Ataturk suppressed Islam
ruthlessly, banning Islamic dress, emancipating
women, requiring universal secular education, and
crushing armed Islamist resistance to his reforms.
Ultimately he failed; the artificial secular
culture of Turkishness that Ataturk sought to
conjure from the pre-Islamic Anatolian past left a
vacuum which the new Islamism gradually has
filled. Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, as I
reported earlier, portrays this vividly in his
novel, Snow.
Turkey is enmeshed in
a terrible battle for its national identity, in
which neither the secular nor the Islamist parties
have any use for "moderate Islam". The Islamists
do not wish to be moderate, and the Kemalists know
that the Islamists are not moderate. By pursing
the phantasm of a "moderate" Islam as harmless as
George W Bush’s Methodism, Washington’s
strategists have succeeded in enraging both sides
in the battle.
I have never believed that
such a thing as "moderate Islam" exists, any more
than I believe that "moderate Christianity"
exists. Either Jesus Christ died to take away the
sins of the
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