BENEFITS OF ISLAMOPHOBIA
By Orhan Kemal Cengiz

Today’s Zaman
June 12 2009
Turkey

For some time, there has been an interesting trend among "white Turks"
(this half-witty term refers to Westernized secular Turks, who are
not Kurdish or Alevi, and definitely not devout Muslims).

This is their apparent sympathy toward Turkey’s non-Muslims. Ah, how
sweet they are. One columnist at the Hurriyet daily — the number
one white Turk newspaper — revealed that his step-grandmother was
Armenian. After passing his 60s, he "confessed" this and expressed his
sympathy toward non-Muslims. Another columnist from the same newspaper
wrote an emotional piece about his Greek Orthodox friend, a Turkish
citizen who wanted to be a marine colonel, but was turned down because
of his ethnic identity — this is a well-established state tradition
in "secular" Turkey: non-Muslims cannot be state officials, hence
you cannot see a single military or police officer who is of Greek,
Jewish or Armenian descent. This columnist, all of a sudden, became
sensitive to the fact that his old non-Muslim friend was not able
to realize his childhood dream. What is the reason for this sudden
illumination? He has been a columnist for ages. He and his friend
of Greek descent have known each other for a long time, but he wrote
this emotional column, in which he invites white Turks to understand
and to be sympathetic to his friend’s pain, just a few weeks ago.

Both of the columnists I just mentioned work and write for a newspaper
that has a very strange motto: "Turkey belongs to Turks." Now, what
would you think if columnists of a German newspaper whose motto reads
"Germany belongs to Germans" all of a sudden started expressing their
sympathy towards Jews? Wouldn’t you be a little suspicious?

An interesting survey

Well, I was a little suspicious. While I was trying to understand the
reason behind this sudden love-fest between Turkey’s white Turks and
non-Muslims, I came across a recent survey carried out by Professor
Fusun Ustel and Associate Professor Birol Caymaz. The survey’s title
is "Elites and Social Distance." The stated aim of the survey was to
understand how Turkey’s elites see themselves and "others." It is an
interesting study, and you can read a brief summary of it in the June
6 edition of Today’s Zaman ("’Elite’ Turks unwilling to share power,
prosperity with ‘others’"). According to this survey, the elites —
the white Turks — see themselves as the carriers and protectors of
the republic and its values. This is not surprising of course. There
is something else, however, which is really interesting: almost all
participants in the survey have non-Muslim friends and they speak
sympathetically about their problems. When I looked at the other
parts of the survey, I understood the root causes of this "sympathy."

Islamophobia

According to the survey, the participants consider Justice and
Development Party (AK Party) deputies "occupiers" who do not deserve to
be represented in Parliament. One of the participants says she abhors
seeing a woman wearing a headscarf in the Cankaya presidential palace,
referring to the wife of President Abdullah Gul.

Another participant states that she is irritated when she sees a
covered woman around: "I try to act as if there are no women wearing
headscarves around me. But there are too many of them," she says. She
and almost all the others surveyed detest the idea of covered women
attending universities. They also have quite a close-minded stance
when it comes to the Kurdish question and the issues surrounding it.

How should we comment on their sympathy towards non-Muslims? I think,
first of all, their interest is shallow, devoid of any real empathy
or depth. When we look at the other parts of the survey, we can see
how shallow they are. "We prefer not to talk about the problems of
minority groups," one of them says. "We are afraid our relations may
get tense if we do so." Another one unveils his ignorance, saying,
"Non-Muslims may have been subjected to injustice in the past, but
the situation is very different now."

Selective tolerance

Basically, our secular Turkish elites have become sympathetic to the
bourgeois, well-educated, non-Muslim figure as an individual because
they are now extremely allergic to devout Muslims who compete with
them in business and who have started to be more and more visible in
commerce, industry and manufacturing sectors. Secular elites cannot
tolerate and digest this new religious middle class. How can the
underclass of the past, the practicing Muslims, dare to be equal to
them? They are sympathetic to non-Muslims because they do not see
them as a threat to their economic interests any longer.

Our non-Muslims are so few now, so how can they be a threat? Once
upon a time, they were the "fifth column"; they were the ones who
were detested. So our elites put their message on the most visible
part of their favorite newspaper: "Turkey belongs to Turks." This
paper, and its predecessors, were the ones who actively encouraged
pogroms against non-Muslims, and they achieved their aim of
getting rid of the non-Muslims through their endless hate-mongering
campaigns[1]. Non-Muslims left, but their property stayed here, so
our elites have no problem with them any longer. Of course, this is
true to the extent that the individual non-Muslim remains silent and
does not bring up any ugly history. If he is a good boy in this way,
then he can be a friend of our Turkish elites, who now have a big
problem with practicing Muslims.

In other words, the Turkish elites have new enemies to hate so the
old ones can be left alone. The old motto has died, long live the new
motto, "Turkey belongs to secular Turks." Not a terribly impressive
sign of tolerance — what do you think?

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress