Turkish Tyrant Erdogan Creating Another Islamic Theocracy, In Turkey

To the list of states taken over by Islam, it's time to add Turkey.

Also add it to the list of repressive theocracies backed and armed to the teeth by the U.S., along with Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf sheikdoms in the orbit of Saudi Arabia. And then there's Pakistan. And Indonesia too, increasingly Islamist.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the incessantly power-grabbing ruler of that increasingly repressive land, has unilaterally changed the curriculum in Turkish schools to create "a pious generation." A generation of religious zealots, like in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and other lands.

The new curriculum eliminates natural selection (aka "Darwinism"), the science of the biological evolution of life on earth, for starters. It also teaches Jihad as a righteous defense of the nation, a "love of the homeland." (The obvious corollary- those who criticize Erdogan hate the homeland and thus are traitors.) No claiming that jihad means "inner struggle to be a better person" as those self-appointed Muslim spokesMEN- always men- in the West- maybe ONLY in the West, or at least mostly- insist is the "real" meaning of the term jihad, because Islam Is A Religion Of Peace, as their slogan goes. Perhaps they should trademark that so they can sue people like me who use it ironically.

To ensure "a pious generation," prayer rooms are to be installed in all schools.

Meanwhile, scholars are being tried as "terrorists," 180 journalists are in jail, part of 50,000 prisoners arrested as "coup plotters," along with another 150,000 people fired from their jobs as alleged co-conspirators in the recent failed military coup. Must be the largest conspiracy in history!

Erdogan, who fancies himself as a latter-day Sultan and dreams of recreating something like the Ottoman Empire, recently rammed through by referendum (with many irregularities and a campaign of suppression against opponents) a revision of Turkish constitutional provisions that grants greatly increased powers to himself. He has already spent several years unilaterally firing and replacing judges, police, and prosecutors, successfully squelching corruption cases against himself and his minions.

Recently some of Erdogan's bodyguards were indicted in the U.S. for assault. On a previous visit, Erdogan was offended by protesters yelling at him, so he sicced his goons on them, hospitalizing 9 protesters, as Erdogan watched. Now he complains that the American police failed to stop the protesters from yelling "insults" at him, clearly something he regards as intolerable. (What the police should have done, but didn't, was arrest Erdogan's "security" thugs.)

Turkey has only had a brief period of relative democracy and freedom. After the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War I (1914-1918), during which the Turks committed the Armenian Genocide, killing over a million Armenians (which emboldened Hitler to carry out the Holocaust: Hitler said "Who, after all, remembers the Armenian massacre?"), Turkey was ruled by the autocrat Ataturk, who forcibly secularized and modernized the country. Since Ataturk, torture and police abuses, and the repression of the Kurdish minority, have been near-constant feature of Turkish society. The military frequently seized overt control, with U.S. blessing.

With the successful political dominance of Erdogan's Islamist party, Turkey is back again to being a repressive place. A key NATO ally, which the U.S. has long relied on for military air bases, and during the Cold War as a spy base against the SovIet Union (including flying U-2 spy planes from Turkey), and now needs to wage its aerial campaign against ISIS in Syria, Turkey largely gets a pass from the U.S. Erdogan has leverage over the EU because Turkey is damning up the flood of Syrian refugees from trying to get to Europe, and the Europeans are desperate to continue that arrangement.

There is some friction over the fact that the U.S. is using Kurdish fighters as its army on the ground against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, while Turkey seeks to annihilate all armed Kurds. The U.S. agrees that one Kurdish resistance group, the PKK, is "terrorist," and tolerates Turkish airstrikes and artillery bombardment of the PKK in Syria. The U.S. has repeatedly used, abused, and double-crossed the Kurds, and is currently doing so again, deporting Kurds from the U.S., and opposing the creation of a Kurdish semi-state in northern Iraq. That's the gratitude the U.S. shows for the Kurds spilling their own blood to be the U.S.' army against ISIS.