In the last 12 months alone, Turkish President Erdogan has closed at least 15 universities and confiscated their property. Invoking Article 301 of the Turkish penal code — which amorphously criminalizes insults to “Turkishness,” the Turkish government or the Turkish military — he has also closed down numerous publishing houses. He has forced Turkish journals to remove from their editorial boards scholars who criticize him. Hundreds have been fired and blacklisted. Unable to work in Turkey and, with their passports confiscated, unable to leave, they represent the worst-case scenario of every comfortable Western academic who has ever bemoaned the “chilling effect” of Republican presidents and congresses, or who have proclaimed as “McCarthyism” any criticism of their own work.
Real suppression, however, making their persecution fantasies seem absurd, is mostly met with silence. Where is the moral indignation? Yet, there is no shortage of howls of “injustice” and BDS movements criticizing even the slightest perceived infringement of human rights in Israel, a country that ensures human rights and equality under the law to all its citizens.
But when it comes to Turkey — sssshhhhhh… Right now, the silence of these organizations tells more about them and their real motives than about the object of their unjustified indignation: Israel.
In Turkey, academics are currently at the mercy of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who demands their compliance and threatens dissenters. After last July’s failed coup (for which Erdogan blamed an American scholar), a series of emergency decrees have specifically targeted Turkish academia. One would think this assault would raise ire from the ivory towers, but as Turkey slides deeper into totalitarianism, academia yawns. The failure of many professors to stand up vigorously and publicly for what they profess is especially notable in those whose careers are focused on the demonization of Israel through various attempts to destroy Israel by suffocating it economically.
All right, it is summer break and everyone is off doing research, writing novels and looking for grant money. But Erdogan’s crackdown is not new. Most of it was ignored until January 2016 when he targeted a group of Turkish scholars who called themselves “Academics for Peace” for producing a petition demanding that the Turkish government “end the massacre of the Kurdish people.”
The 1128 original signatories of a petition, written in Turkey in January 2016, that demanded the Turkish government “end the massacre of the Kurdish people,” were subjected to sustained attacks and threats from the government and nationalist groups. Pictured: Some of the signatories of the “Academics for Peace” petition pose in front of a banner reading, “We will not be a party to this crime.”
Since the failed coup, Erdogan has increasingly behaved like a paranoid dictator flexing his muscles. In the last 12 months alone, he has closed at least 15 universities and confiscated their property. Invoking Article 301 of the Turkish penal code – which amorphously criminalizes insults to “Turkishness,” the Turkish government or the Turkish military – he has also closed down numerous publishing houses. He has forced Turkish journals to remove from their editorial boards scholars who criticize him. Hundreds have been fired and blacklisted. Unable to work in Turkey and, with their passports confiscated, unable to leave, they represent the worst-case scenario of every comfortable Western academic who has ever bemoaned the “chilling effect” of Republican presidents and congresses, or who have proclaimed as “McCarthyism” any criticism of their own work. Real suppression, however, making their persecution fantasies seem absurd, is mostly met with silence. Where is the moral indignation? Yet, there is no shortage of howls of “injustice” and BDS movements criticizing even the slightest perceived infringement of human rights in Israel, a country that ensures human rights and equality under the law to all its citizens.
A letter condemning the Erdogan regime and supporting the persecuted academics is the bare minimum one might expect from an easily-piqued group of people who write for a living. Escalations in severity might include organized protests, media events and other kinds of activism to reach audiences beyond readers of The Chronicle of Higher Education and InsideHigherEd. Enlisting the help of celebrities comes next, followed by attempts at isolation in one of the few ways possible to an academic institution, such as cancelling conferences and sporting events convened in the offending state or country. Next come boycotts, calls for divesture of university-controlled funds and sanctioning various individuals.
So how has the academic industrial complex reacted to Turkey? While their Turkish colleagues in the US are intimidated into silence by threats to their families back in Turkey, most of academia seems still traumatized by the defeat of Hillary Clinton in November 2016. Aside from the proverbial “strongly-worded letters,” academia’s wheels of outrage seem stuck in neutral. If half of the opprobrium consistently leveled at democratic Israel were applied to autocratic Turkey, it might bolster the anti-Semitic claims Israel is not being treating differently than every other country on the planet.
The Middle East Studies Association (MESA), which clearly supports the attempts to smother Israel through economic means, has been the most active of all academic groups in its condemnation of Erdogan. Many of the facts of Erdogan’s crackdown are accurately described in the dozens of letters MESA has sent to Erdogan, Ahmet Davutoglu and Binali Yildirim. But there are no apparent signs of protests or other forms of activism usually deployed by MESA’s leadership. Its website suggests that today MESA is far more focused on the Trump administration than on the Middle East.
