RUTHFULLY YOURS

In 2007, in a highly controversial move, Keith Hakim Ellison, the first Muslim congressman, swore his oath of office on a copy of the Koran. In effect, Ellison rejected the values that unify Americans and instead pledged to follow a religious text that commands Muslims to wage war against secular legal systems.

Today, swearing the oath of office on the Koran and even simultaneously praising Allah have become almost commonplace. In 2016, Minneapolis Park Board member and Somalian refugee, A.K. Hassan took his oath on a massively oversized Koran and proclaimed his commitment to serve “in the name of Allah.” In 2015, another Somali refugee, Ilhan Omar, elected to the Minnesota House of Representative, swore on the Koran, as did Carolyn Walker-Diallo, the first Muslim woman judge elected to Brooklyn’s 7th Municipal District, and Abdullah Hammoud, a Michigan state representative.

In “Muslim Brotherhood Political Infiltration on Steroids,” I described how as early as 1987, FBI information revealed that the Muslim Brotherhood – a Middle East political organization considered a terrorist organization by five Arab countries and Russia – was seeking to “peacefully get inside the United States Government” and accomplish “the ultimate goal of overthrowing all non-Islamic governments.” Several M.B. front groups, including Project Mobilize; the United States Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO); and Jetpac, Inc., had been created to politically exploit America’s Muslim community to achieve supremacist goals set forth in the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategic plan, the Explanatory Memorandum.

As if taking a cue from the memorandum, the executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), Nihad Awad, spoke in January 2016, at the 14th annual Muslim American Society-Islamic Circle of North America (MAS-ICNA) conference in Chicago. He urged Muslims to “[t]urn your centers, Islamic centers, mosques into registration centers for voters, into polling stations during election time.”

The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHCR) itself has become a prime motivator and enforcer of the rejection of human rights.

The other charters of human rights are to be found exclusively in the Muslim world. Anything that falls within Islamic shari’a law is a human right; anything that does not fall within shari’a is not a human right.

“For us the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is nothing but a collection of mumbo-jumbo by disciples of Satan”. — ‘Ali Khamene’i, Iran’s current Supreme Leader.

“The underlying thesis in all the Islamic human rights schemes is that the rights afforded in international law are too generous and only become acceptable when they are subjected to Islamic restrictions”. — Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics.

The history of human rights, albeit fragmented, is a long and often honourable expression of religious and civic endeavour. The scriptures of most religions refer to the ways in which we should treat our fellow man, from the Bible in antiquity to the broadly liberal Baha’i scriptures written in Persian and Arabic in the late nineteenth century. Religious precepts have served to protect human beings from arbitrary mistreatment in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other faiths.

Modern human rights declarations and legislation developed in a secular context, above all as an expression of democratic values, and informed by Judaeo-Christian ethics. The earliest formulations of secular human rights legislation are to be found in the 1789 French Declaration on the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the 1791 US Constitution, the first 10 amendments of which form the Bill of Rights.

It was not until after the Second World War, however, that an even wider formulation of human rights came into being. Like the French and American declarations, these fresh formulas had much to do with the notion of individual rights: rights that were lodged in the political and legislative strategies of modern democratic states. Prior to that, rights tended to be located in communities, with individuals being subject to the laws and pressures of the tribe – as in the limitation of rights for Jews and Christians within Muslim societies, or for Jews in Europe, notably in ghettoes. This new construction of rights — through religious or ethnic identity — has, for some decades now, found expression in democratic states in “multiculturalism”.

Almost everything about the Turkish Republic is a lie or, at best, a half-truth, starting with its name. As the secular state is progressively dismantled the Islamic revivalism of the current regime is no mere nostalgia for the Ottoman heritage. It is something far more sinister.

The imminent demise of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s “caliphate” must be counted as a clear win in the Long War or the War of Freedom and yet, to borrow from Churchill, we are a long way from final victory: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Even that may be overly optimistic. Still incapable of identifying our mortal enemy, we remain stuck in 1938. This major peril confronting us is yet another incarnation of Islamic revivalism, one more manifestation of the hydra-like Global Jihad at war with Dar al-Garb (House of the West). The danger posed to the world by the burgeoning Islamic state of Turkey remains hidden in plain sight.

Almost everything about the Turkish Republic is a lie or, at the very best, a half-truth, starting with its name. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secular Turkish Republic is being dismantled piecemeal by a modern-day demagogue, President Erdoğan. If the Tribune of Anatolia, who possesses the second-largest army in NATO, holds onto power until October 29, 2023—the centenary of the proclamation of the republic—his suzerainty is no doubt going to be reconstituted as the Islamic Republic of Turkey. This development will denote something more than modern-day Turks revisiting their Ottoman heritage. Ottoman-style Islam, as demanding and controlling as it was, might be counted as mild-mannered and easy-going compared with the fanatical millennialism of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The rise and rise of Erdoğan, whose Freedom and Justice Party (AKP) won the 2002 parliamentary elections and has stayed in power ever since, did not occur in a vacuum. Erdoğan, as Soner Cagaptay points out in The New Sultan: Erdoğan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey (2017), was an acolyte of Necmettin Erbakan, a Turkish version of historic members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. The reason Erbakan’s vision of Islamic revivalism began to resonate in Turkey during the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century would probably require an investigation rooted in psychiatric anthropology. To make it brief, many Turks, especially in the Anatolian hinterland, were left feeling uncomfortable, dissatisfied and straight-out confused by Atatürk’s experiment in Western-style modernity.

Samuel P. Huntington, in The Clash of Civilisations?, encapsulated the problem as well as anyone. Turkey is a quintessential “torn country”, caught between the House of Freedom to its immediate north and Islamic rectitude to its south:

[Kemalists] allied Turkey with the West in NATO and in the Gulf War; they applied for membership in the European community. At the same time, however, elements in Turkish society have supported an Islamic revival and have argued that Turkey is basically a Middle Eastern society.