[1/2 to 5/6 May 2016] It happens all the time. Up to a point, you simply don’t take notice. “They” remain below your horizon. You could be trying to do too many things all at once. Meanwhile, you might have spared at most an eye for current events. Surely not to the extent of sitting down to read all the papers in the morning and to suffer through all the news programs or talk shows in the evening. More like making half an effort to follow only what people keep sending to you online. So that at first, you don’t pick “them” up against a welter of background detail. But then, you sense a frequency increase. A certain kind of incident, a phrase, a name, or a whole approach or manner of speech begins to catch your eye. You sit up and start paying attention, all the time muttering “gosh, who can this be” or “what the hell is this” to yourself. From that moment, “it” keeps popping up — and you start seeing “it” — everywhere. It jells into an entire pattern that you learn to recognize and diagnose instantaneously.
Such has been the case with all the stuff that my old high school friend in the US, who has increasingly turned into an Islamophobic AKP and Erdoğan-hater, has been e-mailing me over the last few years. At first, I was going through them one by one, and reacting one by one. In time, though, groups or sets emerged. Some profiles became more prominent than others. First, it seemed, certain things were being manufactured in Turkey and exported abroad. Then they were being re-imported with value added. There were some highly favored outlets (Gatestone Institute, Middle East Forum, Al Monitor, Hürriyet Daily News), as well as equally favored contacts (Pınar Tremblay, Ceylan Yeğinsu, Uzay Bulut, Amberin Zaman). There was also a lot of domestic production going on (by Can Dündar, Hasan Cemal, Ahmet Altan, Celâl Başlangıç, Hayko Bağdat). Ah yes, there was also this chap Burak Bekdil who seemed to be making his own growing contribution.
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A test. A single test (my kingdom for a test)! This question of ISIL or IS. Or rather, the claim that the AKP has been in overt or covert collaboration with IS, to the point where the two can be called one and the same. It used to be more persistently argued until about a year ago, but what weight does it carry today? It was initially promoted by the KCK-PKK, with the Gülen Congregation subsequently joining in, and even assuming a leading role in the MIT (NIO: National Intelligence Organization) trucks incident. IS fighters, it was said, were crossing over to Turkey to receive medical treatment. The daily Cumhuriyet published rather obviously fabricated “interviews” with unnamed IS “commanders.” IS was selling its oil to Turkey, it was further rumored, with Bilâl Erdoğan supposedly playing a key role in this illegal traffic. President Erdoğan’s children were alleged to have gone so far as to set up a field hospital across the border, in Syria, to serve the IS.
As these and similar allegations have repeatedly been exposed as so many falsehoods, I am not going to try and refute them yet again. Instead, putting the past aside I want to pose a simpler question: Where and how do things stand at present? (a) Turkey has repeatedly been subjected to IS suicide attacks. (a1) First and foremost there was the 20th July 2015 Suruç massacre which the PKK used as an excuse to “retaliate” by launching its “new people’s revolutionary war” — though now there is strong evidence to the effect that it was actually perpetrated by IS. (a2) This is also the case with the Ankara Train Station bombers of 10th October 2015 (including the possibility of “intentional negligence” on the part of unreliable elements within the security forces of a state apparatus that has yet to be really and truly democratized). (a3) As for the 12th January 2016 Sultanahmet and the 19th March 2016 Taksim (İstiklâl Street) bombings directed at foreign tourist groups comprising Germans in the first and mostly Israelis in the second case, it is absolutely certain, beyond the slightest shadow of doubt, that these were IS murders. (a4) Most recently, May Day celebrations in Adana had to be cancelled for fear of an IS suicide attack. And (a5) IS has also been declared the prime suspect for the Gaziantep Security Department bombing that claimed the lives of two policemen.
(b) Meanwhile, here and there along the Syrian border Turkish army units are finding themselves more and more involved in firefights with IS. Fifty or more rockets fired from nearby IS-controlled areas have so far fallen on Kilis, killing twenty people, including Syrian refugees as well as Turkish citizens (these numbers keep rising steadily, and have reached roughly sixty rockets for twenty-one dead since the Turkish version of this article was written). Increasing numbers of commentators argue that IS is trying to provoke and to draw Turkey deeper into Syria (in Serbestiyet, see, for example, Abdullah Kıran, IŞİD neden Kilis’i vuruyor [Why is IS hitting Kilis], 27th April; Fırat Erez, Kilis’e “düşen” roketler [The rockets “falling” on Kilis], 1st May 2016). Whyever it may be, the Turkish army has been replying to such ranging or harassment or provocation fire with its own heavy artillery. It is deploying its (as yet unarmed) UAVs to record the outcome, and publishing official reports of hit and destroyed mortars or rocket launchers.
(c) The İncirlik air base has long been at the disposal of the Western coalition against IS. The corollary is that Turkey must have full knowledge of all such operations (see Fırat Erez, İncirlik’ten kalkan bir A-10’un anlattıkları [What an A-10 taking off from İncirlik has to tell], 27th April 2016). As I was writing the original Turkish version of this article, Serbestiyet reported in its news columns that while Turkish 155 mm howitzers had bombarded IS positions at Tughali, killing 34 fighters, four MQ-1 type armed UAVs taking off from İncirlik had also attacked and destroyed five more IS weapon emplacements.
(d) There is also another side to this struggle that is taking place not out in the open but in an invisible twilight zone. It has to do with intelligence, detection, detainment, and prevention. Previously, it had emerged that the Turkish police had actually caught and arrested one of the eventual Brussels bombers, deporting him after notifying Belgium that he was a primary suspect, but that this tip had been wholly ignored by the Belgian police, to the point of forcing two ministers to offer to resign over this neglect. Just this one incident, therefore, hinted at what might be happening behind the scenes.
(e) Recently, however, much more comprehensive information has become available. The BBC’s weekly Newsnight focuses on in-depth analysis of current events. Its diplomatic and defence editor is Mark Urban, whose important article titled Turning point in battle against IS? (29th April) is available on the BBC web site. At the Aspen security conference in London, Urban appears to have spoken to Brett McGurk, the Special Presidential Envoy “or White House point man for the anti-IS battle,” as well as Didier Le Bret, France’s National Intelligence Co-ordinator. Both top authorities, he says, point to (i) recent territorial losses by IS; (ii) success in cutting and curtailing its funding (its oil facilities have been hit, government salaries to those in IS-held areas have been cut by Iraq and Syria, and its foreign remittances have been “sliced off” to such an extent that the group has halved its fighters’ pay and has also tried to come up with other revenue-raising schemes, from new taxes to parking tickets); and (iii) “more effective sealing of the routes in and out of their ‘caliphate’ in Iraq and Syria.” This impression, Urban says, “is backed by Pentagon statistics released this week suggesting there are now about 200 foreign fighters reaching IS in Iraq and Syria each month compared with 1,500-2,000 a month one year ago.” It seems, moreover, that Turkey has played a major role in achieving this result: “Turkey says,” Urban adds, that “it has stopped 44,000 suspected militant sympathisers from crossing into Syria or Iraq.” According to French intelligence (which points to LeBret), this number may include those who have failed to get in and others who have become disillusioned coming home.
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These, then, are the facts. Normally, that would be that. But no; for some, it is not the end of the matter. For it seems that above and beyond what “is” or “actually existing reality,” there is another, superior reality of what “theoretically ought to be.” Indeed, in their world (or should I say parallel universe), it is as if facts, or factual reality, or what actually is, or the simple, direct, ordinary kind of reality that everyone takes in, simply do not exist. They prefer to believe in, and to get others to believe in, different and more wondrous things.
Take Burak Bekdil, for example. To context him, see my Böhmermann tam ne demiş, anlayabildiniz mi? [Did you get just what Böhmermann said], Alman kanalı ne yapmış; onu da var mı soran?[Is anybody asking what the German tv channel has done], and finally Pure fiction articles of 22-23-24 April). This same Bekdil who is a fellow of Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum turns out to have written three more articles on Turkey in late April (i.e. at virtually the same time that I was grappling with Böhmermann). There first came Erdoğanistan Travel Tips (22nd April). The second was about how, supposedly, Erdoğan Calls for Faith-Based UN Reform (27th April). The third made a show of exposing Turkey’s Fake War on Jihadis (28th April). The first two were carried by Hürriyet Daily News, while the third and most important appeared on the web site of the Gatestone Institute, a key link and nerve center in the US chain of right-wing, neo-con, emphatically pro-Israel think-tanks.
Although the titles closely reflect their contents, let me go into some detail, at least to make sure that all readers can benefit from Bekdil’s authorial integrity as well as all those jokes that keep brimming with his keen intelligence. As the UN doesn’t have much to do with the rest, let’s first get that out of the way. Had you heard that by way of highlighting what an unfair and unequal world we happen to be living in, President Erdoğan recently characterized the present composition of the Security Council as “Christian, non-Muslim,” first saying “Christian” and then adding the more general term “non-Muslim” (Hıristiyan, Müslüman olmayan), so that not a single Muslim country is involved in running the UN? Well, according to Burak Bekdil this reflects just how ignorant Erdoğan is — because he seems to think that China is a Christian country!? Secondly, and much more ominously, it reveals that the President of Turkey wants the UN to be reorganized on a religious basis! But how could this be; wouldn’t it be utterly crazy and impossible to design or implement, and so on and so forth… Burak Bekdil picks on a critical observation about the omnipresence of Western hegemony in general, and twists it into unrecognizable form in an unending quest to misrepresent and ridiculize Erdoğan to the point of making him into an enduring laughing stock of the Western world.
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But of even darker portent, in my view, are the other two articles by Burak Bekdil, for it is here that he keeps harping, albeit rather desperately, on the idea that “Turkey = IS.” Bekdil’s stance and tone of voice are the same throughout: He presents himself as what anthropologists doing fieldwork call a reliable “native informant.” As a civilized, intelligent, knowledgeable friend of the West in an otherwise backward and ignorant country, he keeps sharing with (a) his Western interlocutors, and (b) all the other White Turks of Turkey, just how estranged from and hostile to the country of his unfortunate birth he happens to be. When he looks down on and abuses these poor primitive Orientals at every turn, it is as if he is doing so to reaffirm his own wholly Western identity. And this he tries to achieve by deploying a contrived, exaggerated degree of sarcasm, singling out a fragment of an idea (as in the UN case) to exorbitate it way beyond its logical limits into a bloated absurdity. We get the sense that (pretty much like his soul twin Böhmermann before the cameras) in between such wisecracks he is falling all over his desk in self-admiring laughter, as if to mutter “how great I am” to himself before sitting up and carrying on with his dirty work.
In his 22nd April Erdoğanistan Travel Tips article, for example, it is his very title that announces his intentions of cozying up to Western arrogance like a puppy dog wanting to be patted on the head for pandering to some of the worst stereotypical clichés in the arsenal of Eurocentrism. For most members of the 19th century European elite, the Eastern or the Asiatic world comprises a string of petty sheikhdoms, each of which is a microcosmic Oriental despotism ruled by a degenerate sultan spending most of his time in harem debauchery. This fantasy having recently regained currency in the West, as reflected in The Economist’s headlines about “a prickly sultan,” Burak Bekdil latches on to it and takes it a step further to convert Turkey into Erdoganistan. He then pounces on a piece of travel advice by the German Foreign Ministry about how German tourists should behave on a visit to Turkey: “It is strongly advised not to make public political statements against the Turkish state and not to express sympathy for terrorist organizations.” Bekdil promptly lets his imagination run loose; it would be even better, he advises, if the German government were to add the following: (i) “If you are a journalist, do not go to Turkey.” (ii) “Do not drink alcohol like infidels while on a visit to Muslim Turkey. It would be better for your own security if you fasted or at least pretend to fast during Ramadan. You will have more fun and a better time while sunbathing on the Turkish Mediterranean coast if your wives wear the Islamic headscarf, remain in their hotel rooms and avoid swimming in public. T-shirts with script in praise of Hitler will further safeguard your well-being and may even build memorable friendships between yourself and the locals.”
Wow. Have we all really, fully taken that in? Turkey, oops, sorry, Erdoganistan, has succumbed not only to an Iranian or Saudi type of sharia rule, it appears, but also to downright Nazism, which has become so popular that it now provides a suitable and encouraging framework for getting pally with Turks via Hitler! Incredible as it may sound, in Bekdil’s world this is how things stand. Or how he would like things to stand.
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Nevertheless, in his Erdoganistan article even this propensity to Nazism is not what worries Burak Bekdil the most. With reference to the “tips page” of the German Foreign Ministry, he is even more concerned, if this is possible, about which terrorist organizations one may or not express sympathy for. Berlin, says Bekdil, could have been much more specific. The PKK is one thing, IS is another. Dear German tourists, the “terrorists” that you should not be sympathizing with (please note how he waxes ironic, the little darling) are “the elected Kurdish members of the Turkish parliament, or the millions of protesters who took to the streets in 2013, including 15-year-old Berkin Elvan, who was killed by a gas canister fired by the police” or “the journalists who face life sentences for running stories on the front page of their newspapers.” This, it seems, is all that is meant and understood by “terrorism” in a Turkish context. So, who or what is here, and who or what is not? The HDP is represented, as are the Gezi demonstrators of 2013, plus Can Dündar and the daily Cumhuriyet. Wholly absent, unmentioned, invisible are the KCK, PKK or YDG-H, plus their “new people’s revolutionary war,” plus their armed urban occupations behind ditches, barricades and booby traps, plus the TAK’s (the Freedom Falcons of Kurdestan) suicide bombings (the first two in Ankara and now the third in Bursa) that have claimed more than sixty lives… This is how shameless, how thoroughly brazenly shameless Burak Bekdil can get — to the point of trying to persuade his foreign readers that when the Turkish government refers to terrorism, it is targeting non-violent groups or acts that have nothing to do with terrorism.
But there is worse to come. He takes yet another step to claim that in Erdoganistan, IS is not regarded as a terrorist organization, that instead it is popularly and publicly endorsed and supported. “The average German sunbather logically is not expected to publicly express sympathy for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) — although many Turks do so and are not prosecuted,” Bekdil asserts. Where and how, we are not allowed to ask. “A vague expression of empathy, even if not total sympathy, for ISIL will not necessarily put anyone in danger,” he adds. He then tries to buttress this through a reference to Prime Minister Davutoğlu, who has spoken of how “Past anger, alienations and insults [against Sunnis] have caused a reaction [the emergence of ISIL]. Such an accumulation of anger [which resulted in ISIL] would not have existed if Sunni Arabs in Iraq were not alienated.” This was a sound and serious critique of the confessional policies and preferences pursued especially by the US in Iraq and Syria (the errors of which have become all too blatant over time). But for <bekdil, this is tantamount to an apology for IS, so much so that “If prosecuted for ISIL sympathies, the smart German tourist should remember to tell his lawyer to cite Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu's notorious lines about ISIL jihadists,” he recommends. He concludes his article with the following counsel: “Just stay on the safe side and keep repeating the lines Wir lieben die Türkei! Erdoğan ist der beste! [We love Turkey! Erdoğan is the best!].” (Did I say only Hürriyet Daily News? No , it is also on the Middle East Forum web site; see http://www.meforum.org/5971/erdoganistan-travel-tips.)
The biggest disaster of all, however, is Bekdil’s efforts at disinformation over Turkey’s alleged support for IS, which begin with his 22nd April article and reach a crescendo with Turkey’s Fake War on Jihadis (28th April) on the Gatestone Institute web site. This precisely what American neo-cons want to hear and to spread. But please, just why is Turkey’s war with IS a “fake” one? Hasn’t it all been happening right in front of our eyes, the Suruç, Ankara Train Station, Sultanahmet, Taksim (İstiklâl Street) or Gaziantep bombings? Or the rockets continuing to fall on Kilis? Or how Western intelligence organizations have come to appreciate Turkey’s efforts at containment?
Oh come on, these are not what you should be noticing. Instead, what matters for Bekdil, and what should matter for you, are the following: (a) “Last year, a Turkish pollster found that one in every five Turks thought that the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris was the natural response to men who insulted Prophet Mohammed.” (b) Mahmut Kar, media bureau chief for Hizb ut-Tahrir Turkey, has declared that they (too) “will re-establish the caliphate, here, right next to the parliament.” (c) “At a March meeting with top US officials, King Abdullah of Jordan accused Turkey of exporting terrorists to Europe” (which is very dubious, given that no serious media outlets have attached much credibility to a news report with all the markings of having been manufactured and disseminated by Syrian intelligence, which moreover the Jordan government has promptly denied, following it up by signing a number of new agreements with Turkey). (d) Turkish courts have made a habit of easily releasing jihadists, including their commanders, that happen to have been detained here and there, while academics who have done no more than sign a public statement are still in prison (at the time this article was published on 28th April, this too was a deliberate falsehood, since they had all been released on 23rd April). (e) “The suspects may be holding the Turkish government hostage … What if they threatened the authorities that they would reveal the government support for their organization in the past?” a Western diplomat in Ankara (who naturally remains unnamed) has observed.
Especially at the level of speculation ambodied in this last quote (if it is a quote), anything and everything can be said on Earth without the slightest need to produce any proof or evidence. So what if I wanted to write, in the same vein, that “according to a Western diplomat in Istanbul, Mossad could be threatening Burak Bekdil with revealing his past services in order to hold him in line”? Would that be warranted? Good and fair? In conformity with authorial best practice or journalistic ethics? A far cry from all that, wouldn’t you say? Maybe downright fraudulent? But see, this is precisely how Burak Bekdil makes the jump, on the basis of the five pieces of “evidence” cited above, including this last farcical allegation, that Turkey is waging “a fake war on jihadis.” Neither does he fail to warn the outside world: And Turkey is the country its Western allies believe will help them fight jihadists? Lots of luck!
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What is there left to say? Lots of luck to you, too, Burak Bekdil, and bon voyage.
The Gatestone Enstitüsü, Daniel Pipes, and the Middle East Forum — lots of luck to all of you, too, and may you keep Burak Bekdil good company.
Ditto for Hürriyet Daily News, which in a globalizing era, and in Istanbul as already a global city, purports to be serving growing numbers of foreigners, tourists, visitors or businessmen who are either living and working here on a semi-permanent basis, or keep coming and going on a short-run basis, trying to keep them in touch, as truthfully as possible, with world and Turkish current events. — So kudos to you, too, Hürriyet Daily News; may you also have lots of luck on your road that is sure to be paved with good intentions, with the best of intentions, wherever it is that you may be going.