Chirac and Bush spar off about Turkey's possible EU membership

[Oh Jerusalem]

No, this is not intended to be a French bashing thread, like my previous post on this subject appears.

On the contrary, I think it's Bush that should be bashed for the following response today:

Bush Defies Chirac, Says Turkey Merits EU Place
Tue Jun 29, 2004 06:50 AM ET

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - President Bush said on Tuesday that Turkey belongs in the European Union and that Europe is "not the exclusive club of a single religion" in what amounted to a rejection of French President Jacques Chirac.
In remarks prepared for delivery at a Istanbul university, Bush refused to back down in the face of Chirac's criticism on Monday that Bush had no business urging the EU to set a date for Turkey to start entry talks into the union.

"America believes that as a European power, Turkey belongs in the European Union," Bush said.

Bush is to use the speech to try to mend relations between Muslims and Americans left tattered relations by the Iraq war.

"We must strengthen the ties and trust and good will between ourselves and the peoples of the Middle East," he said.

Bush held up Turkey as an example of a Muslim democracy and said its entry to the EU would be "a crucial advance in relations between the Muslim world and the West, because you are part of both."

"Including Turkey in the EU would prove that Europe is not the exclusive club of a single religion, and it would expose the 'clash of civilizations' as a passing myth of history," Bush said.

Chirac said on Monday that Bush should not comment on Turkey's EU entry hopes as EU affairs were none of his business.

"If President Bush really said that the way I read it, well, not only did he go too far but he went into a domain which is not his own," Chirac told reporters at the summit.

"It is like me trying to tell the United States how it should manage its relations with Mexico," he added.

Turkey is keen to use the NATO to showcase its credentials as a westward-looking democracy before December, when EU leaders decide if it has met the political criteria to be put on the formal road to EU membership.

Countries such as Germany, Italy and Britain strongly back Ankara's bid, but Chirac's government has expressed wariness about kicking off a formal process to admit the relatively poor country of 70 million people.


Bush wants to mend relations between Muslims and Americans? What for? For Abu Gharib? He apologized already? For removing Saddam? The Arabs considered him a dangerous crackpot before the US nabbed him. For fighting Iraqi terrorists? Does that require an apology? For getting rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan and hunting down Bin Laden? For grudgingly helping Israel defend itself against the same old Arab school of genocide?

Do Turkey and Europe mix? Does Bush really want to increase Europe's Moslem population? Is he unaware of the exisiting problems, social, political, tactical, that this is already causing? And is Turkey truly the stable Moslem democracy Bush is painting it to be? Turkey's prime minister's recent outbursts against Israel and his more fundamental stance on Islam than was previously promoted by Turkey should at least cause Bush to pause and think ahead a bit.

[Mediocrates]

Ch-Iraq is being an hysterical ninny. What Bush did was classic Clinton, actually. Coopt your opponents agenda so it becomes useless to them. If Bush says it's a good thing then Ch-Iraq has to scream that it is a bad thing, by default. Now he can't easily play political games with Turkey in this arena. It sort of pushes Turkish membership further away than it was before. Not that Ch-Iraq wanted Turkey in the EU, oh no, but Ch-Iraq needed to play political games between his own nascent right wing fascist xenphobes (and make no mistake the government of Ch-Iraq is fairly far to the right in terms of domestic agenda) and Muslims in Fronce. Now this will tend to make Ch-Iraq look even further to the right which could paralyze him politically in the context of the EU community.

[Macc]

Majority of of the people is against Turkey joining EU, this is a fact. Bush went too far, if he loves Turkey so much he should let them join NAFTA.

Countries like Spain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, England, Austria and Germany are having major problems with muslims. You got terrorists running around the EU don't be surprised to see bombings and more antisemetic violence.

I don't care what those Turks think, they're not a part of the European culture and they never have been. It's idiotic to say that the EU is a christian CLUB only, stupid stupid stupid the latest polls show that 65% of Europeans are in fact atheists or Gnostics........ Christianity died in Europe long time ago.

[Mediocrates]

If Europe is so worried about Turkey they should force it out of NATO.

[MGB8]

Actually, I agree it was a ploy - or, more acurately, touche'!

When the US does something the muslim world doesn't like...what does Europe do? It, of course, takes the Arab side to harp on those bad, imperialistic Americans!

Dubya here was just playing the same game, in reverse.

His statement doesn't mean anything, and has no effect on the process, but it makes the US look good politically for a second, a little political capitol with the Muslim world, and has the better effect of making France look bad, lessening THEIR political capitol.

Bravo.

[Oh Jerusalem]

This is what some of us have been trying to warn one or two of our secular Turkish forum posters about on another thread:

Important to Understand the Islamic Sway Over Turkey
Written by Raphael Israeli
Tuesday, June 29, 2004

The inexplicable Western policy of appeasement towards Islam has been predicated upon the false assumption that if the ''moderate'' and ''pragmatic'' model that has ''triumphed'' in Kemalist Turkey is upheld and sustained, this might deter and thwart the wave of fundamentalist Islam that has been terrorizing the West.

In submission to that rosy conjecture that had no leg to stand on, Europe and the United States have actively fought against Christian Serbs and Macedonians in order to support Bosnian and Albanian Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo, who were aided by Iranians, Chechnians, and other Muslim fundamentalists who set their eyes on re-Islamizing the Balkans and driving a Muslim wedge between Greece and Serbia into the heart of Europe, exactly as Izetbegovic had envisioned.

This policy was encouraged by the fact that the newly liberated Muslim Republics of Central Asia, which were part and parcel of the Soviet Union, also seemed to embrace a pro-Western policy, reinforced by their links with Israel, and centered around a close alliance with Turkey, who also became a close military and economic partner of the Jewish state. Except that all those countries which now evoke their Pan-Turkic or Pan-Turanic identity, are first of all Muslim. True, the Kemalist Revolution, which had cruelly eradicated Islam and forcefully secularized society, seemed to prevail for the past decades, mainly under the bayonets of the military who have taken over government on several occasions, every time they thought that the Attaturk ''heritage'' was in jeopardy. Similarly, the newly emerged Central Asian republics can keep their pro-western orientation only because they are ruled autocratically by previously communist regimes who have altered their titles and appellations, but little else.

But then, against all expectations and calculations of the experts, Necmettin Erbakan, the head of the Islamist Party, won a plurality of the vote in 1996, and was swept into the premiership, though his less than 20% strength in Parliament necessitated a coalition with civil political parties. The government veered noticeably to the Islamic world, nonetheless, mainly towards Iran, and apparently also threatened the warming relations with Israel which were dear to the heart of the military, the ''guardians of secularism.'' But what was supposed to have confirmed the rule of the secularists only proved a thin veneer under which Muslim sentiment was in ferment.

Tayip Erdogan, the popular mayor of Istanbul--himself an Islamist that was regarded as more radical than Erbakan--created a new Islamic Party, though he was himself banned for a while to lead it in politics. The party ran for elections and in 2002, for the first time, and with its founder absent, it won a sweeping majority of the vote and for the first time in republican Turkey could even form an exclusively Islamist government without coalition partners.

True, that did not indicate that most Turks were Islamists or sympathizers thereof, but the government was confirmed and became quite popular, perhaps the most popular since the times of Attaturk and Inonu. Once again, the West was duped by the moderate statements made by Gul (the interim prime minister until Erdogan was allowed to take the reins of power), and then Erdogan himself, regarding their pro-Western orientation, the fight against terrorism and the preservation of the links with Israel. All that was said to be geared towards ensuring Turkey’s entrance into the European Union.

But soon Turkey’s erstwhile unfaillible commitment to the West began to crack. The great test was the alliance with the United States, which during the previous Gulf War of 1990 and thereafter had permitted American presence in Incerlik, where Iraqi airspace had been policed from, as well as positioning of allied troops.

Come the preparations for the Iraq War of March 2003, and the new Islamic government drags its feet and forces the American division that was to open a second northern from Turkish territory, to journey around Suez and arrive to the Kuwait bases too late, thus occasioning a change in the war plans. Moreover, the Turks who saw themselves threatened by the close alliance of the Americans with the Kurds who took their place in the Northern Front, went into friction with the Americans when they threatened to invade Iraq should the Kurds declare independence, which Ankara dreads.

And then the Erdogan government effected a very dramatic rapprochement to Syria, the nemesis of yesteryear, pronounced itself strongly in favor of the Palestinians and began to criticize Israel beyond what can be considered ''friendly,'' let alone ''allied,'' relationship. He could not press further at this point, because the close relationship with the Israelis could not be undone overnight, and because the army, who could not intervene brutally as it did with Erbakan, due to the huge popularity of Erdogan, also warned him that if he crossed certain red lines, he might end up sharing the same lot.

However, as the Islamists grow more confident of their power, and appoint their own people to the higher reaches of the military, a few years hence would be able to move in those directions without fearing a coup. Certainly the tough measures Erdogan has been taking against terrorism are not geared to appease the West or Israel, but to avert catastrophe domestically, if his regime, like the Saudi which is as Islamistic if not more, should be directly challenged by the Muslim fundamentalist terrorists of the al-Qa’ida brand.

This is the context in which one has to see the revived debate about the entrance of Turkey into the European Union. Right are those heads of the Union, like Kohl, Giscard, and Berlusconi, who shun this union of Middle Eastern Muslims with Europe which is still essentially Western, if not practically Christian. Their fears are well-founded: if to their 400 million basically Europeans, Westerners, and Christians they add another 60 million Muslims, part of whom do not seek adaptation to the West but transformation thereof, then we are in for a great clash of cultures and friction between traditions, rather than a harmony that multi-ethnic societies could ideally produce, but unfortunately seldom do.

The recent Bosnia and Kosovo wars and the tremendous hazards that the 25 millions Muslims already in Europe present to the local peace, ought to be more than a warning. Obviously, that threat is not universal, for many of the Muslims who settled in Europe went either to seek asylum from the tyrannies in their home countries or to look for better job opportunities. But not a few of them have aligned with the fundamentalists among them, who seem to hold the leadership in many localities, notably France and Belgium.

Thus, whatever the official ''pretexts'' of certain European members of the European Union in their rejection of accepting Turkey in their midst, the truth is that they fear the effect of close to 20% Muslim population in Europe, should Turkey join. Due to their rapid demographic growth, they may double their percentage within the population within a few decades, and if they insist like the Muslim fundamentalists now already established on altering Europe, this may spell out trouble.

This is a harsh discourse that few politicians dare pronounce, so they speak about the insufficient rate of democratization and human rights, or about the high proportion of farmers in Turkey which would ruin the agricultural policy of subsidies within the European Union. But the ascendance to power of Erdogan does not help the Turkish cause in this regard, for beyond his promises and his smiling faces to the West, veteran Europeans cannot disregard his past record of incarceration for his radicalism, nor his present rapprochement back into the Arab and Islamic fold. Undoubtedly… a recipe for conflict.



About the Writer: Raphael Israeli is the author of 18 books on the Middle East, Islam and Sino-Islamic relations, most recently: "Islamikaze" (Frank Cass, London, 2003) and "The Iraq War: Hidden Agendas and Babylonian Intrigue" (Sussex Academic Press, 2004). He is professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies as well as Chinese History, at Hebrew University. He is represented exclusively by Eleana Benador of Benador and Associates and is reachable at http://www.benadorassociates.com.

[Semsem]

Many in Europe do not want Turkey in because they are worried about Muslim extremism. Based on the disgusting antisemitic comments of erdogan I now understand them.

[Oh Jerusalem]

Many in Europe do not want Turkey in because they are worried about Muslim extremism. Based on the disgusting antisemitic comments of erdogan I now understand them.

It's not only his recent remarks.

Correct me if I'm wrong but haven't a number of European Turks been implicated in terrorist tie-ins that have been discovered in Europe?

[Elin]

I now understand them.

To bad,i always know this reality:"People are faithless!" You understand them? Bravo then,i see people may forget their past easily,if any1 says "i understand anti-semitists in Europe" what would you feel then? Isn't it insulting?

[MGB8]

I "understand" Europeans, too.

Though less about countering terrorism and more in the mode of nationalism and "religionism".

One of the keystones of the EU and the desired future "greater Europe" is free and easy mobility from one EU nation to the next - even resettling in the new EU nation.

Right now, all the EU nations are Christian and Secular. Inviting in a Muslim nation with a strong fundamentalist element isn't just risky in terms of allowing in jihadists, but also, the potential for mass immigration of Muslims, who have a much higher birth rate as a whole than European Christians (which causes much of the Muslim world's poverty and even teenage angst caused disfunctions...) may endanger the characters of these EU nations.

France is a Christian Secular nation, for example. If it became over time majority Muslim, it would cease to really be France.

To bad,i always know this reality:"People are faithless!" You understand them? Bravo then,i see people may forget their past easily,if any1 says "i understand anti-semitists in Europe" what would you feel then? Isn't it insulting?

[Elin]

Right now, all the EU nations are Christian and Secular. Inviting in a Muslim nation with a strong fundamentalist element isn't just risky in terms of allowing in jihadists.

Are you ignorant or just drunk??

Turkish President Sezer to Bush: You can not say Turkey is a model ,Turkey can not be model for Mid-Eastern Countries because Turkey Secular Democratic Country,Turkey is not a Muslim Country!

Dear if you are ignorant about my country let stay in silence...

So what about Israel,Israel is a secular country or a Jewish State?

[Elin]

I "understand" Europeans, too.

Anyway if any1 says "now i understand anti-semitists in Europe" what would you feel then?