While Western diplomats persist in calling Turkey a “model,” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Islamist-leaning Justice and Development Party (AKP) continues to tweak relatively minor rules to change Turkish society fundamentally. He makes no secret of this. “Do you expect the conservative democrat AK Party to raise atheist generations? This may be your business and objective but not ours,” he declared last February.
Previously, the Turkish parliament tightened licensing on alcohol sales, and has increased taxes more than 700 percent on beer. The ban on alcohol advertisements forced Efes Pilsen, one of Turkey’s most popular basketball teams, to change its name.
Now, the Turkish parliament is pushing along its crusade against alcohol to new levels. The Islamist-dominated parliament (the AKP holds 326 out of 550 seats) will reportedly change a labor law to enable employers to fire without severance any employer who shows up at work having drunk alcohol, as opposed to being drunk with alcohol. Accordingly, if a businessman consumes a single glass of wine or beer at a business lunch, he can be terminated immediately.
Speaking at an American Enterprise Institute conference in Gdansk, Poland, in August 2005, senior State Department official Daniel Fried once commented that Erdoğan’s AKP was simply the Islamic equivalent of a European Christian Democratic party. Alas, it increasingly appears that the State Department has sacrificed the ideal of a Western-oriented Turkey upon the altar of political correctness.
It really is sad. Efes is a good beer.
I mourn every time a good beer suffers.
The upside is that since most of the senior army corps has been replaced by ideologues, political cronies and the generally incompetent, Turkey presents an ever decreasing military and economic threat to Israel.
You are right, but it's the mid-level career officer corps and the skilled technicians who make things work and those are still competent…albeit cowed. Turkey has a large, well-equipped army and is still powerful enough to disrupt Israel's air and sea lanes, even if it can't manage to control them. The only shocker Turkey may understand is getting turfed out of NATO and losing facoured trading status. Such a jolt may empower the secularists, but the only way they can return to power is by suspending democracy, which in the Muslim world has become a convenient "dictatorship of the mob," an Islamist-led impoverished majority that is becoming ultra-Muslim and is as smart as a bag of socks. We forget that, unfortunately, what we call democracy only works with a substantial educated, stable and affluent middle class.
I suspect even Russia and Europe will not tolerate Islamist control of the Bosporus. The goal of Russia for the last 500 years was to have a warm water fleet.
"I suspect even Russia and Europe will not tolerate Islamist control of the Bosporus." n nCoulter Plan? n n