Short-Selling Humankind
Just after the tsunami, I recall offering an open wager to anyone who was willing to bet against the widespread circulation of a belief that some American, Jewish, or Israeli conspiracy was to blame for it all. I’ve already collected my peppercorn from the highly intelligent readership of this site–which produced no takers–but let me crush any lingering doubts with this blunt object, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal:
At Sabah, a columnist last fall accused the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Eric Edelman, of letting his “ethnic origins”–guess what, he’s Jewish–determine his behavior. Mr. Edelman is indeed the all-too-rare foreign-service officer who takes seriously his obligation to defend America’s image and interests abroad. The intellectual climate in which he’s operating has gone so mad that he actually felt compelled to organize a conference call with scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey to explain that secret U.S. nuclear testing did not cause the recent tsunami.
It’s enough to temper one’s optimism that democracy can undermine hatred and terror, unless of course, you don’t really consider Turkey a democracy. On that, I’m not sure myself, since the Turkish Army exercises strict, authoritarian control over what can be said and who can hold office.
Turkey is a beautiful place full of friendly people; in 1990, it certainly isn’t the fever swamp that Palestine was. Still, the experience that most sticks in my memory is of a water outage on a hot August night in Istanbul, when this bright boy realized that the mosques were sure to have water for a little superficial washing and cooling off. There, I found myself either invited or accosted–I’m not sure which, to this day–off to tea with some Turkish elders to hear, who played a video of an unintelligible Islamofascist harangue that was apparently subversive enough to warrant a leery shuttering of windows. The graybeards, all dressed like ayatollahs, clerics, dervishes, shamans, or (if you prefer) shriners, may have thought that piety (and that was surely misplaced, in me) could cause the faithful to hear in tongues; the only thing I understood from the whole experience was the pointing to Ataturk’s picture with hisses of “kafir! kafir!” and the regrettable lack of a meal to compensate me for my anxious realization that Turkey was a bad place to be caught in the presence of men saying such things.
If this article is to be believed (and many will tell you it isn’t, but then, many would also say the same of South Korea, and just as unconvincingly), Turkey has gotten much worse, and may not have hit bottom.