In 1989, my book Une autre Europe, un autre Monde was published in France. It foresaw the reunification of Europe, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and a future in which Turkey would play the role of bridge between Christian Europe and the Muslim world.

On the first two items, the book was recog-nized as highly prescient. But the third did not turn out as expected: I imagined the Middle East following the example of the European Union, which was soon to adopt the Treaty of Maastricht that eventually led to the creation of the Euro. Although the Israeli/Palestinian conflict was con-stantly in the news, we were more than a decade away from the first manifestations of jihad, as opposed to intifada.

As it turns out, twenty-four years later, Tur-key is indeed playing a role that is closely linked to its geographic location, but it is not the one I envisioned. Since 1987 it has been involved in negotiations to join the European Union, however faced with resistance to its human right record, in 2002 it gave itself an Islamic government.  This represented a break with almost a century of strictly secular rule willed by the founder of the modern state after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

The Justice and Development Party that has ruled Turkey since 2002 has invested heavily in development, as if to persuade its citizens that an Islamist Party can deliver the goods as well as the secular European Union. However, that policy has produced a generation of young adults who are right up there with European youth when it comes to aspirations, life styles, and political awareness. A sign shown on RT today says ‘The revolution will not be televised, it will be tweeted’, and inter-viewees complain that after six days of anti-government demonstrations, most Turkish media has pretended nothing is amiss. According to one demonstrator, CNN, ever ready to accommodate power, has been showing a documentary about penguins!

Put OccupyGezi together with the back to back Bloccupy protest in Frankfurt, Germany, where several thousand demonstrated against the financial troika hobbling the European Union and you’ve got real news: the country that straddles Europe and Asia (via the Bosphorus Straits) has turned out not to be an example of modernizing Islam that its neighbors can follow, but of the difficulty for a country to shed a secular past in favor of a religious regime. Or of adopting US style ‘democracy’, i.e., the ballot box and ‘progress’ combined with brutal repression against those who want to replace that package with participatory democracy, less consumption and saving the planet.

In 1989, my book ‘Une autre Europe, un autre Monde’, was published in France.  In the context of what I had been the first to call ‘A Europe of Thirty’ as I foresaw the continent’s reunification, I noted that Turkey would only feel it had ‘arrived’ when it could join the European Union, but that this sentiment betrayed its history as the seat of the Ottoman Empire that had dominated the Islamic world for five hundred years.

Today, Turkey is a key player in an escalating Middle East crisis. By spearheading Western aggression against Syria to protect Israel from an imaginary attack by Iran, it is paying back NATO for the decades during which it benefitted from the alliance’s ‘protection’ against the Soviet Union. (In the West, Turkey was known as ‘NATO’s sou-thern bulwark’ against the Communist threat.) Turkey’s neighborhood has changed dramatically since the Cold War, yet for NATO, Moscow is still an enemy, as it protests the Alliance’s interference in Syria’s internal affairs.

Not unrelatedly, this week, the Nobel committee awarded its annual Peace Prize to the European Union, citing the successful transformation of thirty countries that had warred for centuries into a peaceful and prosperous polity. Most observers were astonished by the prize, given the potentially earth-shattering crisis of Europe’s common currency, the Euro. And while the Nobel Committee piously hopes its decision will encourage a peaceful resolution, neutral Switzerland gears up to once again receive refugees.

The Second World War has not been forgotten by  Greece which suffered a brutal German occupation, followed by the defeat of its powerful left wing under heavy-handed British/American influence. As for the Spanish, they have not forgotten their Civil War against a fascist dictator that set the stage for Hitler’s aggressions. But should Europe descend once again into conflict, it will not be over territory, but about the chasm between the 99% and the 1%.

To understand the significance of what is happening today, we should go back to 1848, when the Communist Manifesto enjoined the workers of the world to unite. The slogan was subsequently adopted by the Soviet Union and many workers’ parties, but until now, the capitalist system had remained too powerful for the workers of the world to think as one.

Until now. Three weeks before what is perhaps the most crucial American presidential election, populations in thirty-odd countries are in the street banging on pots and pans in opposition to the world America has created, while neither candidate can be expected to break from the policies that led to that opposition.

In 1989 I surmised that one of the reasons why the United States had not imposed sanctions on China after the events of Tiananmen Square was to prevent a rap-prochement between China and the URSS. Thirteen years later, the two former communist countries are united in their opposition to Western military action against the Syrian government, support Iran’s right to peaceful use of nuclear technology, and share similar attitudes toward just about any American policy you can think of.

The common front of these two rising powers is a response to the near total loss of control over world events by Western leaders who bought into the American dream of unlimited wealth. As China and Russia call for coope-ration and dialogue, the energy of desperation flows through the world system at an accelerating rate, driving it toward a bifurcation whose outcome no one can predict. And yet, no special concern is palpable.

Was the world similarly oblivious as Hitler built up his armies to overpower Europe in 1939? No one had dreamed there could be war in 1914 until an assassin’s bullet killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in partly Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina. Today, as Europe’s politicians and bankers ponder how to save the Euro, its peoples spearhead worldwide opposition to Wall Street rule, while a dispute over power in a small Muslim country on its border could ignite the entire Eurasian continent.

If the Christian/Muslim enmity begun in the Middle Ages, and the struggle for equity that began with the French Revolution come together in what could be an ultimate conflagration it will be the fault neither of Iran nor of Syria.

 

With the election of the Muslim’s Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi as President of Egypt, the broader meaning of the Arab Spring can now be perceived. It makes Islam a crucial player in the worldwide jockeying for power between religion, liberalism and social democracy.  Consider these facts:

Tunisia, the country that launched the uprisings that are shaking the Arab world, elected a President who ran on a human rights platform, and rules under a coalition with a left-leaning Islamist party and a social democratic party;

After Muammar Ghaddafi, a maverick who evolved his own version of socialism, was ousted, a National Transition Council was supposed to lead the country to a Western type democracy. It is opposed by both youth and religious groups, the former demanding greater transparency the latter vying for a greater role for religion. The latest news is that it will institute sharia law;

In Yemen, popular pressure forced the American-backed ruler to resign after months of demonstrations, but he is succeeded by his former vice-president. Not coincidentally, the U.S. has an air base in Yemen from which it launches raids against Al-Qaeda groups operating in the region;

In Kuwait, divisions between an increasingly Islamist parliament and the Western-allied ruling family have worsened in recent years. In February’s parliamentary elections two-thirds of the seats were filled by opposition leaders vowing to expose high level corruption. After two ministers resigned in the face of scrutiny, the constitutional court dissolved parliament.

What this rundown shows is that in all the Arab countries undergoing revolutions or regime change, the public is no longer a relatively illiterate mass of religious followers.  Muslim populations are increasingly educated, they watch TV and the young go on-line and use cell-phones. In the twentieth century when the United State and the Soviet Union were vying for influence, the Arab countries largely chose non-alignment, but they also had a socially oriented Arab unity movement, which faced off against fundamentalist tendencies such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

One of the reasons why the so-called war on terrorism is misleading is that all religions have their fundamentalists. In fact, fundamentalists from different religions have more in common with one another than they do with their respective mainstreams: both Christian and Muslim fundamentalists share an acceptance of violence in defense of their respective faiths, and a tendency to see women as objects under male rule. Where the two faiths differ is in their attitudes toward wealth: American fundamentalists generally espouse the pursuit of material goods, even though this is difficult to divorce from the commercialization of sex. Islamists’ greatest objection to the West is the commercialization of sex and the consumer, or me society, which is the antithesis of spirituality and in conflict with charity, one of the five pillars of Islam which must be practiced daily.

Another historical fact that gets short shrift by the media is the antagonism between the two main groups of Muslims, Sunnis and Shi’as. It is usually referred to in terms of their respective rituals, but their social distinctions are more relevant. Shi’ism emphasizes Islam’s commitment to solidarity and hence is usually found among the lower classes, whereas the Sunnis tend to belong to the exploiting class. Although there have been Sunni leaders such as Nasser, who espoused some form of socialism, the Shi’a ethos, inspired by the Prophets chosen successor, Ali, who was murdered, is epitomized by the Iranian Revolution and Ahmedinejad’s continuing support among the working class, whereas Sunni rulers tend to be allied with the United States.

In the recent Egyptian elections, the Muslim Brotherhood seemed to want to be all things to all people, promising Sharia law, bikinis, democracy and human rights. This is simply a reflection of the phenomenon I announced at the start of this article: the current jockeying between religion, socialism and liberalism and various combinations thereof.

It may not be an exaggeration to say that Islam is undergoing a crisis similar to that which began for Christianity in the  sixteenth century, when Martin Luther publicly rejected  Catholicism, and Protestantism was born in an effort to ‘reform’ it. The subsequent European wars of religion lasted for over a hundred years, but had few repercussions on the outside world. Today, the failure of the Western media to provide information about Islamic history results in a severely limited view of an upheaval that affects the entire globe.

Currently the Syrian crisis is in the forefront, yet the historical antagonism between a small Shi’a sect, the Alawites,   and a largely Sunni population is absent from the media, as is     the long history of Turkish/Syrian conflict. The Turkish coastal province of Hatay, home to members of the small Shi’a sect known as the Alawites, to which Bashar al-Assad belongs, has been claimed by both countries since 1939, and partly accounts for the seemingly contradictory positions Turkey has taken in the Syrian crisis.

Last but not least, following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Syria endured a succession of military coups which led to rise of a Muslim Socialist Party, the Ba’ath. In 1963, a group of disgruntled Alawite officers, including Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, helped the Ba’ath Party seize power. Under the Alawites, Syria has been under secular socialist rule, a fact never mentioned in the mainstream media. That is why it is supported both by Russia  and Iran.

In a region that has been almost monolithically religious for fourteen hundred years, secular, socialist and liberal ideologies have paved the way for a reformation – or modernization of Islam, as emphasized in an RT interview of Tunisia’s foreign Minister on June 30 rt.com/programs/interview/tunisia-political-change-abdessalem/. The West needs to recognize this trend instead of fixating on the terrorist behaviors – comparable to the European Religious Wars – that accompany it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is a comparison of the way in which CNN and the BBC treated Turkey’s recall of its Ambassador to Israel over Israel’s refusal to apologize for killing nine Turkish citizens in a raid on a boat trying to reach Gaza with humanitarian aid last year.

Not until the seventh paragraph of the story did CNN state what the issue was. It cites the insult to Israel in the first paragraph, then emphasizes Israel’s positive attitude:

“Turkey’s fiery (sic) prime minister ratcheted up rapidly-escalating tensions with Israel on Tuesday, comparing Ankara’s once-close middle eastern ally to a “spoiled boy” and announcing additional sanctions would soon be imposed.”

….

“Multiple Israeli sources said they are doing what they can to be responsible and reverse the negative dynamic. Some Israeli officials believe the current troubles between the two countries are minor bumps that can be smoothed out with time and the proper diplomacy.”

Others believe the deteriorating relationship has little to do with Israel and more to do with a reorientation of Turkish foreign policy towards the Muslim world.

A possible Erdogan trip to Gaza is contributing to that school of thought. Diplomats in Cairo and Ankara tell CNN that Erdogan is tentatively scheduled to visit Cairo next week. There is growing speculation in local media that the Turkish prime minister may try to visit Gaza via Egypt’s Rafah border crossing.”

……

“Despite deteriorating political relations between Jerusalem and Ankara, trade has grown substantially between the two countries over the last year, according to Turkish government statistics.”

The BBC gets right to the heart of the matter:

“Turkey expelled the Israeli ambassador on 2 September and also suspended military co-operation with Israel last week.

The move follows the expulsion of Israel’s ambassador over its refusal to apologize for the 2010 raid on a flotilla of activists heading for Gaza, in which nine Turks were killed.

A UN report has concluded that Israel used ‘excessive force’ in its raid, but that the naval blockade was legal.

Turkey has vowed to take the case to the International Court of Justice.  Based in The Hague, the ICJ is a permanent UN court set up to rule on state-to-state disputes.”

…..

“Israel has expressed regret for the loss of lives. But Mr Erdogan described the raid as “savagery” and accused Israel of acting like ‘a spoiled boy’ in the region.”

In an update of the story, read at 11.30 eastern time, the BBC elaborated on the court’s findings, concluding with: “The report noted ‘forensic evidence showing that most of the deceased were shot multiple times, including in the back, or at close range’”.

At that time, CNN had not added anything to its story.