The Only Good Muslim…
By Mitch Berg
It’s become an article of faith among some conservatives that Islam is, always and forever, an aggressive, threatening, dangerous faith.
And it’s true that there are aspects of Islam that are giving large swathes of the world headaches (I’m a master of understatement) right about now.
Of course, those critics ignore the broad swathes of the planet where Muslims coexist just fine with the rest of the world. India, Indonesia, Bosnia, Senegal are all places where Islam is not synonymous with unrest, extremism and anger.
And now, Turkey – a majority Muslim country which many in the west had seen as sliding into the Wahhabi fold in recent years – has staved off the Islamists under Recep Erdogan, dishing out serious electoral losses to his Islamist party and forcing him to moderate is once-concerning rhetoric.
It appears Turkey’s experienced voters, the beneficiaries of Ataturk’s vision, gave a would-be strongman a lesson.
Erdogan began as a reformer pursuing free market economic reforms and battling corruption. For a decade (roughly 2003-13), Turkey’s economy grew. He was popular. However, he also used his single-party majority to collect and solidify power for himself and his close supporters.
At times, the reform mask fell, revealing a bully with a penchant for jailing critical journalists and using highly questionable prosecutorial tactics to jail respected senior army officers on vague charges of terrorism.
Erdogan was on the verge of becoming Turkey’s biggest political problem, which is why his loss of majority control has enormous implications.
He sought a two-thirds AKP parliamentary majority. He then could have amended the constitution and imposed a powerful presidency on the political system. Opposition parties feared Erdogan’s goal was imposing by insidious osmosis — “rule by the big man’s whim” — for who would have become this empowered super-president bossing a less democratic and ever-more majoritarian government? Why, the fellow whom critics refer to as Sultan Recep. Prior to the June 7 election, the AKP had 327 seats in Parliament. Based on the most recent count, it now holds 258, far short of two-thirds. Single-party government control in Turkey requires 276 seats.
Erdogan had his positive aspects; he was an economic conservative, by European standards, and Turkey’s economy showed it.
But his drive toward being an Islamist strongman was justly concerning, as was any traction he gained among Turkish voters…
…which, it seems, may have turned.
The lesson for right now? Islam and secular democracy can coexist, although there are tensions.
Just like in any other democracy.
June 15th, 2015 at 4:26 pm
Applause! Well written, well said.
I am personally sick and tired of the many conservatives who fail to acknowledge how many Muslims are our allies, how many Muslims serve in our armed forces, helping us fight back against terrorism.
Muslims are no more monolithic than any other religion, and certainly both Christianity and Judaism, with which many Americans are more familiar, have their own schisms and divisions and differences.
Every instance of the kind of Pamela Geller bullshit hate mongering from the right potentially alienates some of those people we desperately need for our self-defense. People to be translators and interrogators, people who act to counter radicalization in mosques and online.
Muslims are not our enemy; terrorists and extremists of all stripes are our enemy.
Hope you are enjoying your summer!
June 15th, 2015 at 6:01 pm
The only good Muslim…… is a bad Muslim.
All of the true believers are terrorists, support the terrorists, or at the very least tolerate the terrorists.
It’s the bad Muslims we that may save Turkey and we should be supporting them.
June 15th, 2015 at 8:23 pm
Dog Gone once again parrots lefty talking points that are overly simplistic.
The culture of Islamic Turkey has always resembled European culture more than Arabic or Persian Islam. For example, the turks preferred their own language over Arabic. The Turkish version of Islam has a national character that other versions of Islam do not.
The first enemy of the American Left is their fellow Americans. No number of dead Americans at the hands of foreign jihadists will change that.
If you want to know how the Left views Americans, America, and Islam, I strongly suggest you read this article by Lefty Michael Walzer: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/islamism-and-the-left
June 16th, 2015 at 8:01 am
So let me get this straight – Muslims can be violent or peaceful, law breakers or law abiding, good people or bad – so it’s wrong to paint them all with a broad brush.
In other words, they’re not at all like small-town Midwesterners who are all bitter, cling to guns or religion, prefer local control over local issues, doubt global warming and think trade legislation and immigration shenanigans are the reason Americans can’t get decent jobs. Because those people are, without exception, terrorists.
Glad we got that cleared up.
June 16th, 2015 at 11:20 am
In my opinion, the only good Muslim is one who doesn’t wish to transform our current form of government into Sharia Law, and is willing to live and exist under OUR style of government. If they don’t want to live under a representative republic style government, and would rather live under Sharia Law (you know…like the Islamic faith commands them to), well then I feel they should leave. If their vision, their goal, their mission is to transform ANY level of our government into Sharia Law (federal, state or local); then I will not welcome them into this country, and will consider them a hostile invasive force.
June 17th, 2015 at 12:28 am
Too bad the Palestinians couldn’t do something like this. Well maybe they could… if the government they elected ever decides to hold elections. Oh the irony. Good for Turkey. Seems like their citizens took a look at Egypt and decided not to go there. And they didn’t even have to protest in the streets. They did it by the ballot box. Now if we could only get them to recognize that pesky little thing they did to the Armenians back 100 years ago…