48.7 F
New York
Thursday, March 28, 2024

Turkey Needs a Military Coup

Related Articles

-Advertisement-

Must read

Turkey’s President Erdogan continues to take his country down a path of no return with his heavy-handed Islamic-based edicts.
Turkey’s President Erdogan continues to take his country down a path of no return with his heavy-handed Islamic-based edicts.
As the Jewish Voice has been documenting for some time in both our news articles and opinion pieces, the atmosphere within Turkey has become increasingly problematic of late, from the point of view of those who believe that Western-style freedom and democracy is the most preferable form of government. Slowly but ever so surely, Prime Minister Recep Erdogan has made no secret of his love for hard-line Islamism. In any number of statements and measures – intrusively telling women in his country to have at least three children, forbidding the sale of alcohol between 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM, ordering the female flight attendants on the country’s national airline to wear very long dresses that fully conceal their form along with Ottoman-style fez caps and to stop putting on lipstick – the man originally perceived as a “moderate” has taken off the mask to show his true face.

These acts are actually quite innocuous in comparison to Erdogan’s more oppressive – perhaps “horrific” is a more apt adjective – totalitarian-style moves. In recent months, the Turkish government has arrested countless numbers of people who dared to voice disagreement with the president’s policies. Are we talking about treacherous revolutionaries? Not quite – Erdogan has jailed lawyers, doctors, journalists (both foreign and domestic), Twitter and Facebook users, and law-abiding street protesters (whom Erdogan calls “terrorists”) exercising their inherent right to express their dissent. Moreover, in an effort to tighten his hold over the country some time after he assumed leadership, Turkey’s president removed the top generals in his army and replaced them with Islamic-sympathizing military brass.

In a recent article, this newspaper quoted a Turkish protestor as asserting, “Erdogan has gone too far. Did you know that there’s no image of [Mustafa Kemal Atatürk – the founder of the modern and secular Turkish Republic] in schoolbooks anymore? He wants to remove all traces of Atatürk, who represents Turkish secularism. He wants to replace our laws with the Sharia!”

We are not only concerned with the social well-being of Turkey’s own citizenry, who are very likely to wind up living under an Islamist dictatorship that will become isolated from free society. As the world has bitterly learned, Islamist-led governments have a tendency to wreak havoc with their neighbors. Given Erdogan’s close relationship with Iran and other despotic Moslem nations – while he continues to maintain friendly official ties with European countries (not to mention the United States) – the inevitability of Turkey’s brand of Islamism spreading across Europe does not seem far-fetched at all. Heaven help us all if that should occur.

So what is the solution to this dangerous trend? In the opinion of the Jewish Voice, the moderate elements still exerting power within Turkey’s army should come together and rise up against their insidious president – the same way that Egypt’s military recently did in order to oust their country’s unpopular Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated leader Mohammed Morsi. It may seem like a challenging idea, but we hope and believe that there are enough democratic-leaning members of the Turkish army with the requisite passion and resilience to successfully conduct a military coup against President Erdogan.

Such a bold move may be the once proud country’s only last hope.

balance of natureDonate

Latest article

- Advertisement -