About Hugh Fitzgerald: What Mustafa Akyol **ACTUALLY** Said

We have, in fact, let many grievous assaults on good people pass without comment. Most of them have been made on one of our Senior Fellows, who has taken the position that personal attacks on her should not meet with response, as any response might be a distraction to those doing, admittedly, other good work. Thus, many bloggers, and the administrators of web pages that host their screed (and do nothing about it and do some of the execrating themselves), have escaped the public scrutiny and protest which they have richly deserved. I do not promise that in the future I will be honoring my commitment to let these aggressions rest. Why the change in policy? In just one thread on one of these websites, Jihad Watch, both our analyst and a young Turkish journalist and Islamic theorist were subjected to what I certainly consider overtly dishonest dealings, and not for the first time for either: Opinions which our analyst does not hold were attributed to her by a poster using the handle Great Comet of 1577, necessitating (again, unfortunately, not for the first time) a long, detailed response. But it is a post by "Hugh Fitzgerald" (likely a pseudonym), a manager of and frequent author on the Jihad Watch website, that is the subject of this column. In this post, Mr. Fitzgerald admits that he is pretending to be Mr. Akyol and writes a post in Akyol's name of what he surmises Mr. Akyol would say. Of course, Mustafa Akyol has never said and never shall say anything of the sort that Hugh Fitzgerald wrote. We consider such "putting words into the mouths of others" an act of intellectual dishonesty—and a dangerous one, as Mr. Akyol can be falsely quoted from this post. As many writers on the Jihad Watch website — among them Robert Spencer himself and Serbian writer Srdja Trifkovic — should know, having the writings of others falsely attributed to oneself is at the very least distressing; it can be costly and threatening. Morgaan Sinclair tells us that when a Montenegrin newspaper attributed to Srdja Trifkovic something he had not said — something so inflammatory he could have been killed for it — the brave lad made an appearance in Montenegro to refute the claim. Good for him. And recently, CAIR representative and incorrigible liar Ibrahim Hooper attributed a statement to Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer that he had not made — a scandalous statement that had actually appeared on Mr. Spencer's own site but had been made by an anonymous blogger. This statement can likely never be expunged, even after the extraordinary efforts made by Mr. Spencer's friends, including Gracen Fellow Morgaan Sinclair, who wrote a lengthy piece for BNN in an effort to help. One would think then, the management of Jihad Watch would know better than this. However, in deference to the fact these people apparently want this post to be viewed as "humor" (oh, yes, very funny), I will let them make the rules on this one — but they will have to live by the rules they have publicly forced on others. Therefore, I shall soon be publishing a "response in kind" on this web page — and on all three of the Gracen Intelligence private sites — and I shall expect, if not demand, that my comedic roast of Hugh Fitzgerald be met with the peals of gay laughter and knee-slapping paroxyms of warm camaraderie with which Mr. Fitzgerald apparently expects us to respond to the ridicule of a friend and colleague. Stay tuned to your digital telly, for my boomerang of Hugh Fitzgerald's razzing of Mustafa Akyol at the expense of the truth is forthcoming.

Mr. Akyol's English-language Website may be found at www.thewhitepath.org
Mr. Akyol is Op-Ed Editor of Turkish Daily News, Turkey's largest English-language daily.

authority

January 30, 2007

The Hrant Dink Murder and Its Meaning

[Originally published in First Things website]

On January 19, 2007, a journalist named Hrant Dink was shot dead by a seventeen-year-old militant on one of Istanbul’s busiest avenues. In just thirty-two hours, the Turkish police caught the reckless killer, who confessed his crime quite proudly. “I shot the Armenian,” he said smugly, “because he had insulted Turkishness.”

Hrant Dink was a member of Turkey’s seventy-thousand-strong Armenian community. But he was not just any member. As the founder and editor of the weekly Agos, the bilingual Turkish/Armenian newspaper, he was certainly the most prominent Armenian public intellectual in the country. He was, like many Turkish democrats, critical of the authoritarian measures of the state, with a particular emphasis on the taboos about the Armenian tragedy of 1915. Mr. Dink, like many others, believed that the tragedy was indeed a planned genocide. (The Turkish view, on the other hand, is that hundreds of thousands Armenians did indeed perish in 1915, but so did many Turks and Kurds, and what happened should be defined as intercommunal violence, not as a campaign of extermination.)

Yet, while Mr. Dink continued to make his case in the face of reaction from Turkish authorities and nationalist groups, he also criticized the anti-Turkish stance in some circles of the Armenian Diaspora. Turks were not bad people who deserve to be seen as the enemy, he insisted; they just needed to be informed about the other side of the story.

Mr. Dink’s principled stance placed him right in the center of the ideological war between those who strive to create an open and democratic Turkey and those who want to avoid it. The dividing line between these two camps is not religion, as some would presume, but nationalism. The proponents of the latter ideology, which is strong both in the state bureaucracy and in society at large, are particularly against the democratic reforms inspired by the European Union accession process. They want their good old Turkey, in which the all-powerful state oversees society, and civil liberties are sacrificed for its narrow definition of “Turkishness.”

Mr. Dink’s killer, Ogun Samast, is just one of the many chauvinistic young militants inspired by the most radical version of the cult of Turkishness. One of his predecessors is Mehmet Ali Agca, who shot Pope Jean Paul II in 1979. Another one is the sixteen-year-old militant from Trabzon–which is also Samast’s hometown–who killed Father Andrea Santoro last year. And of course these young apparatchiks have their elder “brothers,” who indoctrinate, train, and arm them.

The relationship between this hysterical type of Turkish nationalism–or, to use a more appropriate term, Turkish fascism–and Islam is worth clarifying. There are of course many militant Islamists in the world today, but Turkish fascists are not among them. In fact, they are clearly distinguished from and often at odds with Turkey’s Islamic circles, some of which are strong proponents of democratization and the EU bid. The fascists defend Islam and use it in some of their slogans, to be sure, but this is because they see religion as an important component of the Turkish identity. They hate the “infidel” Jews, Armenians, or Americans, but they detest Muslim Kurds and Arabs, too. Indeed, some of their most extreme factions don’t like Islam because of its trans-nationalism; instead they yearn for the pagan faiths of the pre-Islamic Turks.

Threats and violence have been the traditional tools these fascist cadres use to silence the intellectuals they hate–including liberal novelists such as the recent Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, and the Sufi-inspired Elif Safak. With the murder of Hrant Dink, they probably wanted to give a warning to them all. But the reaction of Turkish society to this political assassination suggests that their plan has backfired. Right after Dink’s murder, thousands of people gathered in front of his office to protest the crime. Their maxim was dramatic: “We are all Hrant Dink.” And the Turkish media, save for a few extremist dailies that support the fascist line, published heartfelt praise for Dink and grave condemnation of his murder.

Moreover, Hrant Dink’s funeral turned into an unprecedented rally against fascism in Turkish society. About one hundred thousand people from all walks of life and faiths marched in the wide avenues of Istanbul, creating a scenic river of bodies. The motto of the day was “We are all Armenians.”

In the following days, this motto was criticized by some nationalist figures as “going too far.” To gauge public opinion, the mainstream daily Hurriyet launched an online poll to which more than 450,000 people replied. To the question “Is it rightful to say ‘We are all Armenians’ to protest the Dink murder,” nearly half the respondents said yes.

All this implies that there is an important trend in Turkish society toward embracing its historical “others.” The “others” note this, too. In his piece published in the Turkish Daily News, the former prime minister of Armenia, Armen Darbinyan, wrote, “Armenians in Armenia did not anticipate such a sincere manifestation of solidarity” in Turkey for Hrant Dink. “This leaves no doubt that a core transformation in the worldview of today’s Turkey has occurred,” added Mr. Darbinyan, “[which] should become a turning point in the relations between Turkish and Armenian nations.”

He is right. These two great nations, which lived peacefully side by side for centuries until the curse of modern nationalism, should seek reconciliation. An Islamic principle reads, “From every evil, there emerges a good.” Perhaps the good emerging from the evil murder of Hrant Dink might be the chance to build that mutual understanding. Had he lived, that would have been his advice to us all.