Re: 300,000 rally against Turkish government
On Apr 15, 2007, at 12:32 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
On 4/15/07, Doug Henwood dhenwood@panix.com wrote: >
On Apr 15, 2007, at 11:18 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
I’m afraid that many secular Western leftists would prefer a
military dictatorship that bans hijab to a democracy that allows but does not impose hijab.Since Carrol won’t play his usual role in demanding names rather than generalizations, I’ll do it - who are these western leftists? Not me or anyone I know. So name one - no, more than one, since you said “many.”
Mike Ballard, normally a pacific man not known for any sympathy for militarism, seems positively elated by a big pro-military rally in Turkey, just because it is billed as a rally in defense of secularism against an Islamist party (even though, in this case, it’s a party that is more cosmopolitan and more oriented to Europe than hard-line secular nationalists) and favorably covered in the corporate Western media. Western leftists can be as simple and provincial as that, and I doubt that Mike is an exception. I’d expect many of them to support the Democratic Left Party (social democrats, http://www.dsp.org.tr/MEP/) which joined the rally (if they look into the matter enough to find out that it was also part of it).
So “many secular Wstern leftists” are actually Mike Ballard, who
probably didn’t know who was behind the demo, and who I’m confident
(though he can speak for himself) would not “prefer a military
dictatorship that bans hijab to a democracy that allows but does not
impose hijab.” I really can’t imagine anyone who’d prefer that, so
you’re just making stuff up, aren’t you?
And I’ll bet that a lot of those 300,000 wouldn’t prefer such a
dictatorship either - they’re just afraid of Islamists. Don’t you
often say that people support Islamist parties for their own reasons
without supporting theocracy? Can’t that apply in the other direction?
Doug