Thursday, July 26, 2007
Michel Gurfinkiel asks Is Turkey Lost? On the way to answering is actually a nice concise history of modern Turkey worth checking out. As to the question, at the risk of reading too much into too little, this is highly meaningful to me:
Hard on the heels of Metal Storm came a movie: Valley of the Wolves, Iraq. Taking off from a popular TV serial, it depicted the U.S. presence in Iraq as a nightmare of brutality. According to the movie, the U.S. was engaging in mass murder and then trafficking in the victims’ organs. Much of the action was devoted to a supposed joint American-Kurdish operation to “cleanse†northern Iraq of its Turkmen (i.e., Turkish) minority. If Metal Storm was a best-seller, Valley of the Wolves could be the Turkish film industry’s biggest commercial success ever.
Then there is anti-Semitism. Kavgam, a Turkish translation of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, was published at about the same time as Metal Storm. Almost two years ago, as I and other European and American visitors saw on a fact-finding trip sponsored by the Nixon Center, it was on prominent display in airports, shopping malls, academic bookstores, at the archeological museum in Ankara—everywhere. And Kavgam is hardly the only example of the new anti-Semitism in the Turkish media. The worst character in Valley of the Wolves is an American Jewish doctor who supervises organ traffic from Iraq to the United States and Israel. Another recent best-seller is a book called Hitler’s Leadership Qualities. Turkish newspapers are rife with anti-Jewish innuendo and worse...
Even leaving aside the anti-Semitism (it's almost old hat and expected by now isn't it?), the movie and the book are particularly interesting as a way of getting in the psyche of the average guy. Who does he fantasize about fighting? Us.
I was there last summer, and found the people to be overwhelmingly friendly. The bookstores don't have nearly as many anti-American books of the Michael Moore / Noam Chomsky genre as you see anywhere in Western Europe, and I certainly didn't see Mein Kampf anywhere, let alone "everywhere". I did see one poster for "Valley of the Wolves", hanging next to a poster of Serena Williams. My Israeli relatives faced some hostility when visiting there during the Lebanon war, but describe it as a departure from the normal friendly treatment they get there.
I strongly recommend it as a destination.
I have no doubt that what you say is true, but that doesn't really speak to what's going on outside the realm of the interpersonal. You know how many times I've read how wonderful the Palestinians (or some other Arab group) are because X person went there and drank tea and had a wonderful time? Or some Rabbi thinks he's going to head off Jihad in America by going down to the local MAS and shaking hands and smiling and being charming?
Sometimes these things are very superficial. There's a lot going on below the surface.
I understand that but:
1) At least let it be noted that people aren't overtly hostile.
2) I wouldn't discount "superficial" friendliness.
3) Mein Kampf was nowhere in sight, and the level of public anti-Americanism (remember, Turkish is written in western script so it's easy to get a rough sense of things) is nowhere near what it is in Western Europe.
4) My relatives are Turkish-Israelis, and certainly know what's going on.