links for 2007-07-22

Turkish nationalist supporters

2 thoughts on “links for 2007-07-22

  1. What do you, as an atheist and Europhile especially, think about islamist government of Turkey if it is (just barely) the will of the people?

  2. I don’t really know enough about the AKP to form a decent opinion, so take the following with a pinch of salt – but despite my dislike of all religions, I’d prefer a religious internationalist party to a secular nationalist party pretty much any day.

    From what I can tell, the use of “Islamist” in the context of the AKP is a bit of a misnomer anyway, considering the associations the term has adopted over the last few years – and I wouldn’t be too surprised if sections of the western media had been using the suffix “ist” rather than “ic” purely to scare everyone.

    It has some nutty, hard-core religious supporters, undoubtedly – but you can’t judge a party by its most extreme supporters. If you could, in the UK Labour would be a bunch of Stalinists and the Tories borderline fascists.