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Rabble, Canada
Oct 9 2005
X-Sender: Asbed Bedrossian <[email protected]>
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Bridging the Christian-Muslim divide
While no one in Europe is crazy about the Turks joining what happens
to be a largely white association (Hungary is 52 per cent in favour
and Britain is 45 per cent), only 10 per cent of Austrians favour
Turkish membership.
>by Heather Mallick
October 9, 2005
It may have taken 40 years, but it finally happened this week: The
European Union opened membership talks with Turkey.
I have watched the especially intense year-long run-up to this moment
with fascination and disgust. It was like being a spectator at a
cockfight, with ugly squawks, blood-soaked feathers and the stabbing
of beaks into the meat beneath the skin, the two cocks all the while
denying that this was, in fact, a cockfight, oh no, and the EU
spectators secretly hoping Turkey would expire in the straw of a
heart attack. It wouldn't look good if an Islamic nation were pecked
to death.
Supposedly, the fight was over Turkey being too big, or too poor, or
too full of possible migrants. It wasn't about Muslims joining what
former EC head Jacques Delors once called a `Christian club.'
Neither was it about whether Turkey was a European-type nation or
more of an Asian-ish, wrong-side-of-the-Mediterranean kind of
country. Not that they're not lovely people, of course. Fine
peasants, we're sure, but we won't have them in our home. You do
understand.
That's how racism works. One German-American writer in The Guardian,
disregarding the fact that the European nations fight their best wars
with each other, said white people should be allowed to mourn the
eventual loss of their culture to immigrant hordes. What is white
culture? Egg-salad sandwiches? Fridge magnets? She did not say.
The key is that while no one in Europe is crazy about the Turks
joining what happens to be a largely white association (Hungary is 52
per cent in favour and Britain is 45 per cent), only 10 per cent of
Austrians favour Turkish membership. The pollsters were surprised.
Austrians were the only respondents who saw `almost no positive side'
to letting the Turks in, the BBC reported, not even envisioning
`improved understanding between Europe and the Muslim world.'
Every EU nation agreed to negotiate with Turkey except Austria, which
said talks should take place only about a `privileged partnership,'
not actual membership.
Austria got dirty looks. The conference hall fell silent, I assume. A
polite cough was heard from Germany. It's unlikely there were Jews in
the room, Europe having a distinct shortage of Jews on its mainland,
but they were on European minds. Far-right Austrian politician Joerg
Haider, whose election had once brought EU sanctions against his
nation, had campaigned hard against the Turkish membership effort.
So Austria caved, doubtless reassuring itself that the negotiations
will take a decade, Turkey has to swallow 80,000 pages of EU law and
even then, it will take only one vote to blackball the country.
The EU wants Turkey badly for economic reasons. With a population of
72 million, it has plenty of young, educated people. Europe is
getting panicky about its low birth rate, caused by the refusal of
working women to have large families and resultant miserable lives.
At some point, Europe will need that younger work force.
In addition, Turkey, while mostly Sunni Muslim, is a secular
republic. Kurds, who make up 20 per cent of the population, see the
EU as a guard for their human rights, which it would be. Turkey,
notorious for arrests without trial and severe torture of prisoners,
claims to be trying to improve its human-rights record and treatment
of women. The charges recently filed against Turkish novelist Orhan
Pamuk for deploring Turkey's killing of 30,000 Kurds since 1984 and
the 1915 Armenian genocide were inspired by reactionaries aiming to
stop the talks. They failed.
After watching the cockfight for a year without taking sides, I am
convinced that Turkey's entrance into the EU, whose human-rights laws
are a model for the world, is our last best hope for a peaceful
understanding between the so-called Christian and Muslim solitudes.
Those in doubt might wish to read Indian novelist Vikram Seth's new
book, Two Lives, a stunning biography of his great-uncle Shanti (from
India) and great-aunt Henny (a Jew who escaped Second World War
Germany at the last minute). It brings home the horror of the slow
humiliation and demonization of the German Jews, who considered
themselves utterly German. It shows how insiders are made into
outsiders, how Henny's sister, Miss Lola Caro, an elegant German
(Jewish) girl, went from eating Stollen with her German (Christian)
friends in 1931 to Birkenau in 1943, stripped, thrown into a room
with perforated pillars filled with Zyklon-B, gassed, grapple-hooked
and burned to ash. That's 12 years of humiliation.
Imagine what the Palestinians feel. Imagine how a Turk, wanting to
modernize Turkey, feels at being rejected for his race and religion
for 40 years. Hitler would be giggling now. Think how much time
Muslims have had to be humiliated by the Western world. Perhaps
globalization speeded up the process.
When we seek an explanation for the existence of young, educated,
middle-class suicide bombers, humiliation fits the bill. An
Associated Press interview with a suicide bomber - he changed his
mind when he saw a mother and two children in a café - suggests that
bombers are driven `not by poverty or ignorance, but by a lethal mix
of nationalism, zealotry and humiliation.'
Turkey had already declared that it would give up on Europe if it
were rebuffed this time. The fact is, it would have been utterly
humiliated. In Western eyes at least, the squalid objections of
Austria, a country that unlike Germany has never truly faced its Nazi
past, would have been plain evidence of racism. Austria wanted a wall
around Europe, but the world doesn't work that way, we hope.
Former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing was angry at the
welcome extended to Turkey. The EU was risking replacing a `grand
French project of political union' with `a large free-trade zone,' he
said.
In fact, it is the opposite. It is a hand extended in hope.
Heather Mallick's column is in The Globe and Mail each
Saturday. It appears on Sunday in rabble.ca.
Oct 9 2005
X-Sender: Asbed Bedrossian <[email protected]>
X-Listprocessor-Version: 8.1 -- ListProcessor(tm) by CREN
Bridging the Christian-Muslim divide
While no one in Europe is crazy about the Turks joining what happens
to be a largely white association (Hungary is 52 per cent in favour
and Britain is 45 per cent), only 10 per cent of Austrians favour
Turkish membership.
>by Heather Mallick
October 9, 2005
It may have taken 40 years, but it finally happened this week: The
European Union opened membership talks with Turkey.
I have watched the especially intense year-long run-up to this moment
with fascination and disgust. It was like being a spectator at a
cockfight, with ugly squawks, blood-soaked feathers and the stabbing
of beaks into the meat beneath the skin, the two cocks all the while
denying that this was, in fact, a cockfight, oh no, and the EU
spectators secretly hoping Turkey would expire in the straw of a
heart attack. It wouldn't look good if an Islamic nation were pecked
to death.
Supposedly, the fight was over Turkey being too big, or too poor, or
too full of possible migrants. It wasn't about Muslims joining what
former EC head Jacques Delors once called a `Christian club.'
Neither was it about whether Turkey was a European-type nation or
more of an Asian-ish, wrong-side-of-the-Mediterranean kind of
country. Not that they're not lovely people, of course. Fine
peasants, we're sure, but we won't have them in our home. You do
understand.
That's how racism works. One German-American writer in The Guardian,
disregarding the fact that the European nations fight their best wars
with each other, said white people should be allowed to mourn the
eventual loss of their culture to immigrant hordes. What is white
culture? Egg-salad sandwiches? Fridge magnets? She did not say.
The key is that while no one in Europe is crazy about the Turks
joining what happens to be a largely white association (Hungary is 52
per cent in favour and Britain is 45 per cent), only 10 per cent of
Austrians favour Turkish membership. The pollsters were surprised.
Austrians were the only respondents who saw `almost no positive side'
to letting the Turks in, the BBC reported, not even envisioning
`improved understanding between Europe and the Muslim world.'
Every EU nation agreed to negotiate with Turkey except Austria, which
said talks should take place only about a `privileged partnership,'
not actual membership.
Austria got dirty looks. The conference hall fell silent, I assume. A
polite cough was heard from Germany. It's unlikely there were Jews in
the room, Europe having a distinct shortage of Jews on its mainland,
but they were on European minds. Far-right Austrian politician Joerg
Haider, whose election had once brought EU sanctions against his
nation, had campaigned hard against the Turkish membership effort.
So Austria caved, doubtless reassuring itself that the negotiations
will take a decade, Turkey has to swallow 80,000 pages of EU law and
even then, it will take only one vote to blackball the country.
The EU wants Turkey badly for economic reasons. With a population of
72 million, it has plenty of young, educated people. Europe is
getting panicky about its low birth rate, caused by the refusal of
working women to have large families and resultant miserable lives.
At some point, Europe will need that younger work force.
In addition, Turkey, while mostly Sunni Muslim, is a secular
republic. Kurds, who make up 20 per cent of the population, see the
EU as a guard for their human rights, which it would be. Turkey,
notorious for arrests without trial and severe torture of prisoners,
claims to be trying to improve its human-rights record and treatment
of women. The charges recently filed against Turkish novelist Orhan
Pamuk for deploring Turkey's killing of 30,000 Kurds since 1984 and
the 1915 Armenian genocide were inspired by reactionaries aiming to
stop the talks. They failed.
After watching the cockfight for a year without taking sides, I am
convinced that Turkey's entrance into the EU, whose human-rights laws
are a model for the world, is our last best hope for a peaceful
understanding between the so-called Christian and Muslim solitudes.
Those in doubt might wish to read Indian novelist Vikram Seth's new
book, Two Lives, a stunning biography of his great-uncle Shanti (from
India) and great-aunt Henny (a Jew who escaped Second World War
Germany at the last minute). It brings home the horror of the slow
humiliation and demonization of the German Jews, who considered
themselves utterly German. It shows how insiders are made into
outsiders, how Henny's sister, Miss Lola Caro, an elegant German
(Jewish) girl, went from eating Stollen with her German (Christian)
friends in 1931 to Birkenau in 1943, stripped, thrown into a room
with perforated pillars filled with Zyklon-B, gassed, grapple-hooked
and burned to ash. That's 12 years of humiliation.
Imagine what the Palestinians feel. Imagine how a Turk, wanting to
modernize Turkey, feels at being rejected for his race and religion
for 40 years. Hitler would be giggling now. Think how much time
Muslims have had to be humiliated by the Western world. Perhaps
globalization speeded up the process.
When we seek an explanation for the existence of young, educated,
middle-class suicide bombers, humiliation fits the bill. An
Associated Press interview with a suicide bomber - he changed his
mind when he saw a mother and two children in a café - suggests that
bombers are driven `not by poverty or ignorance, but by a lethal mix
of nationalism, zealotry and humiliation.'
Turkey had already declared that it would give up on Europe if it
were rebuffed this time. The fact is, it would have been utterly
humiliated. In Western eyes at least, the squalid objections of
Austria, a country that unlike Germany has never truly faced its Nazi
past, would have been plain evidence of racism. Austria wanted a wall
around Europe, but the world doesn't work that way, we hope.
Former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing was angry at the
welcome extended to Turkey. The EU was risking replacing a `grand
French project of political union' with `a large free-trade zone,' he
said.
In fact, it is the opposite. It is a hand extended in hope.
Heather Mallick's column is in The Globe and Mail each
Saturday. It appears on Sunday in rabble.ca.