Letters to the Editor
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But isn't this happy liberal paradise?
I mean you've been Muslim cheerleaders for years. If they unwind the clock 500 years isn't that the happy hippy horseshit everyone's been demanding?
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A tipping point
Islam is on the rise in Turkey. Note I did not say "Islamism." There is no "ism" in this behavior; everything you see from headscarves, honor killings, slaughter of dogs, Shar'ia, and murders of Christian publishing workers is simply Islam, pure and practiced the way Mohammed wanted it.
One wonders if this will finally wake up the dhimmi bureaucrats in Europe to stop Turkey's bid for the EU once and for all. Germany actually ascended to a slight pissiness about the Islamic torture and murder of one of their citizens at the Bible publishing house, and there have been peevish murmurs from other European "powers" about the murders of journalists and the suppression of the truth about the Islamic genocide of Armenians.
You'd think by now Europeans would realize that the proliferation of head-bagged women means that dark times are ahead. Perhaps the Islamic shrinkwrap on Erdogan's chattel will finally get that across.
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You're obsessed with headscarves
Why don't you quit your neo-colonialist babble about headscarves in Quebec and Turkey and let those countries make up their own minds on the subject? You know next-to-nothing about Turkish politics and if you did maybe you'd understand why this is such a huge issue to Turks who honor Ataturk's memory.
What an embarrassment your are to Salon.
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Obsession?
You bet I worry about this issue. Some folks in the late 1930s were "obsessed" with certain types of brown shirts, too, or is that reference beyond you -- do they even teach "colonialist" history at NYU anymore?
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Kasmira
You're attacking the wrong person. My letter was directed towards Tracy Clark-Flory, not you.
Her attitude is the neo-colonialist one. She's constantly questioning the right of the people of Turkey or Quebec to decide if they want people wearing headscarves - as if her opinion mattered more than the right of the citizens of those states to decide the issue for themselves.
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I wish evereyone would stop equating "headscarf" with "veil"
Covering the head for women is also traditional in Christian (at least Catholic) as well as Orthodox Jewish customs. I remember buying a chapel cap (available at a drug store and symbolically covering the head) before attending Mass and I knew Jewish Orthodox families where the Mom wore a wig to cover her head in public.
We need to understand that women covering their heads is a tradition in the continuum among Jewish, Christian and Muslim beliefs.
However, full veils, burkas, family male companions in public and restrictions to the home and from education/professions is obviously extreme, not actualy part of the Koran, and out of touch with the modern world.
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Hardly cause for concern about secular Turkey
But, in a scandalous turn of events, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, a Muslim, is considering a presidential run ... meaning, it's possible that the presidential palace will be occupied by his head-scarf-wearing wife.
First off, this sentence doesn't make a whole lot of sense. A Muslim President does not automatically mean a headscarf-wearing wife. Nor is a Muslim running for President exactly a scandalous turn of events. The current president, Ahmet Sezer, is also a Muslim, as are approximately 99% of Turks.
Second, this is hardly something to fret about. Erdogan and his party are not extremists - they may envision a Turkey that's less vehemently secular, but, as Prime Minister, he has worked very hard to bring Turkey up to the standards necessary to join the EU, and toppling the secular order would be to turn around and go in the other direction.
Third, as president, he'll actually have more symbolic power and less real power than he does as Prime Minister.
Fourth - seems to me that some of Turkey's secularity laws, such as the banning of headscarves (again, NOT the same thing as veils) are counter-productive to women's rights. I think that it's better to wear a headscarf than to be pulled out of school. I also find it interesting that of Islamic Middle Eastern countries (in the broadest sense of the term "middle east") Iran actually has the highest portion of women with a higher education, because nobody prevents them from attending for ethical reasons.
Fifth - despite what a previous poster seems to think, Islamism is not creeping into power in Turkey. There are reactionaries within the country, of course, and because they feel threatened, some will lash out, but they hardly represent anything systematic. In much of Turkey, you'd find it little different from western Europe, and I'm told by people who've spent more time there than I have that the line between the secular, European west, and the conservative, more staunchly Islamic east is steadily marching eastward.
And finally, as you mention, the army - NATO's second largest - has overthrown governments before because they have strain too far from the secular path set out by Ataturk. It's practically their constitutional duty. If the government goes too far awry, they'll do it again.
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Headscarves, Burkas, Yarmukas, Shaitels, and So On...
Any faith that requires its ordinary non-clerical practitioners to wear a uniform is inherently fascistic. Period.
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Furthermore
Any faith, not just those above, is silly superstitious nonsense. Refusing to go to school because you (or your family) cherish the symbols of such superstition is, frankly, stupid.
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"This is hardly something to fret about"
With Muslims running amok in European cities, raping, robbing, murdering, and rioting according to Mohammed's example, the ascendance of head-bagging fundamentalist Islam to the leadership of Turkey is not "something to fret about"?
It is indeed something to "fret" about. The Muslim head-bag on women, the ignominious sign of accepted inferiority and slavery that it is, is the clearest symbol of the ascendance of the brutality of Islamic law that we have. It doesn't take a Ph.D. to look at worldwide news and see the whippings, stonings, rapes, honor killings, and beheadings of women done in the name of Allah, and according to the strictures of the "prophet's" law. I actually congratulate the editors of Broadsheet for their attempts to bring this clear red flag of 7th century Arab supremacism to our attention.
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What's funny is that the day this happens
The Cheerleaders will be first in line screaming about the erasure of Turkey's aggressive separation of Church and State. Sometimes I think radicals just like to be unhappy and angry about something, anything.