The fate of Turkey and liberal values
Is there any better example of the foolishness and dishonesty of secular democracy without a commitment to liberal values, a commitment to liberty, than the on-going developments in Turkey?
Turkey charges 86 for 'coup plot'
"On Monday prosecutor Mr Engin filed charges at an Istanbul court against 86 people, 48 of whom are already in custody.
'The indictment covers crimes such as forming an armed terror group...and attempting to overthrow the government by force,' Mr Engin said.
A court must decide within two weeks whether to open the case against the 86 suspects.
They are accused of plotting to create chaos in Turkey, provoking secularist anger and a military coup that would topple the government.
The indictment referred to the killing of a judge in a 2006 armed attack on a court, and the bombing of a secularist newspaper.
There have been several coups by the Turkish military, which sees itself as the ultimate guardian of the country's secular values.
Some secularists believe the AK Party, many of whose members are former Islamists, is intent on installing Islamism in Turkey. They say the AKP's moves to overturn a ban on the Islamic headscarf at universities is evidence of this."
Future of the Ruling AK Party
"Turkey's recent top court decision that rejected a parliament constitutional amendment, which would have allowed female students to attend universities with headscarves, has provoked thousands of Turkish women, AKP supporters, and human rights activists worldwide.
It has also triggered an intense debate over the future of both: The ruling AKP — facing a constitutional court closure case in a few months— and Turkey's unique secularism seen by many critics as anti-democratic and anti-liberal.
The ruling Justice and Development party, AKP, rejected the decision as unconstitutional, breaching individual freedoms, and politically motivated. The court's decision poses a real threat to the majority party that is awaiting another constitutional court case seeking to outlaw the party and its 71 leaders—including the president Abdullah Gul and charismatic Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan— on grounds they are working to undermine the country's entrenched secularism."
Free speech on trial in Turkey
"Like one of his own characters, trapped between liberal yearnings and the reality of an unforgiving state, Turkey's most celebrated novelist, Orhan Pamuk, is slated to appear in court Friday to face charges of 'insulting Turkish identity.'
The high-profile free speech trial pits the aims of European-driven reform in Turkey - which began EU membership talks last October - against a fiercely nationalistic tradition that permits little challenge. Mr. Pamuk's trial is one of more than 65 other free speech cases now under way in Turkey, which are being closely watched by European observers, as a test of the recent reforms.
'This is a tug of war in Turkey now, between those who favor democratic and EU values, [against] those who are afraid of such change - the hard-core nationalists who are willing to do anything to stop that trend,' says Haluk Sahin, a journalism professor at Bilgi University and columnist for Radikal newspaper, who is also facing trial in February under the same statute...
Pamuk is charged over remarks made to a Swiss newspaper last February, that '30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.'
Pamuk did not use the word 'genocide,' which is officially rejected here in favor of an 'internecine fighting' formulation to explain the Armenian deaths 90 years ago. Western historians, however, often consider the events in Anatolia during the last years of the Ottoman Empire to be the first genocide of the 20th century.
Turkey has also long had difficulty accepting that Kurds have a separate ethnic identity, with their own language and customs, beyond a designation as 'Mountain Turks.' Battle against separatist Kurds in the 1980s and 1990s left an estimated 30,000 Kurds dead.
Even discussing such issues has been taboo in Turkey, though freedom of speech protection is required to join the EU club. Extremists rallied against Pamuk; a provincial governor ordered his books burned.
'Various newspapers launched hate campaigns against me, with some right-wing (but not necessarily Islamist) columnists going as far as to say that I should be 'silenced' for good,' Pamuk writes in the current issue of The New Yorker magazine. 'What am I to make of a country that insists that the Turks, unlike their Western neighbors, are a compassionate people, incapable of genocide, while nationalist political groups are pelting me with death threats?' he asks...
Pamuk faces three years in prison if convicted, though often such cases end in payment of fines.
Still, the number of cases is mounting, bringing opprobrium from the US and Europe - which has expressed 'serious concern' and tasked an envoy with following the trial - as well as from human rights organizations.
'The trial of Orhan Pamuk will show the world which direction Turkish justice is heading,' Holly Cartner, the Europe and Central Asia director of Human Rights Watch said in a statement."
Turkish High Court Overturns Headscarf Rule
[notice how the left-wing, secular New York Times refers to the right to wear Muslim headscarves as a rule rather than as a freedom]
"ISTANBUL — Turkey’s highest court dealt a stinging slap to the governing party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday, ruling that a legal change allowing women attending universities to wear head scarves was unconstitutional.
Turkish women wearing head scarves walked through the streets of Istanbul. Turkey's top court ruled today that Islamic head scarves violate secularism and cannot be allowed at universities.
The Constitutional Court said in a brief statement that the change, proposed by Mr. Erdogan’s party and passed by Parliament in February, violated principles of secularism set in Turkey’s Constitution.
The ruling sets the stage for a showdown between Turkey’s secular elite — its military, judiciary and secular political party — and Mr. Erdogan, an observant Muslim with an Islamist past.
The court is one of Turkey’s most important secular institutions, and liberals see the ruling as largely political. It bodes ominously for Mr. Erdogan: The same court is considering a case that would ban him and 70 members of his party from politics. A decision is expected in the summer.
Turkey’s political system has been controlled for generations by a powerful secular elite that has stepped in with coups and judicial decisions against elected governments. Mr. Erdogan and his party, Justice and Development, or AKP, have come the closest of any political party in Turkey’s history to breaking its hold on power.
In the head-scarf case, the elite establishment contended that allowing veiled women onto campuses threatened Turkish secularism, one of the founding principles of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s secular revolution in the 1920s. Head scarves were banned from campuses in the 1990s.
Kemal Anadol, a deputy chairman of the secular opposition Republican People’s Party, called the verdict a triumph of justice and said it showed that secularism and democracy were 'constitutional principles that can’t be separated from one another.'
Mr. Erdogan calls the case a matter of individual rights, contending that all Turks should be able to attend universities no matter what they wear or believe.
But the way his party proposed it — abruptly, with little public discussion — angered the secular old guard and disappointed liberals, who support the changes, but want them to be accompanied by changes that strengthen other rights, like free speech. Some said AKP seemed to be pursuing only those changes that would please its constituency, and not the broader range that was needed to join the European Union.
'AKP is lost in the spell of their own power,' said Mithat Sancar, a law professor in Ankara, Turkey’s capital. 'When they want to listen to liberals, they do, but when they don’t, they comfortably ignore them.'
Despite Mr. Erdogan’s broad popularity — his party won 47 percent of the vote in an election last July — the threat of a ban is serious. The authorities have closed more than 20 parties in the past, and Thursday’s ruling seemed as if it could be a sign of things to come.
The head-scarf amendment is considered to be the single most important irritant that set off the case to ban Mr. Erdogan and 70 other AKP members, and it is central to the prosecution’s argument that he and his allies are trying to dismantle secularism in Turkey, an accusation they strongly dispute." 
Secular military coups. Banning religious parties. Censoring speech about Armenian genocide. Prohibiting religious headscarves.
How on earth could such leftism ever be characterized as liberal, in any honest sense?
The answer is that it cannot. And Turkey, today, reflects the sham of left-wing power grabs as liberal in any substantive sense.
Liberal means liberty. Power is the opposite of liberty. When people claim power on behalf of freedom without presumption against its use they do not bring a honest commitment to liberal values. They are rationalizing power for the causes they favor. Hence the most important aphorism in the political world by a more genuine liberal, John Dalberg-Acton:
"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Power is not freedom. Freedom is not power. They are opposites, even when power is used legitimately. Which is why we need a presumption against its use if we are to maintain any honest notion of liberal democracy.
