Amazing readiness to believe lies

Kerim Balcı

I have been observing an amazing readiness among Western intellectuals -- be they journalists or academics -- to believe in smear campaigns against the religious people of Turkey.

The religious-democratic sources inform them about the coup plans of fundamentalist secularists with all kinds of evidence and yet they prefer to believe the secularist sources. The secularists lie to them about the alleged secret agendas and intentions of religious people without any evidence at all, and yet they spare a place in their columns, articles, speeches and documentaries for those allegations.

This is at best secularist solidarity, at worst clear Orientalism.

Turkish history is not a coup-free history. Even if we speak of a coup plan without any evidence -- in the recent case we have 5,000 pages of coup plan, several wet signature-carrying documents, buried munitions here and there, confessing witnesses, evidence gathered through legal and technical wiretapping and seized documents proving renewal of the plans each time they were revealed and prevented -- reason would say that objective Western ears should be ready to listen to the allegations. No, they do not do so! They still prefer to voice counter-allegations that a particular group of religious people in the police have been “inventing” all the evidence. Good Lord! Do we have any previous cases of “religious policemen” being caught red-handed planting weapons and munitions in any place in order to conspire against any political, social or economical interest group? No! On the other hand we have the documents of a coup plan that includes planting illegal documents and weapons in the student dorms of a particular religious group in the country. We have witnessed at least one case where a pro-coup gendarmerie commander ordered planting weapons and forging police documents in order to delegitimize the police forces. The eyewitness reports are all in the indictment of the İlhan Cihaner case.

The book draft called “The Imam’s Army” is another case. The book itself is distributed on the Internet and many people have read it already, including myself, and yet many Western journalists continue to claim that the book was destroyed. The lawyers of Fethullah Gülen -- the “imam” in the title of the book -- have already declared that they have no objection to publication of the book and that they won’t file a complaint about the author if the book is published in the future, but certain Western journalists still believe the lies of who-knows-who and write in their columns that “whoever touches the imam gets burned!”

Both the aforementioned book and several Western journalists have voiced allegations about Gülen and the civil society organizations named after him -- allegations that were all written down in the indictment of Nuh Mete Yüksel. Gülen was cleared of all these allegations several times, including a vote in the Supreme Court of Appeals. Is it ethical to remind the readers of the baseless allegations and not of the dismissal of these allegations? For what do we have the judicial system, if not help clear an innocent person’s name of allegations?

I am amazed and disappointed to see the readiness of Western correspondents in Turkey, or the editors of Western media outlets, to believe and give a voice to the unsupported, baseless allegations of fundamentalist secularists about religious people.

Reason is the inner castle of the post-Enlightenment Western paradigm. What is this hurry to abandon the inner castle?

Published on Today's Zaman, 11 May 2011, Wednesday