In January, Turkey's current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, created an international sensation at the World Economic Forum in Davos when he stormed out of the meeting after accusing Israeli soldiers of deliberately killing innocent Palestinians in Gaza, calling it "a crime against humanity." When Maj. Gen. Avi Mizrahi, the commander of those soldiers, heard that, he reportedly replied: "Erdogan should first look in the mirror." General Mizrahi is right, and all Turks should take his advice, but not for the reason most Turks think.

Most Turks assumed General Mizrahi was referring to the increasingly loud international chorus insisting that Turks, too, are guilty of crimes against humanity because they committed genocide against innocent Armenians in World War I. They think he was saying, in effect, "We may be wanton killers, but you have no standing to criticize us, because you are too." I don't assume that's what the general meant - because the truth, and the point, is the opposite. Persistent and hugely successful propaganda campaigns to the contrary notwithstanding, Jews are no more guilty of wanton murder today than Turks were of deliberate genocide in World War I (as I've argued here and here).

General Mizrahi's legitimate point is that people who have felt the lash of unjust accusations by corrupt foreign leaders, and the dangerous mobs they incite, should refuse to join in when mobs unjustly target another state, demonizing it and whitewashing its enemies.

That's doubly true when the targeted state is a loyal, longtime ally like Israel. And what is true for Israel is true as well for Turkey's other small, beleaguered ally, Azerbaijan, a Turkic sister state that was finally freed from Russian occupation only to suffer again, now, under partial Armenian occupation. Practical benefits reinforce the moral claims that both these struggling democracies have on Turkey: e.g., access to Israel's technological and defense wizardry, to Azerbaijani oil, and to the great promise of the Nabucco project to make the abundant oil and gas of the Caspian Sea region available to Turkey and the West in a way that will prevent Russia, Iran, or the Arabs from having a stranglehold on vital resources we all need. This latter project could make Azerbaijan a model for Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, two other newly freed Turkic states struggling for a viable way forward, a way to exploit their gas and oil resources without falling back under Russian domination. It would also give hope to the other newly freed and struggling Muslim "Stans" in the region, and to Georgia's beleaguered Christians.

TURKEY IN THE TRANSNATIONAL MIRROR

Prime Minister Erdogan prioritizes none of that. His focus is on the global stage, where Israel is hated, Azerbaijan is ignored to the point of invisibility, and the "Stans" are not a big enough voting bloc to matter. There, abandoning old allies and embracing Palestinians and Armenians instead is a winning move. Let's count the ways: It puts Turkey in sync with both the Islamists and the blindly self-righteous Socialists, the two big multinational blocs that dominate the U.N. It pleases European Union transnationals who appease both blocs and call it statesmanship. It gives the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) the Muslim unanimity against Israel that Turkey denied it in the past (along with Iran, before the Islamists seized power there in 1979). It wins Turkey special points with its new best friends: an increasingly expansionist Russia; a rapidly nuclearizing Iran, along with its satellite, Syria, and its terrorist surrogates, Hezbollah and Hamas; and Sudan, a current practitioner of actual genocide against its own desperate and friendless people.

Last but not least in this media-driven world of ours, condemning Israel makes Erdogan an international celebrity, winning him flattering attention not just in the Turkish press - increasingly owned and dominated by his AKP (Justice and Development) party through relatives and friends - and in Arab-government-controlled outlets like Qatar's ubiquitous al-Jazeera television network, but in the increasingly anti-Western Western media too. And it evokes cheers from mobs in streets, squares, and campuses from Cairo to London to Los Angeles. At Atat�rk Airport, on his return from Davos, Erdogan was greeted by a cheering mob, shouting "Bravo Erdogan" and "Death to Israel."

Prime Minister Erdogan is an ambitious man. At Davos, he didn't just add Turkey's voice to the growing multinational chorus demonizing Israel and taking a see-no-evil stance toward the Palestinians. He went beyond simple acquiescence, making a bid to put Turkey at the head of the latest wave of Israel-bashing by saying what all the other Jew-bashers were saying, but saying it louder and more dramatically, from an unexpected platform.

TURKEY IN THE MIRROR OF THE PAST

Many explanations have been offered for why Erdogan and his "moderate Islamist" party are behaving this way, but the idea that the AKP is reverting to the ways of its Ottoman ancestors is ahistorical and demeaning to the Ottomans. It is true, as Muslim-bashers in the West persistently point out, that Ottoman sultans were a far cry from politically correct 21st-century liberals. But it is also true that for 500 years, the Ottomans were light years ahead of their contemporaries when it came to dealing with religious minorities, particularly the Mizrahi - the Jews of the East. Those centuries saw recurrent waves of anti-Jewish incitement, many culminating in terrible peaks of slaughter. Demonization of Jews was rampant in the Muslim world, and widespread in Christian Europe too. But not in Turkey.

Turkey was different. It always stood largely apart from the great waves of Jew-hatred that periodically darken the world, and was never fully engulfed by them. Until the birth of America, it was virtually unique in this respect. Turkish sultans didn't demonize Jews, or join forces with those who did. They didn't echo or broadcast ugly Arab or Christian blood libels. Instead, they did their best to impose their own more rational and tolerant attitudes toward Jews and other peaceful minorities on all the peoples they ruled, and to recognize and utilize the skills of all their subjects. Of course Christians and Jews were dhimmis in the Ottoman empire, and that is always a painful burden. But Turkish sultans were also Caliphs - supreme interpreters of Islam for all Muslims - and their Islam was not the Islam of today's Saudis or al-Qaeda. Under Ottoman rule, Jews and Christians - Armenian Christians especially - could generally practice their religions freely within their own self-governing millets.

The most famous illustration of this persistent Ottoman policy is the remark of Beyazit II, the Turkish sultan who welcomed a new group of Jews to Turkey in the 15th century - the ones who were expelled from Spain during the Inquisition. He said: "How can you call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king? He has made his land poor and enriched ours."

This venerable Turkish stance toward the Jewish people didn't end with the Ottoman Empire. The secular republic of Turkey that rose from its ashes in 1923 was neutral in World War II, like Switzerland, but much more generous to the demonized victims of Europe's last great wave of hate. Turkey gave refuge to thousands of Jews fleeing the Nazi inferno - Turkish Jews who had been living abroad, and many Ashkenazi (Western) Jews too. Turkish ambassadors in Nazi-occupied Europe took real risks to make it possible for Jews to escape to Turkey. Free-thinking Atat�rk, the founder of modern Turkey, was gone by then (he died in 1938), but his successor, a devout Muslim named Ismet Inonu, struggled to be faithful to Atat�rk's vision of a secular state that not only tolerated Jews and other loyal non-Muslims, but abolished their dhimmi status altogether.

TURKEY IN THE DOMESTIC MIRROR TODAY

Judging by the responses I got when I visited with Istanbul's Jews in 2001, the policy of Inonu and his successors worked. Like the Muslim Turks I met on that same trip, the Istanbul Jews were honest about Turkey's lapses and flaws, and impatient with the less-than-competent political leaders in those pre-AKP years, but they were fiercely proud of their country, and fully at home in it. Today, after six and a half years of AKP rule, many Jews are profoundly uneasy, painfully aware that increasing numbers of their fellow Turks now echo the lies others tell about them and see them as foreigners in the land they have embraced as Turks for five centuries and more.

Jews aren't the only people being demonized in Erdogan's Turkey. Indeed, their treatment, so far, is mild compared with that being meted out to Turkey's Muslim secularists. They are the targets of a vast, ongoing conspiracy investigation known as Ergenekon. A hitherto unknown government prosecutor, working with no-holds-barred police investigators, launched the case in June 2007, weaving an ever more complex and elaborate tale of a fantastically sinister secularist plot to massacre large numbers of innocent Turks as a prelude to the violent overthrow of the AKP government.

Some 200 alleged co-conspirators have been arrested so far, and this year there are new arrests every month - some weeks, almost every day. Many of the accused are prominent men and women who fall into one of four categories: (1) Turkish journalists who have criticized Erdogan and/or reported on AKP corruption, and owners of the remaining independent media outlets that employ those journalists; (2) Turkish military officers - at first mostly retired army men, some quite high-ranking, and more recently, active army and navy officers as well; (3) Turkish intellectuals - university rectors, professors, scholars, and scientists - with records of outspoken support for Atat�rk's bedrock commitment to the separation of mosque and state as the defining principle of the Turkish republic; and (4) Turkish business and professional men and women known to share those views. A number of the arrestees are old and ill. Prison has been hard on them. Some have died there, or soon after their release.

TURKEY, THE FUTURE, AND MAY 17, 2009

Turkey's unique Ottoman Empire lasted for five centuries. The question today is whether Turkey's unique secular republic will make it to its first centennial in 2023. The answer, sadly, will be no, if the Turks continue to look to the European Union for salvation. The transnationals who run the EU have many reservations about admitting a Muslim-majority state like Turkey to their national-sovereignty-superseding, Islamist-appeasing club, but a principled objection to the idea of a "moderate Islamist" government is not among them. They quite like that idea, seeing it, as President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice once did, as a model for other Muslim-majority states to emulate.

But the sad truth is that under the AKP, emulation is proceeding in the opposite direction: Turkey is becoming more like the oppressive, corrupt, and propaganda-dominated Arab states from which Atat�rk deliberately distanced Turkey. Today, it's fashionable in some Turkish circles to disparage Atat�rk for his "isolationism," but a more accurate summary would describe him as a leader who was highly selective about the close ties he established with foreign nations - the tie with Australia, for example, which remains strong to this day.

Another, even sadder truth, for me as an American, is that support from the U.S. for Turkey's proud, secular tradition is even less likely under our current president. Barack Obama shares the EU's enthusiasm for "moderate Islamist" states. Unlike ex-president Bush, he also shares the EU's uncritical embrace of the view that the massacre of Armenians in World War I was full-scale genocide on the part of Turkey, and why not? Our popular new president embraces all the currently popular transnational prejudices, including those that unfairly target America - exaggerating our sins and ignoring the role we have played in making the world a safer, freer, more civilized place, and the enormous price we have paid to do that. Instead, Obama joins Erdogan in courting U.N. and OIC favor by giving short shrift to embattled friends (e.g., Georgia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Colombia, and Mexico, as well as Israel), while simultaneously reaching far out to countries with dangerously hostile and aggressive leaders - countries like Iran, Syria, Russia, Venezuela, and Cuba.

The bottom-line truth is that if Turkey's unique secular republic is to be saved, it will be Turks alone who save it. Right now, the odds against that look intimidatingly high, but they were much higher in the 1920s, when the Turkish republic was born. Like Turkey's isolated and embattled secular loyalists today, Turks then had many foreign enemies and no foreign friends. Everyone was sure the Turks would not only lose their remaining imperial possessions; they would lose sovereignty over their historic homeland too. But they did not.

Atat�rk accepted the loss of empire without regret, for the most part, but he rallied and unified the Turkish people into an indomitable force that ultimately defeated every attempt to subject Turkey to foreign control. Today, it's home-grown Islamists who are trying to turn Turkey into something foreign: a state as oppressive and intolerant as the ones that dominate the OIC, intimidate the EU, and cooperate with self-righteous socialists to turn the U.N. into a mockery of the principles of its founders.

Can Turkey's secularists turn back the tide and regain control of their country? In elections in March of this year, they reduced the AKP vote for the first time since the party took power in 2002, increasing their own vote totals even in poor areas where the AKP tried to buy votes by giving out free washing machines and refrigerators. But Turkey's secular politicians, like Israel's unapologetic Zionists, have yet to put aside their relatively minor political differences and unite into a truly formidable electoral force.

Ordinary Turks have had less difficulty making that necessary move. In April 2007 they came together in mass demonstrations across Turkey to pledge support for their secular republic and denounce AKP efforts to Islamicize it. Rallies in Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir drew more than a million supporters each, and there were sizeable gatherings in smaller cities too. Speakers at all the rallies were impassioned, as were the cheering crowds, but, unlike the more frequent but much smaller demonstrations by Islamists and by Turkey's hard Left, the secularist demonstrations were all peaceful.

In 2008, Turkey's secularists took their protest to the courts. When the Erdogan government pushed for legislation to lift the ban on Muslim headscarves for women on university campuses, secularists petitioned to have the courts declare that this, and a number of other AKP actions, were clear violations of constitutional provisions limiting the reach of Islam in Turkish society. These provisions have been central to the Turkish Republic since Atat�rk founded it; they are a large part of what has made modern Turkey so different from every other Muslim-majority nation for the past 85 years. They are not anti-religious provisions - mosques are plentiful in Turkey, and Turks are free to worship in them as they choose - but they insist on a sharp separation between mosque and state, forbidding any intrusion of Islam into government, any government action to promote Islam, or any imposition of sharia on Turkish citizens by law.

The chief prosecutor of Turkey's Court of Appeals, Abdurrahman Yal‡inkaya, asked the Constitutional Court to find the AKP guilty and apply the legally prescribed remedy - removing Erdogan and his cohorts from office and holding new elections. The high court agreed that the AKP had violated the constitution, but fell one vote short of the margin required to oust the party. The judges let AKP off with a fine and a warning, and the government celebrated its victory by making more Ergenekon arrests.

Secularist Turks - Atat�rk's Turks - are hoping to mount mass rallies again on May 17, and the size of the crowds will give us some indication of the current strength of their movement. If defeatism prevails and the crowds are smaller than they were in 2007, the near-term future looks bleak. But if secular-state loyalists turn out in numbers that exceed the impressive totals of 2007, Turkey may yet surprise the world again. For the future - not just of the Turks but of everyone who loves freedom - we should all pray that they do.

By Barbara Lerner
National Review Online