To Ianus: No contest

Submitted by Plato (India), Mar 2, 2007 at 01:11

I have no pretensions to be a historian and as you say, one little detail can undo a beautiful theory. Have I propounded any theory here?

And I agree with your observation that the Nazism analogy can be tiresome, but since since it happened so recently it is bound to come up again and again. My problem has nothng to do with your description of the nature of the Turks under Ataturk. My contention is that by bracketing Ataturk's atrocities with Muslim atrocities will bring up the Nazi ones. He may have considered himself a good Muslim but in the larger Islamic world he is seem as someone who took Turkey out of the Islamic world.

You may remember that Musharaf of Pakistan on taking power said he wanted to do an Ataturk and had to hastily backtrack on the hostile reaction generated. If you look at every Muslim dictator's action as an Islamic problem then in Muslim minds atrocities by any person with a Christian name comes out as a Christian action.

The problem with the Muslims is that the vast majority have only knowledge of the rituals of their religion and very little of the ideology that underpins it - the call to jihad, the poor ethics of its theology and its founder. They have been conned into believing that it is a religion that is peacful by nature and that its bloody past can be compared favourably with the past of other religions, especially Christianity.

By bringing up the Armenian genocide as an Islamic one when Turkey had by then, at least at the government level, jettisoned Islam as a state religion and tried to adopt Western values (probably unsuccessfuly at the mass level) the Nazi ones will and is brought up by Muslim apologists as a Christian one. There are enough and more Muslim atrocities admittedly committed in the name of Islam from day one for the Ataturk one to matter in the larger picture.

The Muslim world will never be able to be a patch on the free world for the reason that their intellectual level has hit the iron ceiling of Islam. Yes they will do a lot of harm before they break through that ceiling and let the light of freedom into their mental spaces.

I sound general because I am a generalist, not a specialist, so the soup will remain watery but I hope the taste of the meat come through.

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