A year after Turkey’s failed coup attempt, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s regime faces a dilemma: first it fears any kind of street-based movement. Erdoğan’s harsh response to the
Gezi Park protests in 2013 or the protests that were brutally quashed in the Kurdish cities of south-east Turkey last year are examples. Yet with the president’s power built on a friend-or-foe dichotomy, he also needs a street-based legitimacy. Witness the weekend ceremonies marking the anniversary of 15 July in which
he whipped up public support for punishing coup plotters with the death penalty and talked about “ripping the heads” off so-called traitors.
And as a result of disabling parliamentary opposition and governing by decree under a continuous state of emergency it is not possible for him to prevent oppositional street-based movements from erupting. Last week’s justice march led by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, chair of the opposition Republicans People’s party, (CHP) which brought at least 1.5 million people for a final rally proves this point.
Erdoğan and his followers come from a tradition of political Islam that is often accused of seeking to impose sharia law by stealth. Beyond this, Erdoğan has given Turkey a worse record than China or Iran for jailing journalists and activists. Since July 2016 he has pursued a crackdown which has seen more than 50,000 people detained and nearly 170,000 people placed under investigation. It is fair now to say that democracy and its institutions in Turkey are dying by the day.
It also seems clear that the failed coup attempt has helped Erdoğan to solidify his power and use it to push his political agenda. He is entrenching it via the institutions of Islam, notably the mosques. The directorate of religious affairs has become an apparatus of Erdoğan’s political initiatives. Of course, mosques have been the carriers of rightwing politics in Turkey throughout history, but traditionally claimed to be supra-political and unbiased.
After last year’s events they no longer even pretend to be neutral. To underline this, look at some statistics on the Islamisation of the country: since Erdoğan came to power,
thousands of new mosques have been built , including the one inside the compound of Erdoğan’s vast new presidential palace which is, incidentally, four times bigger than Versailles. Tens of thousands more students are attending religious schools than there were in 2002 when Erdoğan came to power, according to the Education and Science Workers’ Union of Turkey. In effect, Erdoğan is using Islamism for power.

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Source : the guardian

Following the recent removal of evolution from secondary school curriculum and being replaced with “jihad"... Is Turkey seeming more radical? Due to the continuously extended state of emergency in the country, the press have been silenced.. All oppositions to the president are being silenced and arrested... Will it end??

Secularists were outraged. Ataturk had been demoted to make way for a future monument to those who died defending Erdogan against July’s failed military coup. The square is now a construction site. They saw further evidence that Erdogan is replacing the secular, westward-looking state, complete with its own founding myth: his victory over the coup.
Then, last month, the Education Ministry published a new draft school curriculum that would reduce coursework on Ataturk, study jihad under the rubric of values, and remove a unit on theories of evolution, according to Impact-se, a non-profit that measures school systems against UNESCO standards. In a press release, it called the draft a “bellwether as to the intentions of President Erdogan.”

I would love a discussion rather than a one way topic

What are your views ?
Will there ever be an end to this seeming dictatorship?
Will it affect the breakaway North Cyprus?
Will turkey be a radical state?
If so, how long will it take?

The floor is open to all

cc: seun , mynd44 , lalasticlala

I magine you are making a late-night call to your significant other and your president answers the phone instead. Last Saturday every Turkish citizen was obliged to listen to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s failed coup anniversary message on their mobile phone before moving on to their actual call. He was once again reminding the country of his omnipresence – in case any citizen could forget it for a moment.
This year, those who are not Erdoğan’s supporters arranged their holidays carefully in order to skip last weekend’s
celebrations in Istanbul . Anyone living in a country with issues of rising populism or authoritarianism will recognise the feeling of helplessness in the face of invasive and blunt lying by the ruler who constantly invents new enemies to sustain his power. Some of those who couldn’t arrange to be away simply turned off their TVs before Erdoğan made his speech.
But for those of us who watched him declare, “ We are going to cut the traitors’ heads off ”, and the crowd chant back, “We want execution!”, it was one of the countless moments when we asked ourselves: “Are these my people? Is this my land?” When manufactured hatred turns your country into a hive of hostility, you feel homeless.
Erdoğan’s answer to such questions is very clear. The anniversary was a declaration that the old Turkey has been replaced by Erdoğan’s Turkey . He even declared that the population had shrunk by 30 million. “We rescued the 50 million on the night of the coup,” he said. Turkey’s population is 80 million.
The Turkish flag was replaced with a new symbol featuring 15 July. The national anthem has virtually been replaced with Dombra, the campaign song of the ruling Justice and Development (AKP) party, with its chorus “Recep Tayyip Erdoğan” repeated 10 times. Thanks to emergency rule, extended again a few days ago, the already crippled judicial system has been further weakened. Since the dubiously conducted referendum for the presidential system in April, the parliament has in effect been replaced by Erdoğan’s lavish
palace as the seat of political power – which he considers quite humble compared to Buckingham Palace.
All the complexity of Turkish politics has simultaneously been reduced to the most banal polarisation . The tension between Kurdish and Turkish, Sunni and Alevi or left and right has been reduced to a single split: between Erdoğan’s devout supporters and the “traitors” who now include even teenagers being investigated for critical tweets.
Meanwhile the de facto replacement of the secular system with an Islamic one was symbolically marked by Qur’an recitation during the anniversary ceremony in parliament. What little comfort the 30 million Turks regarded by Erdoğan as not existing can find comes in depressed jokes on Twitter, or in their private WhatsApp groups.
In Turkey, the age of post-truth is not a sophisticated one. What started as subtle bending of the facts to create handy truths for the ruling party has become crude lies, rubbed in your face. When more than 2 million people gathered in Istanbul under the banner of “Justice” on 9 July following a protest march from Ankara, Erdoğan insisted that the crowd numbered just 145,000, despite the whole nation having watched the rally on TV with their own eyes. As the oppressed media reluctantly repeated Erdoğan’s figures, Turks learned yet again that it is no good having eyes when you cannot express what you see.
Today, many are reluctant to make predictions about Turkey’s future simply because it is so deeply painful to voice our fears. Since formal political opposition has become virtually impossible, the half of the population that opposes Erdoğan is left with only one option: street politics. And Erdoğan has insinuated several times that if people take to the streets, the outcome could be far bloodier than the crackdown on the Gezi protests of 2013 that left several dead and more than 8,000 severely injured.
Nobody wants to imagine a confrontation between the more educated

Source : the guardian

Nice write-up dear

Thanks

America’s NATO ally Turkey, which is abandoning the secular vision of the modern state’s founder, could become a “more dangerous version” of Iran, a Middle East expert believes, according to a new report in Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
Uzay Bulut, a journalist who was born and raised Muslim in Turkey and now is a writing fellow for the Middle East Forum, noted the “Islamization” of the school system along with the dictatorial moves of President Erdogan.
In an article on the Gatestone Institute site, she said Turkish schools are teaching jihad under the guise of “religion, culture and morality” while cutting back on art, philosophy and other secular subjects.
“Given the political developments in Turkey for more than a decade, the country seems to be fast-forwarding to be the second – and possibly even a more dangerous version of – the Islamic Republic of Iran,” she wrote.
She cited various developments that have hit headlines recently: the jailing of journalists, destruction of Kurdish towns, the firing of more than 100,000 government workers “for political reasons” and the outright seizure of lands from Christians.
She said Turkey is in the process of including the concept of jihad in compulsory school curricula, teaching it as a “value,” according to the Turkish Ministry of National Education, in middle schools that offer an Islamic curriculum to pupils.
An estimate 1.5 million seventh- and eighth-grade students who will received the instruction

Source: wnd

Turkey has erred. I see a onced Christian country sinking into the Islamic world as fast as it could.

Erdogan will probably be the next Khalifa.
He sees himself as strong enough to perform so much miracles with His words. Very Arrogant