When Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party won an overwhelming victory in Turkey’s November 2002 parliamentary elections, giving an Islamist party a supermajority for the first time in modern Turkish history, Erdogan took pains to assure those who worried where he might take the country. “Secularism is the protector of all beliefs and religions. We are the guarantors of this secularism, and our management will clearly prove that,” he told American reporters.
There was sharp divergence, however, between what he told diplomats and the agenda which he slowly undertook. He replaced technocrats with Islamists within the financial and auditing sector, moved to interject religion into education, and changed fundamentally Turkey’s foreign policy direction. Some leaders try to win the battle of ideas; Erdogan was never able to do this as he neither had the intellectual capability to win his opponents over nor the respect for democracy to compromise.
This was one of the main reasons why he began to target the press. A free press could act as a check-and-balance when Erdogan had dismantled all others within the system. It could question Erdogan’s choices and propose alternate solutions to problems.
Many American liberals celebrated Erdogan. Not only had his party stood up to President George W. Bush, a hated figure in many progressive circles because of the 2003 Iraq War, but he also swore to extract the Turkish military from any role in politics. In some sort of protointersectionality, therefore, to criticize Erdogan was to oppose a liberal agenda.
I was fortunate to travel to Turkey on more than two dozen occasions to meet politicians from across the Turkish ideological spectrum and to meet dozens of editors and journalists from some of its largest print and television outlets. I watched as some journalists increasingly became afraid to report stories they knew had news value (sometimes, they would leak these to me and other think tank scholars), while other journalists sought to betray the cores of their profession and instead seek favor from Turkey’s leader by amplifying the stories he wanted told or the arguments he wanted made, regardless of their truth.
During this time, I often wrote and spoke about the decline in Turkey’s press freedom and willingly amplified stories that Turkish journalists had researched but were unable to report. Some diplomats, journalists, and lobbyists disagreed and argued honestly against the notion that Erdogan sought fundamental changes for Turkey. Many Turkish liberals, however, sought to dispel any alarm about Erdogan and his broader agenda by suggesting the accusations were part of a Jewish conspiracy against Turkey.
Consider this story from nine years ago on March 28, 2011, published in The Guardian, the flagship of the British left, and written by veteran Turkish journalist Cengiz Candar. Entitled “Who’s calling Turkey a police state?,” Candar argued that freedom of speech was alive and well in Turkey and that journalists who found themselves in prison had it coming to them. “The journalists who’ve been arrested were not arrested because of their journalistic activities or for expressing their opinions: they are suspected of being part of a plot to topple the civilian government,” Candar stated.
The evidence backing that accusation was subsequently dismissed as fraudulent, but the numbers of journalists imprisoned by Erdogan kept growing, and the line that Candar used to justify the imprisonment of his colleagues is one that was repeated frequently by Erdogan’s spokesman. Candar continued to suggest that criticism to declining rights and freedoms in Turkey was actually driven by Jews upset at Erdogan’s criticism toward Israel. “The dislike of the Erdogan government among pro-Israel neocons in Washington can be partly explained by the deterioration of relations between Turkey and the Israeli state,” he stated.
Rather than address facts head-on, Candar (and The Guardian) sought instead to delegitimize real arguments by suggesting those who made them were Jewish and therefore held dual loyalty. “Turkey may still not be a liberal democracy, but those who argue that it is turning into a police state are misleading world public opinion,” he wrote. He posited that the old, military elite in Ankara and “their neocon friends in Washington [sought] to launch a new campaign against the current Turkish government” and urged all “to expose this dangerous alliance.” Today, it sounds ridiculous, but nine years ago, it is what passed in some circles for intellectual discourse.
Nine years on, Candar is living in exile. The Turkish newspaper for which he worked was closed, and he has retired from the Turkish press. The Guardian, too, has had a recent change of perspective without acknowledging how its own actions helped enable Erdogan’s rampage. How unfortunate that hatred toward Jews or a desire to ingratiate himself to Erdogan helped obfuscate at a critical time the reality of what Turkey was becoming.
When ancient hatreds trump an honest battle of ideas, sometimes liberalism seems not so liberal.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
