Why we should love our prime minister

Why we should love our prime minister

According to Yiğit Bulut, one of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s advisors and the inventor of the theory that foreign powers were conspiring to murder Mr. Erdoğan by telekinesis, A) Turkey does not need Europe and its moral-material extensions, B) There won’t be any Europe in the balance of new world order, and C) The new West is only America. How bizarre, Mr. Bulut’s boss has a Cabinet minister who deals exclusively with Turkey’s accession into something that will not exist in the new world order.

It was not a coincidence that Nils Muiznieks, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, had to remind that Hitler, too, had been elected by a majority of Germans. In an interview with Hürriyet, Mr. Muiznieks said “the fact that Hitler had been elected by a majority did not make him a democratic leader.”

Would Mr. Muiznieks have reminded that Hitler was an elected leader if he spoke to a European newspaper? There must be a reason he mentioned -- several decades after and not when he speaks to a German newspaper -- how the mad man of Germany came to power. We all know what that reason could be.

On March 30, Mr. Erdoğan’s choice of mayoral candidate in the southeastern city of Bingöl won a landslide election victory. Immediately after, Bingöl’s female deputy mayor had to resign because Mr. Erdoğan’s man in Bingöl said “a female deputy mayor is against our religion and traditions.”

That fancy remark came 84 years after Turkish women won the right to vote in municipal elections and 80 years after they were granted full suffrage (25 years earlier than Swiss women). But if you momentarily think that the honorable mayor’s words should merely be an exception, then do some quick research and find out yourself how many lady family members in the entire cabinet have professional careers. You may be appalled.

But you should not be. Turkey is a very coherent country in many ways. For instance, in a country that elects mayors like the gentleman in Bingöl, it is perfectly normal that two doctors must stand trial, with the prosecutor demanding prison terms of up to six years and four months, for “treating injured demonstrators during last year’s Gezi protests.”

It is also perfectly normal that a teacher who has been under detention for the past 15 months for being a member of a left-wing terrorist organization is still trying to convince the prosecution to offer even a flimsy piece of evidence linking him to terrorism. The prosecutor’s strongest evidence is that “the man may subconsciously have the potential to become a member of the terrorist organization in question.” Is that not a marvelous reason to keep someone in jail for 15 months?

So coherent, Turkey is. When you have advisors of the prime minister who think major powers are trying to murder him by telekinesis, mayors who think a woman for a city council is against our religion and traditions and prosecutors who detect terrorists by reading out their subconscious thinking, it is perfectly normal to have judges like the gentleman who ordered the arrest of a bunch of police officers in Adana on charges of being members of a “parallel structure within the state.”

The honorable judge has a wonderfully colorful Facebook account. In one particular magnum opus of literature, the judge shared this text:

“We love you Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
We love you because those who don’t love you, don’t love this nation,
Because Zionist Israel and its conspirators don’t love you,
Because the world’s oppressed and Muslims love you,
Because you are one of us, one of your nation,
God save you and make you victorious,
For us…”

It might be quite an adventure to stand trial before that judge for anyone who does not feel so passionately about the prime minister – someone whom the judge would think is a Zionist and someone who does not love this nation, who is not one of the nation, a filthy foreigner in a way.

But is it not amazing that, by that judge’s logic, there are more than 40 million Zionists in Turkey?