Natural Allies

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a happy man. He has waited over a decade for this moment. Not, of course, envisioning the possibility of the occurrence of anything as bizarrely unexpected as the "Arab Spring", but feeling quite assured that Islamism was embarked on an unstoppable upward swing.

He is basking in adulation in the Arab street, whether it be in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan or Syria. For he has turned his back on Turkey's latter tradition of cool relations as a secular albeit Muslim country, with the Arab world, in favour of economic, social and military ties with Israel. Not that the Turkish street was entirely comfortable with the close communion with Israel.

From Libya and Syria, to Egypt and Tunisia, Muslims derisively call on their leaders to take courage, emulate Turkey's prime minister and face down 'the enemy'. Jordanians have joined Egyptians in chanting for a cessation of the peace between themselves and Israel. And their leaders, nervous in the extreme in the current climate of unrest, are listening.

They may not feel comfortable with Mr. Erdogan's message, but the people, eager for 'freedom' from their traditional tyranny, shout for democratic freedoms - Arab-style, one would assume. A free, democratic vote once brought Algeria very close to an Islamist government until the military stepped in. A traditional event in Turkey, now history.

And it was a free democratic vote that brought another Islamist group, dedicated to violence with no pretense at accommodating themselves to democratic niceties of civil obligations, to power in the Palestinian Territories. Now the West Bank and Gaza are divided between Fatah and Hamas. What the West assumes about democracy and free votes is not quite what erupts in the Middle East.

"Islam and democracy are not contradictory. A Muslim can run a state very successfully. The success of the electoral process in Tunisia will show the world that democracy and Islam can go together", encouraged Erdogan. "Israel will no longer be able to do what it wants in the Mediterranean and you'll be seeing Turkish warships in this sea."

Ah, yes, Islam and democracy, natural allies.

"Nowhere is the tension between democracy and Jihad more evident than in the Islamic world, where the idea of Jihad has a home of birth but certainly not an exclusive patent. For, although it is clear that Islam is a complex religion that by no means is synonymous with Jihad, it is relatively inhospitable to democracy and that inhospitality in turn nurtures conditions favourable to parochialism, antimodernism, exclusiveness, and hostility to "others", the characteristics that constitute what I have called Jihad." Benjamin R. Barber: Jihad vs. McWorld

"Relations with Israel cannot normalize if Israel does not apologize over the flotilla raid, compensate the martyrs' families and lift the blockade of Gaza" rhapsodized Mr. Erdogan.

His formula for democracy is a recognition of hostile thugs intent on violence being seen as 'martyrs', and lifting the blockade of Gaza, enabling Hamas to acquire more destructive weapons to aim at Israel will lift the state of animosity between Turkey and Israel.