Turkey's 26th General Chief of Staff

Islamism is quite simply unstoppable. On the rise everywhere in the Muslim world. The myth of 'moderate' Islam is simply an exercise in comparative relativity. Islam is itself uncompromising. And fanatical Islamism is just that, the way of life and the only way of life for those who worship the era long past of the Golden age of Islam, when its warriors swept before them the weak resistance of the infidels to claim for themselves the universality of Islam.

Turkey, so long a bastion of secular politics within a Muslim society probably came closest to representing 'moderate' Islam (along with Indonesia, also rising toward Islamism now, as everywhere else to various degrees of religious ferocity). A bulwark of eastern democracy between Europe and the Middle East, it is now resolutely Islamist.

A stealthy, determined infiltration at the political level, resulting in a broad acceptance on the social level.

Kamal Ataturk's military legacy ensuring that the powerful Turkish military would stage coups when required to restore the balance of secularism, preventing the rise of political Islam had a good run. But the current Turkish Justice and Development Party of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has been successful in usurping supreme power from the military and placing it in the political sphere; one now almost fully converted to Islamism.

The once-proudly powerful Turkish military is now answerable to Turkey's parliament. Current and former high-ranking generals and other military elites have been crushed by Prime Minister Erdogan's order, brought to 'justice' through the country's Supreme Court, imprisoned, accused of planning and mounting coups.

Accused of conspiring to unseat the AK Party government in a traditional move to remove Islamists from power, the military is no longer the huge power broker it once was. Hundreds have been arrested in 'investigations' into the issue of conspiracies. They include not only military officers but academics, lawyers and journalists.

The charges are felt by many to be trumped up simply for the purpose of clearing out any opposition to Erdogan's power base. The network of conspirators cited by the investigators in all likelihood does not exist other than in the minds of those who see an opportunity to rid themselves of the inconvenient presence of opposition to the current Islamist rule.

And now, the former head of the country's armed forces, General Ilker Basbug, once chief of a huge standing army, the second-largest in NATO, has been accused of fomenting a plot against the government, and arrested. The secularist establishment and the military that once ensured the separation between politics and religion in Turkey have been effectively emasculated.

"The Republic of Turkey's 26th general chief of staff has been remanded in custody for forming and directing a terrorist group. I leave it to the great Turkish nation to judge", said former General Basbug as he was led from the courtroom.