Professor Christian Reder
Since Turkey, a young country, has been focussing on republicanism (supporting power resting with the people), secularism (rejecting religious interference on state issues), reformism, nationalism and planned economy, the country was prospering way better than those countries that had retained their colonial status after having formally been part of the Ottoman empire, as they had allegedly been unfit for political independence. Yet their political reform course was noticeably different in the cities from their original political environment.
For under the leadership of Eleftherios Venizelos (1864-1936) there was supposed to be developing a gigantic Greek empire on Turkish territory, which finally resulted in the dictatorship of Metaxa (1871-1941). In Hungary, Romania, Spain, and Portugal dictators had risen to power. Horthy (1868-1957), Antonescu (1882.1946), Franco (1892-1975), Salazar (1889-1970). They were all contemporaries of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938) like Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) and Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) whose era was marked by terror and excessive wars and genocides. K. Atatürk, however, preferred modernity, personal freedom, and a civilised way of dealing with one another in day-today matters. According to him “even though, there are different countries there is only ONE civilisation, which is a prerequisite for a nation to be part of progress.
In contrast to this there was above all the Palestinian Amin al-Husseini (1895/97-1974) in the Muslim world. As mufti of Jerusalem and radical voice of the Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt he preached the racist demand, “kill all the Jews wherever you find them”, for he held them responsible for all “the misfortune” in the world, not only in Palestine; this could only be eliminated by one powerful “Führer”, like Hitler. This is why, from 1941 onwards, Hitler formed Muslim SS-units in Berlin, for he admired the puritan death-defying heroism of the Pashtuns in Afghanistan, who fought the British soldiers, which could be seen in the Hollywood film “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer”. This is why the NS propaganda always produced positive images of Islam.
Further groups like Hamas, Hisbollah, Islamic Jihad, Al-Quaida and PLO leaders referred to Al-Husseini and his rejection of the United Nations Partition Plan of Palestine. This did obviously not pose a problem for cooperating German left-wing terrorists. The horrendous Hamas massacre of Jews on Jews on 7/10/2023 resulting in 1200 deaths reminds us of the drastic excesses of German death squads.
However, there is only one more ‘minority’ denying Israel’s existence, namely the Syrian philosopher Sadiq al Azm (1934-2016), an important voice of the Islamic Enlightenment, who died in his Berlin exile. We must raise awareness that Muslim countries have never known political parties with racist programmes and the idea of antisemitism and the concept of ethnic -homogenous nations was rooted in Europe. Israel has never had the status of a colony due to 100s of thousands of immigrants from neighbouring countries. Till then there were 80 000 Jews in Bagdad and Egypt and Mesopotamia were the oldest places of Jewish diaspora.
A symptomatic feature of todays excesses of violence is that they focus on secular beliefs in fascism, communism rather than religion. Even Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been overrated as a Holy war by the church. According to the sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer it is easy for leaders, warlords, followers or Mullahs to incite and manipulate religious feelings, no matter if it is in jihadists, messianic Jews, Talibans, or in Christian militia forces in the US. The key question for our civilisation is only how many people adhere to democratic procedures and human rights.
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