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Turkey: 22 July 2007 – Election Results

In the BBC video report in diary by NLinStPaul, the Islamists were near defeat in 1998 through excessive violence in Muslim states of the Middle East. The Islamists were on the verge of gaining a majority through democratic elections in the last decade of the 20th century in Algeria. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood (of al-Zawahri) and extreme Islamists were banned. In Turkey, the Islamic Virtue party was banned by the Constitutional Court in June 2001. As a result, Al Qaeda could make a case against Western hypocrisy about ‘democracy’ as was also seen by the Palestinian election where Hamas gained parliamentary control and ultimately were defeated by the economic embargo of Israel and Western Powers.


Merve Kavakci was evicted from parliament for wearing headscarf  

Apparently, in Turkey the AK Muslim party of PM Erdogan will gain a majority rule by a strong backing of modern, highly educated Muslim Turks, desillusioned by the secular ‘old’ parties, but willing to reverse the secular state. A new phase in Islamisering of Middle Eastern countries and a forebode of a growing Muslim population in the European Union.

June 2001 – Turkey Shuts Down the Islamists . . . Again

On June 22, Turkey’s Constitutional Court voted 8-3 to permanently shut down the Virtue Party, the country’s main opposition party and the vanguard of activist Islam in Turkish politics.

Virtue stood accused of two transgressions. The first was that it was the political reincarnation of the old Welfare Party, which the Constitutional Court banned in 1998 for mixing Islam and politics. On this first count, the Court decided in favor of Virtue, concluding that the party was not a continuation of Welfare under another name, but truly a different party. On the second charge, however, the Court sided with the Chief Public Prosecutor, finding Virtue a hotbed of Islamism and therefore illegal under the 1982 Turkish Constitution.

Islamists joined with liberals in Turkey and abroad to condemn the Court’s decision, claiming it was yet another blow to democratic development. Still, the immediate consequences of the Virtue closure were not nearly as bad as they might have been.

To begin with, the Court could have expelled en masse all Virtue deputies from the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA). When the number of empty seats in the TGNA exceeds 5%, new elections must be held. Since Virtue controlled 102 of the TGNA’s 550 seats, a wholesale expulsion would have toppled the government and plunged the country into all the uncertainties of an unplanned election. With so much riding on the stability of the current government (such as a $15.7 billion emergency economic package from the IMF), that would have been grim indeed. As it happened, however, the Court expelled only two Virtue deputies, allowing the other 100 to remain in the TGNA as independents.  

At present, the (Arab) Islamists are waging war in Darfur – Indonesia – Philippines and most recently in Pakistan. The world during the leadership of U.S. President George Bush, has become less stable and the extremists and terrorist have gained new ground.

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Documentary Jihad on Horseback

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."