It has been an interesting couple of weeks with an attempted coup in Turkey, a spate of terrorist attacks with axes, trucks and guns and France and the US escalating their bombings in Syria causing the deaths of over 100 civilians including many children in one of the attacks in the last week.
You cannot escape the stories about terrorist attacks or the coup attempt, but the latter may have not gotten your attention. Terrorist attacks – whoever does them – are about grabbing your attention and making you afraid. But the authorities want that fear managed so the story is usually carefully – if implausibly -scripted. (e.g. There was just one attacker and he got away but then killed himself)
The stories about Turkey have been particularly revealing about the agenda being pursued in the mass media. Erdogan is more popular than ever in Turkey and his actions have the overwhelming support of the Turkish people including the opposition parties. Yet he is criticised ad nausea by the same newspapers whose print time meant they got it all wrong and acclaimed the successful coup as well as other media whose hypocrisy seems as unabashed as it is limitless.
Turkey has managed finally, I hope, to rid itself of the culture of change of government by coup. Maybe now the opposition parties will try to build a new consensus of opposition based on some real principles – not just Islamophobia. Political parties generally have fallen into a left / right paradigm and Turkey could be the same. The reason for this is very primal I think. We see authority and the authority of the state much the way that we see those who have had authority over us as we are growing up – mum and dad. Mum is the caring nurturing intervening and controlling authority and is reflected in the left wing of politics. Dad is the more hands off, occasionally preaching but more encouraging of self reliance, involved more later on in adolescence and less when children need everything doing for them. Dad is the right wing of politics. Sometimes people feel that the state should be more like dad sometimes more like mum. The AK party is essentially a right wing party by this description and the left wing needs to get its act together in Turkey and focus on Bernie Sanders like populist socialist ideas but accepting that the political landscape has changed. They must accept that banning women from public office because they wear a headscarf or forbidding men to grow beards and other such attacks on freedom of conscience and freedom of religion under the flag of protecting secularism is never coming back to Turkey. For Turkey to complete its journey to proper democracy, there needs to be peaceful change of power to a truly democratic opposition that accepts the necessary freedoms to live sincerely as a Muslim.
The politics of Turkey and its vulnerability to coup plots is because it does not live in isolation and much of the blame for the plot is rightly targeted at external influences.
There has been since the end of the cold war a concerted effort – a conspiracy if you like – to create a “clash of civilisations” between Islam and the West. This is not a new thing, but there are many people who now make a living out of this. Today, culturally the West is reverting to a very long tradition of defining itself through its hostility to Islam. Much of this centuries’ long animosity is propaganda and lies and the current situation is no different. However new times call for new lies. Today’s lies are mostly about terrorism. This story needs to be drummed into people with increasing frequency. Turkey was frustrating the narrative and continues to do so, which is why it is so important. Turkey demonstrates that Muslims love the values and principles of democracy and freedom.
The terrorist attacks have all been part of the Western projection of Islam as essentially hostile to those values and principles which they cherish and morally identify with. Some Muslims in their anger at how they have been abused by Western imperialism reject these principles because of who is promoting them and their hypocrisy. They need to realise that sometimes the devil deceives you by telling you the truth.
As for this spate of terrorist attacks, I have my suspicions. In almost every case the attacker is hiding his face and dressed like the police who also hide their faces. So simply put we don’t know who is actually doing these attacks. What we do know is that afterwards typically there are lots of innocent people dead including the person who we are told to believe carried out the attack. There is never a real investigation worthy of its name and almost never a trail. It is just narrative, and so it is more about controlling the media message than about any other goal. False flag attacks are now pretty much the norm. Even if we accept the official narratives, the only people who carry out these terrorist attacks “in the name of Islam” are the most unislamic people ever. They may use the name “Muhammad” but they are drug addicts, petty criminals, frequenters of gay bars and lap dance bars, love eating pork and drinking alchohol, never pray, never go to the mosque, never read the Qur’an – and the list goes on. But “Islamic State” apparently adopts all of them as its own.
There are many alternative narratives which have more evidence when people make the effort to really investigate. I would recommend anyone to look at the work of Ryan Dawson or Kevin Barrett for some good alternative narratives of what is really going on.
The main way that truth is fought in this age of internet access is by the production of masses of misinformation. But truth has a way of dismantling lies because it can be seen from so many angles that it cannot be fully hidden. The big question is: are you ready to look for it?