Erimtan is de naam

De man in de foto beneden is mijn vader (of eerder mijn ‘Şam babası’), Kemal Erimtan (nam-ı diğer, Figüran Kemal). Op 17 september 1980 heeft hij zijn echtgenote en zoon achtergelaten, onder het mom van plannen om in Turkije een nieuw leven voor ons voor te bereiden. In 1983 bleek dan dat hij al in december 1980 een echtscheiding had bekomen en dat hij dan in januari 1981 getrouwd is met een dame namens Meral Feyzioğlu – de dochter van een zekere zakenman en fabriekseigenaar genaamd Hamdi Feyzioğlu (die ondertussen al lang dood is).

Naar eigen zeggen is hij niet mijn vader (ofte ‘baba’), maar mijn ‘Şam babası’ . . . een uitdrukking in het Turks voor vaders die zich niet bekommeren om hun echtgenotes en/of kinderen (ik veronderstel dat hijzelf niet goed weet wat de uitdrukking betekent, maar slechts een uitdrukking uitgesproken door zijn huidige echtgenote heeft herhaald).

Per slot van rekening, hij is op 16-jarige leeftijd geschorst op school . . . en dan is hij maar naar West Europa gekomen als bona fide Gastarbeiter met een lagere school diploma.

Bourdain Suicide: Text Message Trafic

It’s been more than four years now. But it is only now that final details are emerging and these details can be found in journalist Charles Leerhsen’s 2022 book Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain In the book, the text message exchanges between Bourdain and his girlfriend Asia Argento can be read . . . and they throw a disturbing light on the dead man’s state of mind.

“I am okay,” Bourdain texted Argento after seeing photo depicting her and another man in an embrace. Adding, “I am not spiteful. I am not jealous that you have been with another man. I do not own you. You are free. As I said. As I promised. As I truly meant. But you were careless. You were reckless with my heart. My life.” Argento responded curtly, texting “I can’t take this.” The final text exchange with Argento, was Bourdain writing, “Is there anything I can do?,” and the actress carelessly replied, “Stop busting my balls.” The cook responded with a simple, “OK,” and subsequently hanged himself later on. But there is more. Bourdain was not a happy man, it turns out: “I hate my fans, too. I hate being famous. I hate my job,” Bourdain wrote to his estranged wife Ottavia Busia-Bourdain, with whom he remained a close confidant even after they split ip in 2016.

“I am lonely and living in constant uncertainty,” the reluctant celebrity wrote.

Hidden History of Big Brother in America

The below is an excerpt from the incredibly prolific Thom Hartmann’s latest book, Hidden History of Big Brother in America (scheduled to hit book shops in March 2022).^*

Big Brother and the Global Info Wars

Privacy, Cybersecurity, National Security, and the Future of Warfare

Privacy and safety (or at least a sense of safety) are often intertwined. Given that the deadliest predators humans have faced throughout our history have been members of our own species, it just makes sense. If you’re sitting comfortably in your living room reading a book or watching TV and happen to look up at your front window and see a menacing-looking person standing outside staring at you, you immediately go from feeling safe to feeling unsafe. Most people don’t have deep, dark online secrets they want to hide from others on the internet; most of us are not pornographers or terrorists or burglars. But even the most innocent, benign person would prefer that strangers aren’t reading their emails or knowing every click or purchase that comes out of their time online. Governments, though, are another matter. There isn’t a government in the world that doesn’t have secrets that, if revealed, would damage the national security of that country. Be it military, trade, or political, governments routinely conceal information for reasons both bad and good, and competing governments are always trying to find them out.

Spying, in this regard, is as old as humankind.

From Moses’ 12 spies in the Bible to the story of the giant wooden horse that carried warriors into Troy to tales from behind the lines in World War II, we’re all familiar with the damage that can be done to a nation when it’s infiltrated by hostile agents. And this is where our Internet of Things presents a particular vulnerability for the United States. On the internet, maintaining privacy and security is important for individuals but vital for governments. Most Americans are familiar with the story of how the United States and Israel apparently collaborated to implant a computer worm known as Stuxnet into the nuclear enrichment systems of Iran in 2010. The worm burrowed into the computerized systems controlling the spinning centrifuges used to purify uranium, causing them to spin so fast or irregularly that they essentially broke into pieces.

Far less well known is the story of how Iran responded.

A paper from the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College titled “Iran’s Emergence as a Cyber Power” states that prior to then, virtually all of that country’s cyber capability was directed at spying on their own citizens, hoping to stop rebellions before they began. But Stuxnet changed everything. “Today, Iran as a cyber power is the elephant in the room that everyone is finally beginning to notice,” the report’s authors wrote. “The Iranian government was originally believed to have budgeted approximately $76 million annually to its fledgling cyber force.”Then came Stuxnet in 2010. As the War College said, “However, in late-2011, Iran invested at least $1 billion dollars in cyber technology, infrastructure, and expertise. In March 2012, the IRGC [Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps] claimed it had recruited around 120,000 personnel over the past 3 years to combat ‘a soft cyber war against Iran.’ In early-2013, an IRGC general publicly claimed Iran had the ‘fourth biggest cyber power among the world’s cyber armies.’”

On August 15, 2012, they used that power first to disable the world’s wealthiest oil company, Saudi Aramco, irretrievably destroying 30,000 computers, leaving only an image of a burning American flag on every monitor’s screen. Then they went after a 245-foot-tall, 800-foot-long dam in Oregon, the Arthur R. Bowman Dam, which backs up the Crooked River. Had they opened its floodgates fast enough, it would have wiped out the downriver town of Pineville, killing thousands. Fortunately for Oregonians, they got the wrong dam; instead of the Oregon dam, they successfully infiltrated and took control of the Bowman Avenue Dam in New York State, which reroutes a relatively small stream. And, to add insult to injury for the Iranians, when they hit that dam (as the CIA was just then discovering), the sluice gates had been separated from the computer system for maintenance.

In an article about the attack, Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Yadron wrote, “America’s power grid, factories, pipelines, bridges and dams—all prime targets for digital armies—are sitting largely unprotected on the Internet.” It was just a fluke that they got the wrong dam and that it was down for repairs. The late Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson, then a close friend of Benjamin Netanyahu and a major donor to both Israeli and GOP causes, was the next victim of Iran after telling an audience at Yeshiva University in New York that the United States should drop an atomic bomb in Iran’s desert, implicitly threatening the capital, Tehran. “You want to be wiped out? Go ahead and take a tough position,” Adelson said. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei replied that somebody “should slap these prating people in the mouth.” Weeks later, all the computers at the Sands, Adelson’s hotel/casino, died. Totally. Every hard drive wiped, every screen showing a photo of Adelson and Netanyahu with the inscription, “Don’t let your tongue cut your throat”; the computers may as well have been boat anchors. Bricked is the word that hackers use.

Two years earlier, the Obama administration had put forward legislation to require all privately owned “essential infrastructure” in the United States to harden their cyber capabilities. While it passed the House of Representatives, as the New York Times reported, “Senate Republicans . . . argued that the minimum standards were too burdensome for businesses, and by late July had managed to change the legislation to make them optional. In early August, the bill essentially died when it was blocked by a Republican filibuster.” Failing at getting Congress to force the American companies that controlled our infrastructure to harden their systems, President Obama signed an executive order “that promotes increased information sharing about cyberthreats between the government and private companies that oversee the country’s critical infrastructure” and “put together recommendations that companies should follow to prevent attacks.” The order was ignored, and continues to be ignored, by American industry.

Cybersecurity for our privately owned dams, bridges, electrical generating stations, nuclear power plants, gas and oil pipelines, and water and sewage systems is now optional, and few . . .

*https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-History-Big-Brother-America/dp/152300102X/

When I met Tony: No Reservations in Istanbul

Back in 2010, when I was still living in İstanbul, or rather in the rundown area known only as Tarlabaşı, situated right next to yet worlds removed from the hip and fashionable area that was Beyoğlu, I used to frequent a small kebap place. A small establishment carrying the improbable name Dürümzade and quite well-known amongst those in the know, well-known as the premier spot to buy and eat a tasty dürüm or ‘Turkish wrap’ as called by the small yet immensely useful culinary guide Istanbul Eats. The spot is located at the very edge of Beyoğlu, right before you hit Tarlabaşı Bulvarı and is thus frequented by all sorts of clientele, ranging from hungry trannies over tough local strongmen to hipsters wearing small hats and the like. As such, I had been a regular ever since I moved to Tarlabaşı two years previously, and the guys knew me by name and invariably tried to get my advice for breaking into the international and preferably, American, market.

One day, the Dürümzade guys asked me to come over on a certain day at a certain time as an American chef accompanied by a film crew was scheduled to visit them for a shoot. Quite naturally, I agreed to hop over and offer any kind of assistance I’d be able to provide . . . On the day, I went there at the appointed hour, thinking to myself, just imagine if Anthony Bourdain were to be the expected guest. I arrived, met and greeted the Dürümzade crew when I also bumped into the film crew, a cameraman accompanied by a whole host of other technical guys that make up a film crew. I overheard them saying that Tony should be joining them any minute now. And suddenly, there was Anthony Bourdain standing in front of me – a tall and skinny fellow with a typical New York attitude I imagine . . . I introduced myself, with him retorting that he already had a ‘guide’ to tell him all he needs to know, when I saw this bald geezer popping up addressing “Tony” in a friendly and familiar manner. The Dürümzade guys informed me that he was a cook (or aşcı) working at Swissotel and . . . he had arranged the whole thing for the No Reservations team in order to introduce Bourdain to the Turkish delicacy of offal (which is incidentally, the topic tackled by Istanbul Eats introducing the Dürümzade guys whom the booklet refers to as ‘Wrap Artists’). I was flabbergasted, Anthony Bourdain was visiting Dürümzade and not planning to have a ‘Turkish wrap’. I immediately went to Tony and told him that the one delicacy served by the establishment is dürüm, but the progamme was already made – the bald geezer was to sit down with Bourdain, introducing the various bits of offal on offer with Tony munching away, as per usual. Once the shoot was in the can, Anthony Bourdain proceeded to order dürüm for the whole crew, himself included. He then thanked me, as the ‘wraps’ were “excellent” and we chatted for a bit. A friend of mine who had also arrived on the scene after I’d informed her that Bourdain was in the house via my mobile next attempted to take a picture of me and the visiting Bourdain, standing shoulder to shoulder (yes, turns out, I was a bit taller) . . .

Afterwards, it transpired, my friend’s attempts at photographic portraiture had been just that, namely attemtps that had come to naught. Hence, my fleeting meeting with the legendary Anthony Bourdain would become nothing but a memory locked in my mind with no visual memento available. We had not talked about anything amounting to much of anything, but it was abundantly clear to me that Tony was a cool guy, a real person with real convinctions and opinions . . . And now, he has apparenly taken his own life in France and the world will move along as it does. After all, every day hundreds if not thousands of people die across the globe – some in horrible ways and others under peaceful circumstances. Yet, the unique person that was Anthony Bourdain will no longer be part of the human fabric populating the earth and contributring to its malfunctioning . . . Sic transit gloria mundi.

Beijing 2008: A Painting and its Meaning

I stumbled across this intriguing picture on Facebook, of all places. The image was posted by a certain Joel Ng, who appears to be living in Brunei, again of all places. And this what he said by way of accompaniment: “Amazing thought-provoking painting “Beijing 2008” by Chinese-Canadian artist Liu Yi. The woman with the tattoos on her back is China. On the left, focused intensely on the game, is Japan. The one with the shirt and head cocked to the side is America. Lying provocatively on the floor is Russia. And the little girl standing to the side is Taiwan. This painting, named Beijing 2008, has been the subject of much discussion in the west as well as on the internet. What’s interesting is that this painting is called Beijing 2008, yet it depicts four women playing mahjong, and conceals a wealth of meaning within . . . China’s visible set of tiles “East Wind” has a dual meaning. First, it signifies China’s revival as a world power. Second, it signifies the military might and weaponry that China possesses has already been placed on the table. On one hand, China appears to be in a good position, but we cannot see the rest of her hand. Additionally, she is also handling some hidden tiles below the table. America looks confident, but is glancing at Taiwan, trying to read something off of Taiwan’s expression, and at the same time seems to be hinting something at Taiwan. Russia appears to be disinterested in the game, but this is far from the truth. One foot hooks coyly at America, while her hand passes a hidden tile to China, both countries can be said to be exchanging benefits in secret. Japan is all seriousness while staring at her own set of tiles, and is oblivious to the actions of the others in her self-focused state. Taiwan wears a traditional red slip, symbolizing that she is the true heir of Chinese culture and civilization. In one hand she has a bowl of fruit, and in the other, a paring knife. Her expression as she stares at China is full of anger, sadness, and hatred, but to no avail; unless she enters the game, no matter who ends up as the victor, she is doomed to a fate of serving fruit. Outside the riverbank is darkened by storm clouds, suggesting the high tension between the two nations is dangerously explosive. The painting hanging on the wall is also very meaningful; Mao’s face, but with Chiang Kai Shek’s bald head, and Sun Yat-Sen’s mustache”.^a

Ng continues that the “four women’s state of undress represent the situation in each country. China is naked on top, clothed with a skirt and underwear on the bottom. America wears a bra and a light jacket, but is naked on the bottom. Russia has only her underwear left. Japan has nothing left. At first glance, America appears to be most composed and seems to be the best position, as all the others are in various states of nakedness. However, while America may look radiant, her vulnerability has already been exposed. China and Russia may look naked, yet their key private parts remain hidden. If the stakes of this game is that the loser strips off a piece of clothing, then if China loses, she will be in the same state as Russia (similar to when the USSR dissolved). If America loses, she also ends up in the same state as Russia. If Russia loses, she loses all. Japan has already lost everything. Russia seems to be a mere ‘filler’ player, but in fact is exchanging tiles with China. The real ‘filler’ player is Japan, for Japan has nothing more to lose, and if she loses just once more she is immediately out of the game. America may look like she is in the best position, but in fact is in a lot of danger, if she loses this round, she will give up her position as a world power. Russia is the most sinister, playing along with both sides, much like when China was de-occupied, she leaned towards the USSR and then towards America; as she did not have the ability to survive on her own, she had to weave between both sides in order to survive and develop. There are too many of China’s tiles that we cannot see. Perhaps suggesting that China has several hidden aces? Additionally China is also exchanging tiles with Russia, while America can only guess from Taiwan’s expression of what actions have transpired between Russia and China. Japan on the other hand is completely oblivious, still focused solely on her own set of tiles. Taiwan stares coldly at the game from aside. She sees everything that the players at the table are doing, she understands everything that is going on. But she doesn’t have the means or permission to join the game, she isn’t even given the right to speak. Even if she has a dearth of complaints, she cannot voice it to anyone, all she can do is to be a good page girl, and bring fresh fruit to the victor. The final victor lies between China and America, this much is apparent. But look closely; while America is capable, they are playing Chinese Mahjong, not Western Poker. Playing by the rules of China, how much chance at victory does America really have?”.^b And that is question, particularly now that America’s nominal figurehead is a buffoon like the Drumpf, who seems to be bumbling through life as much anything else. In fact, the artist also has a Facebook page, and I imagine that enterprising or merely curious onlookers might want to query Lui Liu.^c Still, I would say that Joel Ng has done an excellent job at unraveling the various layers of meaning and decoding the iconography as well as iconology of the work.

aJoel Ng’s post in ’21SilkRd’ Facebook (01 July 2019). https://www.facebook.com/groups/947867908642430/permalink/2287003388062202/.

b Joel Ng’s post in ’21SilkRd’.

c“Lui Liu. @luiliupainter” Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/luiliupainter/.

The Ottoman Tuğra: A Twitter Feed

When I was but a lowly undergrad studying in Brussels, I first encountered the Ottoman Tuğra in the summer of 1988. That chance meeting took place at the Türk-İslam Eserleri Müzesi in İstanbul.¹ In fact, I became so enamoured with these samples of Ottoman calligraphy that I wanted to write my undergraduate thesis on them. Alas, due to lack of a qualified supervisor in the neighbourhood, that desire of mine remained unfulfilled. Needless to say, I have ever since always had a great love for Ottoman Tuğra‘s, but have in my academic career not been able to do anything about that. And, by sheer happenstance, nearly 31 years after my first exposure to the Tuğra, I just now stumbled across this quite wonderful Twitter feed, explaining nearly everything anyone would like to know about the delicate caligraphic flowers. The one doing the tweeting was Maryland-based historian who also happens to be a  PhD student Jonathan Parkes Allen, and here is a rendition. Dr Allen-to-be begins by saying these humble words: “And now a super-thread on the winding & complicated (pun intended) history of the tuǧra, a textual feature often defined as a ‘calligraphic emblem’ for ‘Turkic’ rulers, though that definition doesn’t capture the whole story. Let’s start with a ‘classic’ Ottoman tuǧra: That of Süleyman the Great. Here’s the entirety of the tuǧra I showed in detail view yesterday (LACMA M.85.237.17); it’s a good example of where the tuǧra would go under the Ottomans, with a fairly set form, lots of floral flourish, and a range of uses”.

Continuing like this: “Use of the tuǧra goes back to at least the Great Seljuks. Exact origins are fuzzy (including the word’s etymology), but it seems like that the bow and arrow emblem visible on this gold dinar of Tughril Beg (d. 1063) represents an early tuǧra, or what would become the tuǧra”.

Going on, “Our earliest textual attestation is from the Dīwān lughāt al-turk of Maḥmūd al-Kāshgarī (d. 1102), who gives this definition: ‘The tughra is the seal (ṭābiʿ) and signature (tawqīʿ) of the king; Oghuz dialect and not known to the [Western] Turks; I do not know its origin. The historian Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286) gives more context: ‘And from this time Sultan Tughril Beg began to inscribe the figure of a bow at the top of his seal, and inside it were these titles. And that sign was called ‘tughra’, and he who wrote [it] being commanded, ‘tughrai. No Seljuk tuǧras proper have survived, but Mamluk examples have, such as this one recorded by al-Qalqashandī (d. 1418) in his Ṣubḥ al-aʻshá. The basic form of the tuǧra is evident: soaring verticals (originally arrows?) with the rest of the letters interlacing (like bows)”.

Moving along, “Al-Qalqashandī also discusses the administrative uses of and scribal practices associated with Mamluk tuǧras, which eventually fell out of fashion among the Mamluk rulers. From the Mamluks the tuǧra would go in two different directions: the Ottoman one and the Indian one. n India-especially in late medieval & early modern Bengal- Turkic Muslim rulers would employ the tuǧra style in spectacular fashion in inscriptions on architecture, such as this c. 1500 example from a west Bengal mosque built by Shahzade Daniyal (Met. 1981.320)”.

And, “Or this one from 1487 from a mosque built by the Bengal Sultanate ruler Jalal al-Din Fath Shah (d. 1487), which beautifully displays the evolution from Mamluk tuǧra-as-calligraphic-signature to tuǧra-as-monumental-calligraphy (BM OA+.2299)”.

“The tuǧra would also continue, sporadically at least, to develop in India into its better known usage among the Ottomans as the calligraphic emblem of the ruler, culminating in Mughal tuǧras, such as this one of Shah Jahan embedded in a illumined rosette (Met. 55.121.10.39)”.

Dr Allen-to-be then says that the “Mughals would also use a blockier (to use the technical language) form of the tuǧra affixed to official documents, such as this c. 1645 instance, also from Shah Jahan, w/ that of his son Dara Shikoh, on a fermān responding to a request for aid (Met. 1997.205)”.

Finally getting down to the nitty-gritty he says: “Now for the Ottomans: one of our earliest surviving tuǧra, on a coin minted by a şehzade (prince), Süleyman Çelebi (d. 1411), shows what would become the typical features of the O. tuǧra: three verticals going up & two ellipticals going left, name & titles inside”.

Explaining then that the “tuǧra would become an emblem used especially by sultans but also by other members of the elite; with a few exceptions, calligraphers from the inner hierarchy would draft, write, & illumine the reigning sultan’s tuǧra, the process governed by an array of officials & steps. Besides fermâns, the tuǧra was affixed to deeds, endowed books, to coins, (eventually) architectural inscriptions, and various other substrates, such as this book of Islamic jurisprudence with Bayezid II’s gorgeous gold and floral bedecked tuǧra (Khalili Collections MSS 83)”.

“Or this set-on-its-side tuǧra of Selim III, added in 1802 to a book of fatwas (Khalili Collections MS 84)”.

“Coins continued to feature sultanic tuǧras, such as this lovely instance minted in 1703 under Ahmed III (BM 1947,0606.1567)”.

Going into some more detail, Dr Allen-to-be explains that the “tuǧra made its way into other contexts, too, such as in the following analogy made by the sufi şeyh Ismail Hakkı (d. 1725) in his Kenz-i maḫfî: ‘All of the prophets with the divine books in their hands are like a fermân of the exalted Sultan, while the Messenger of God, with the Qur’an in his hand, is like the fermân’s ṭuǧrâ. Just as if a sultanic fermân is not marked with a ṭuǧrâ it is not in force, if all of the prophets [& their books] had not been revealed & made manifest within the Muhammadan form…they would not be in circulation’. Ahmed III helped usher in new developments in the tuǧra, by drafting a hadith (‘My intercession is for those in my community, who commit greater sins’) in tuǧra form, which would become extremely popular in coming years, like other material forms of devotion”.

And on, “[m]any, many copies of this hadith-tuǧra, to use Philippe Bora Keskiner’s term for it, exist, such as this elegant 18th c. copy, which would have been mounted by itself, similar to a hily-i şerîf. Going to stop for now- other tasks call- but I’ll pick this thread up later with 19th and 20th century permutations of the tuǧra, and of course others’ contributions and/or questions are welcome!”. . . And you can tweet him at @Mar_Musa.

1Osmanlı Padişah Fermanları (Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları Ankara 1986 ).

Hamam for Sale: İshak Paşa’s Turkish Bath

In the heart of Istanbul’s old city, in the neighbourhood of Sultanahmet, named after the world-famous Blue Mosque erected by Sultan Ahmed I in the early 17^th century, an even older building, or rather its remains, are now up for sale. The 550-year old İshak Paşa Hamamı (or ‘Turkish bath’) was first put up for sale in 2014, with a price tag of $6 million. At that stage a suitable buyer did apparently not materialise and the owners gave up on the idea of selling the old ruin. But, some time ago, at the end of 2018, to be precise, the precarious economic circumstances prevailing in the AKP-led New Turkey forced the owners to reconsider, putting the property up for sale again and this time even halving the price tag as well. In the local daily Gazete Damga, the writer and editor Ekrem Hacıhasanoğlu claims that the potential buyer is supposed to have the property restored wthout damaging or altering its external appearance and to refurbish the interior according to the requirements of the original. Furhtermore, Hacıhasanoğlu maintains that the lucky buyer is also not allowed to exploit his new piece of real estate as a hotel.

İshak Paşa was an Ottoman statesman active during the reigns of the Sultans Mehmed II (aka Fatih) and Bayezid II, and the hamam had been part of a külliye also containing a mosque and a school. In fact, the now ruined bath is on the UNESCO world heritage list, according to the report published in the daily Cumhuriyet.¹

1“550 yıllık İshak Paşa Hamamı satılığa çıkarıldı” Cumhuriyet (04 January 2019). http://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/haber/turkiye/1191276/550_yillik_ishak_Pasa_Hamami_satiliga_cikarildi.html

Molenbeek: Radicale Islam in België en een gesprek met Teun Voeten

De oorlogsfotograaf en antropoloog Teun Voeten heeft tot 2015 in Molenbeek gewoond, maar op dat had hij er genoeg van en is weggetrokken. Toen had Voeten een gesprek met Christophe Degreef, gepubliceerd in het tijdschrift BRUZZ.¹ Voeten begint zijn betoog als volgt: “De Marokkanen van Molenbeek hebben een sterk parochiale cultuur. Laag-Molenbeek is een etnische enclave van een zeer gesloten gemeenschap. Daarop heeft zich een toenemend islamisme gevestigd, een onderstroom die steeds belangrijker wordt. Vrouwen krijgen de raad een hoofddoek te dragen, en als ze dat niet doen worden ze geïntimideerd.” Vervolgen geeft Voeten wat meer uitleg: “De Duitse filosoof Friedrich Nietzsche had gelijk. De moderne geseculariseerde mens heeft de Sklavenmoral van de christenen behouden en wentelt zich in zelfhaat en capitulatiedrang. Wij vinden dat wij schuld hebben aan al het leed van de wereld. We hebben op een kortzichtige manier onze eigen godsdienst weggegooid en denken dat we vrij zijn. Aan de andere kant heb je nu vijftig tot zestig procent van de Europese moslims – volgens een recente studie uit Berlijn – die een zeer conservatieve invulling van de islam volgen. De rest niet, dus, maar een groot deel onder hen is wel vatbaar voor het verwijt dat ze dan niet vroom genoeg zijn. Net zoals meneer pastoor vroeger mensen ‘raad’ kwam geven, en heel wat mensen plots in een vlaag beseften dat ze niet vroom genoeg waren.” En dat is het probleem uiteraard, een probleem dat aangeeft dat het momenteel niet echt zo schuchtere percentage van 50 à 60% wel al te vlug zou kunnen opzwellen tot 75% zoniet 90%. Voeten vervolgens zegt dat de “meeste moslims die ik in mijn leven heb ontmoet zijn wel lieve, goede mensen, maar zeer beïnvloedbaar voor godsdienstige verwijten.”

En dan neemt Voeten geen blad voor mond meer: de “Islamitische Staat is als een bliksemafleider waar alle spanningen en frustraties samenkomen. We leven in een goor neoliberaal tijdperk, en mensen worden door het economische systeem aan de kant gezet. Ze worden steeds overbodiger, kijk maar naar de berichten over de nieuwe golf automatiseringen die op komst is. De strenge islam biedt buitengesloten jongeren een sterke identiteit en groepsgevoel, en daarbovenop een staat die je de kans geeft om iemand te zijn, om avontuur te beleven, om te ‘leven’ tout court. In 2012 had je nog een soort idealisme bij jongeren die naar Syrië trokken. Ze gingen tegen dictator Bashar Al-Assad vechten. Naïef, maar begrijpelijk. Maar nu is Islamitische Staat puur fascistoïde geworden. Iedereen die zich daar nu nog bij aansluit is medeplichtig aan oorlogsmisdaden.” Terug naar het hier en nu, met andere woorden, Molenbeek in 2015, zegt Voeten: “Hier is een van die obscure moskeetjes waar ik dezelfde mannen heb zien lopen als in Syrië: jihadi-dresscode.” En terug naar een ietwat breder onderwerp zegt hij dat de “Islamitische Staat . . . de ideologie van de haat is [die] in de praktijk gebracht. Daarom dat het ook zo succesvol is: er is een grondgebied, een land waar je de haat tegen ongelovigen zomaar in de praktijk kan brengen. Niet alleen jonge mannen, maar ook jonge vrouwen vinden het best geil daar. Men zegt dat ze maar met honderden zijn, de Belgische Syriëstrijders, en dat dat niet veel is. Maar tel daar de actieve sympathisanten bij op, de complotdenkers, de conservatieve moslims die IS misschien niet steunen, maar ook niet afvallen, en je bent al met veel.” En ook brengt Voeten zijn eigen credo aan de man tijdens zijn gesprek met Degreef: “Ik ben een anti-imperialist,” zegt Voeten, als statement. “Ik vecht tegen Islam-imperialisme.”

1 Christophe Degreef, “Oorlogsfotograaf neemt afscheid van Molenbeek” BRUZZ (18 maart 2015). https://www.bruzz.be/samenleving/oorlogsfotograaf-neemt-afscheid-van-molenbeek-2015-03-18?fbclid=IwAR1aodWSOtMhAnPVrIqlAWj5adRrqKbum_oCpUL6N1fZhWNe-JtAXx-cMjg.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS)

Dan Ward says: “The region circled in red, is a portion of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS). This region is roughly the same square kilometers as Greenland, it contains an estimated 1700 gigatons(gts) of frozen methane, about 20 kilometers thick. Note: The ridges in the Arctic abyssal basin are higher than the Alps, and many are volcanos. There is enough methane there, to blow Texas to the moon, or further . . . “If 50gts suddenly releases, we cannot survive it” ~ Professor Peter Wadhams. 50gts is just 3% of total methane stores there! It’s under only 50+/-mdters of water, that used to be covered with sea ice year round. Sea ice served (past tense) as a cap or seal, to keep the methane from releasing. Guess what? The sea ice is GONE”.¹

1 Dan Ward on ‘Arctic news’ facebook. (25 August 2018). https://www.facebook.com/groups/arcticnews/permalink/10156705206524679/?_xts__[0]=68.ARAX5FbeCrAAcBIPvyIgWmL7_AcnLywvRBIO6Uypx89m1fPJuSN8nBs4celcMPhqdOZmxpBXL_Isij1J3TJhVSxBT8m6WcIOgFqOqlKo_JdQUAdX7qV7kWJrsEnrNoE4MdJaObg&__tn__=-R.

The end of multiculturalism, Islamophobia and the role of NATO

Tuesday, 23 November 2010. 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was re-elected last year with a larger majority, which allowed her to form a coalition with the free-market party Free Democratic Party (FDP), or Freie Demokratische Partei in German, more in line with her own conservative political values.

Recently, Frau Merkel has managed to get noticed beyond Germany’s borders and occupy the internatifonal headlines — Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, a senior director at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, even spoke of a “global media tsunami.” In a speech she gave at a meeting of younger members of her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Frau Merkel namely said the unthinkable: “At the start of the ‘60s we invited the guest-workers to Germany. We kidded ourselves for a while that they wouldn’t stay, that one day they’d go home. That isn’t what happened. And, of course, the tendency was to say let’s be ‘multikulti’ and live next to each other and enjoy being together, [but] this concept has failed, failed utterly.”

In spite of the fact that she tried to balance these harsh words with subsequent statements stressing Germany’s openness and its willingness to give people “opportunities,” overnight Frau Merkel’s shrill condemnation of the multicultural experiment became an international sensation. Her words came in the wake of the controversy surrounding former Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin. His book “Deutschland schafft sich ab” (“Germany Does Away With Itself”), appearing at the end of August 2010, caused indignation nationally and internationally. At the time, the BBC reported that in his book “Mr Sarrazin has criticised German Muslims, suggested the existence of a Jewish gene, and warned of ethnic Germans being outnumbered by [Muslim] migrants.” These two high-profile outrages indicate that the guest-workers (gastarbeiter) of yesteryear, who used to do all the heavy and unpleasant jobs unfit for locals, have now assumed an altogether different identity. Whereas previously these immigrants were primarily seen as foreign nationals, mostly from Turkey, but also hailing from Morocco and Algeria, they have now become an altogether different group: They are now seen first and foremost as Muslims.

Foreigners in Germany

So, how did these foreigners end up in Germany? Following the end of World War II in Europe (May 8, 1945) and the promulgation of the Marshall Plan (April 3, 1948), West Germany went through a time of bustling economic activity. In the ’50s and ’60s, Germany witnessed the so-called “Wirtschaftswunder” (economic miracle) which transformed the war-ravaged country into an economic powerhouse. In order to dispose of sufficient labor forces, the then-West German government signed a number of bilateral recruitment agreements with countries that could supply some much-needed workers to do the job. In 1955 Germany signed a deal with Italy; in 1960 with Greece; in 1961 with Turkey, and two years later with Morocco. But the reality was such that after 1961, Turkish citizens (largely from rural areas) soon became the largest group of gastarbeiter in West Germany. These Turks had at first arrived on their own, single men willing to work and eager to return home laden with money and luxury goods. But, as indicated by Frau Merkel in her notorious speech, these men were soon joined by their wives, established families and subsequently struck deep roots in German soil. Second and third-generation Turkish immigrants grew up in Germany facing racism and discrimination. These German-born Turks met with prejudice and intolerance, based upon their status as foreigners, foreigners from the backward East, speaking a different language and practicing a different religion. But the locals saw them primarily as “Turks,” as individuals belonging to a different ethnic or national group. Back in those good old days of overt xenophobia, brave investigative journalists like Günter Wallraff were able to report on the racism Turks were bound to encounter in the German workplace. In his 1985 book “Ganz unten” (“Lowest of the Low”) Wallraff describes how Turkish workers were routinely mistreated by employers, landlords and the German government. Back then, the racism encountered by the Turkish gastarbeiter was the plain and simple kind that discriminated against the outsider on account of his or her ethnic or national background.

Nowadays, however, commentators and politicians alike tend to forget national or ethnic identifiers, instead opting for religious markers, and thus speaking about the Muslim other present in Germany (and by extension, Europe), the Muslim other whose presence and actions are incompatible with Western civilization and alien to the Judeo-Christian tradition which provides the framework for much, if not all, of Europe’s culture and identity. The professor of sociology, scholar and expert in Islamic matters, Stefano Allievi rightly remarks that the “immigrant … has progressively become ‘Muslim,’ both in his/her perception by the host societies and in his/her self-perception.” Nowadays, Europeans express their dislike of the “other” in religious and/or cultural terms. This has led to the creation of a new term that is oftentimes not even associated with racist sentiments and/or reflexes: Islamophobia. But we should be clear about this: Islamophobia is nothing but a new name given to the age-old reflex of racism. I can already hear some people objecting and uttering the phrase, “But Islam is not a race.” In fact, some scientists have argued over the past years that the mere concept of race as a distinguishing factor between humans does not really exist. Scientists like C. Loring Brace, Steve Jones, Nina Jablonski and Norman Sauer have made their case on more than one occasion. Rather than claiming racial differences between individual humans, they suggest that the criterion of race is as much a cultural artifact and a social construct as it is reflective of real differences between individuals and/or social groups. In that sense, racism is the term we use to describe the act of discriminating against an individual or a group of people based on certain traits (held in common) that are seen as undesirable, unwelcome and alien. On the BBC World Service, Professor Jones declared that “races are really in the eye of the beholder” and not necessarily a biological reality. As a result, the term Islamophobia suggests that the trait held in common by the people deserving discrimination and exclusion is their religious affiliation rather than their skin color or physiology, and thus we could term Islamophobia a clear form of “cultural racism.”

‘Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All’

In 1997, the Runnymede Trust, “the UK’s leading independent race equality think tank,” issued an influential report in this respect: “Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All.” In the report one can read that the term Islamophobia is “the shorthand way of referring to the dread and hatred of Islam — and, therefore, the fear or dislike of all, or most Muslims.” Additionally, the report claims that this “fear or dislike of all, or most Muslims” first appeared in the mid-’70s. Today, Islamophobia as a social phenomenon is all but commonplace all over Europe: in the UK, the racist British National Party (BNP) is steadily gaining in force and popularity; in the Netherlands, the Islamophobic hate-monger Geert Wilders has booked an expected electoral victory for his Party For Freedom (PVV), or Partij voor de Vrijheid; neighboring Belgium also recently saw a good showing for the separatist and xenophobic Flemish Interest (VB), or Vlaams Belang, while in Sweden, prior to last September’s elections, Björn Söder, a member of the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD), or Sverigedemokraterna, claimed that an “Islamic revolution akin to the one that swept through Iran in 1979 could easily take place in Sweden.” Söder’s statement is particularly revealing of the current mood not just in Sweden but in the whole of Europe. Let us put his statement into a bit of context. In 2009, a report on migration in Sweden established that there were about 450,000 to 500,000 Muslims in Sweden, which translates to around 5 percent of the total population. Yet Söder felt completely at ease to warn his fellow Swedes of impending doom and gloom, as these 5 percent of the total population were about to unleash an “Islamic revolution akin to the one that swept through Iran” in Scandinavia. Southern European countries are not immune, either. In Italy, the Northern League (LG), or Lega Nord, is particularly vociferous in its condemnation of Muslim immigrants. And now Germany’s centrist Christian-Democrat Angela Merkel also seems to be pandering to populist Islamophobic sentiment by declaring the death of multiculturalism.

How did this happen?

The continent of Europe had in the post-World War II era decisively moved towards a secular society, a society where one’s religious beliefs and cultural preferences were increasingly confined to one’s private life and where multiculturalism was thus allowed to bloom and prosper. Racism, xenophobia and sheer chauvinism were supposed to be traits of the past in Europe. In reality, however, the population of Europe has never really been able to suppress its covert “racist” instincts and distrust of the “other.” But nowadays these atavistic sentiments receive a religious label, which is no doubt linked with 9/11 and the subsequent “war on terror.” In fact, ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall religion has been making a comeback in Europe — at first in the former communist countries and now also in Western Europe. In Europe, more and more people appear to rediscover their Christian roots. The present pope, Benedict XVI, is currently cunningly tapping into that well of resurgent Christianity and has openly declared his hostility towards “aggressive forms of secularism” and “atheist extremism.” These trends feed into the age-old rivalry between Islam and Christianity. On a political level, such a development had been sanctioned as long ago as February 1995. Then, Willy Claes, NATO secretary-general from 1994-95, said, “Islamic militancy has emerged as perhaps the single gravest threat to the NATO alliance and to Western security” in the aftermath of the fall of communism. Claes added that extremist Muslims oppose “the basic principles of civilization that bind North America and Western Europe.” The then-NATO secretary-general was nevertheless diplomatic enough to remark that his declaration should not be seen as a call for “a crusade against Islam.” Nevertheless, Claes had let the genie out of the bottle, and here we are today, in a world where racism in the form of Islamophobia is rampant and on the rise. The situation has become even more volatile and combustible now, in the aftermath of 9/11 and the US-led “war on terror,” which some see as a thinly veiled “war on Islam.” Is it any wonder that Claes’ words have turned out to be prophetic? In view of Europe’s now sizeable Muslim population, it is imperative that the multicultural experiment be continued to achieve a future of peace and prosperity. But the fact that Germany’s chancellor can now recklessly declare the failure of multiculturalism in Germany (and Europe) appears to indicate the absence of the political will to oppose the creeping trend towards open hostility against Islam and Muslims. Instead, politicians increasingly pander to the whims of an electorate that has been manipulated into viewing Islam as a threat and danger to the “basic principles of civilization.” Will the future see a revival of open hostility between Islam and Christianity? Will Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” become a political and possibly even military reality in years to come? Only time will tell . . .