But among Turkey’s army and secular élite, secularism has become a religion in itself, a subjective interpretation forced upon an intellectually diverse population. The tension has manifested itself more and more clearly since the ascent of the AK Party (AKP), and it is now time to, if you will allow the wording, be secular in the face of secularism.

Just weeks ago, AKP arrested several members of the army, which has historically overruled the democratic government on national and foreign policy with impunity, on charges of attempting a coup. Now, AKP is attempting to implement a landmark set of constitutional reforms that will, among other things, put more judicial power in the hands of the population and give ‘preferential treatment’ to women, children, and the disabled under the law. That last point is seen in Turkey as a bold attempt to legalise wearing headscarves in universities, government buildings, and other public venues.

While Turkish political tradition can be credited with successfully keeping the country virtually free of militancy in the name of Islam, it is becoming clearer that Turkish society does not see this as a gain worth the immense cost on personal liberty. Indeed, while it is almost certain that the legislative assembly will strike down the amendments, they will be approved in a popular referendum.

I was in Istanbul the weekend that the aforementioned military personnel were put on trial. All of my Turkish friends (most of whom are from Ankara) are members of the secular élite, and I ignorantly believed that their views on religion and politics were representative of most Turks. Because of this, I expected to see protests against the arrests when I arrived in Istanbul. But I saw absolutely nothing of the sort. In my three days of interaction with a variety of Turks, ranging from police at the airport to shop owners to confidence men, the Turkey that I witnessed was very proud to be Muslim. In Istanbul I saw the tension of Turkish society; a Muslim culture that has internalised modernity and fused its European and Asian identities, and furthermore a Muslim culture that was trying to make all of this work. It is a place where young men in English football jerseys drink Rakı (a Turkish alcoholic drink) and blast rap music on the side of the road, then pull their sagging jeans up and whip prayer beads out of their pockets when they hear the call to prayer.

The point of relating my experience in Istanbul in this article is to demonstrate that, try as they might, the army and the establishment in Turkey cannot suppress this uniqueness. They cannot overpower the religion of Islam with the religion of secularism because in doing so it replaces one violent radical ideology with another. The establishment needs to understand that its people on the whole are not prone to slide backward into Islamic fundamentalism. Their society has already infused liberal individualism. If Turkey truly wants to be a secular democracy, it must broadly echo the structure of the United States, in which religious radicalism is still a feature, but it is shot down in politics with true secularism, the voices of reason.

Who is he really pointing the finger at? (photo credit: AP/Mehr News, Sajjad Safari)

Under no circumstances should this be viewed as a personal defence of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as that is not my intention nor is it my desire. This piece is an academic exercise in provoking thought on preserving the legitimacy of words like ‘anti-semitism’ and the accuracy of their usage in post-WWII society by using Ahmadinejad as a case study to this effect.

If you live in Europe or North America and don’t conduct independent research on West Asian issues very much, it is extremely likely that you think Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an anti-semite. I was in that boat for a long time. Now, while I continue to have numerous concerns about the Iranian regime, I find myself firmly convinced that Ahmadinejad is a man who despises the Israeli government and its policies, not Jewish people. No, they are not the same thing. Hear me out.

To demonstrate the validity of my claim, I have found a compilation of Ahmadinejad’s supposed ‘anti-semitic’ remarks on Jews and Israel since 2005. To further prove that I am coming at this from an unbiased angle, I acquired the compilation from the website of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish NGO that tasks itself with advocating for Israel and Jews and fighting anti-Semitism. My goal here is to shed light on the truth, not at all to defend Ahmadinejad.

To make the argument as clear as possible, I’ll examine three aspects of Ahmadinejad’s views: his statements on Israel and Zionism, his statements on the Holocaust, and his statements on Jewish people in general/Judaism as a religion. From the ADL’s compilation of quotes, I’m going to use the best examples I can here, but you can find the full compilation in the link in the preceding paragraph. If you think I’m selecting quotes in a biased manner in this post, I challenge you to look at the list yourself and find any quotes that contradict the arguments I am about to make.

Israel
January 28th 2009- “The illegal Zionist regime… has demanded blood money of some victims…and have used some of this money to establish a Zionist regime in the land of Palestine, and have used this excuse to attack Palestine and by killing and displacing the people from their motherland they have occupied their mother land and established a Zionist regime, which is tasked with the job of denying an Islamic power emerging to counter the West.”

September 18th 2008- “I have heard some say the idea of Greater Israel has expired….I say that the idea of lesser Israel has expired, too…We have no problems with these people (Israelis) but they should leave the occupied territories, leave them to their genuine owners and get back to their countries and homes where they originally came from.”

October 5th 2007- On resettling the Jews from Israel to Canada or Alaska:
“…you cannot tolerate the presence of Zionists in Europe but want to inflict them on the people of our region? You have so much land in your possession. This vast land of Canada and Alaska can be used to resettle the Jews. Save yourselves.”

November 13th 2006- “Israel is destined for destruction and will soon disappear…Israel is “a contradiction to nature, we foresee its rapid disappearance and destruction.”

And of course the famous one from October 26th 2005- “Israel must be wiped off the map … The establishment of a Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world . . . The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of the war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land.”

From these quotations, it is extremely clear that President Ahmadinejad thinks that the Israeli state is a vile, cruel one that oppresses Palestinians and should be destroyed. I don’t think anyone can argue that those are pro-peace sentiments. But, he makes the important distinction between the state/state policy and the Israeli people in the 2008 quote. He says he has “no problems with these people (Israelis).” Therefore, the issue boils down to this: If Ahmadinejad calls for the destruction of an Israeli state and lambasts its policies, but he has “no problems” with the Israeli people, even if you wanted to make the argument that Israelis are synonymous with Jews and Jews Israelis, there is no foundation here for an accusation of anti-semitism.

I’m willing to make the same argument with regards to his thoughts on Zionism. He doesn’t like them. That is evident. But not all Jews are Zionist. Zionism is not a pre-requisite for being Jewish. In fact, Zionism was an idea that originated in the last two to three centuries among European Jews. If you asked a Jew in Uzbekistan in 1900 what Zionism was, he/she would have had no idea. They might have even told you that a return to Israel was not necessary until the arrival of the Messiah, as some ultra-conservative Jews claim today. Therefore, while many Jews are Zionist, to despise that part of Jewish society is not the same thing as calling for the destruction of the Jewish religion and race (if you in fact believe that Jews that constitute a race). If it was, then it would amount to anti-semitism. But it’s not.

The Holocaust
I really only need two quotes here to make my point.

September 18th 2008- “The Holocaust is a lie and the real Holocaust is happening to the Palestinians.”

September 18th 2009- “They (the Western powers) launched the myth of the Holocaust. They lied, they put on a show and then they support the Jews…. If as you claim the Holocaust is true, why can a study not be allowed? … The pretext for establishing the Zionist regime is a lie… a lie which relies on an unreliable claim, a mythical claim, and the occupation of Palestine has nothing to do with the Holocaust…This claim is corrupt and the pretext is corrupt. This (the Israeli) regime’s days are numbered and it is on its way to collapse. This regime is dying.”

The holocaust happened. This is an undeniable fact. Ahmadinejad’s denial of it makes him a buffoon and an idiot in the strongest possible sense. But does it also make him anti-semitic? I think that really just depends on why he’s doing it. All of his comments suggest that he denies the Holocaust more to try to undo the occupation of Palestinian land than to personally insult Jewish people simply because they are Jewish.

Lest I sound too glib, I want to make it clear that I understand and internalise the horror and tragedy of 6 million Jews being exterminated. I have personally visited the Dachau concentration camp in Germany and have shed tears for those who died there. But I think as logical thinkers we need to be able to draw lines in terms of what ways we will let the shock of the Holocaust impact our society. I disagree with Holocaust-denial being illegal solely on the principle that it should not be a criminal offence to say what you want as long as you are not encouraging violent hatred against living people. The United States legal system clearly agrees with me because Holocaust denial is not a criminal offence there thanks to the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

I think that Ahmadinejad’s claims are rooted in a refusal to accept that any historical event large enough to justify the displacement and oppression of Palestinians ever occurred. From the quotations, it is impossible to logically conclude that he denies the Holocaust out of any deep-seated hatred for Judaism or Jewish people as a whole. That brings me to the next point, his views on Jews.

Jews
18 September 2008- ”The Zionist regime (Israel) is going towards its final collapse after 60 years of aggression. The final solution would be a referendum on Palestine’s future fate with the participation of all Palestinians, regardless of whether Muslims, Jews or Christians.”

24 September 2007- ”…on the other hand, they gather a number of Jews from different parts of the world through false propaganda and with the promise of providing them with welfare, jobs and food, and settle them in the occupied territories, exposing them to the harshest restrictions, psychological pressures and constant threats. They prevent these people from returning to their homelands and by coercion and propaganda induce them to malevolence toward the indigenous Palestinian people.”

In the 2008 quote, Ahmadinejad includes Jews in the category of Palestinians. In that quote, he advocates inclusion, not exclusion.

The 2007 quote sounds harsh and I would not have believed it…until in the third week of my second year at the LSE I discovered that it was actually 100% true. If you ask an Israeli historian, they will likely agree as well. The forced aliyahs (migrations) of African and Oriental Jews (mizrahim in Hebrew) to Israel in the early days of the Zionist settlement is an appalling stain on Israeli history for even Israelis themselves. Many of these Jews had no understanding nor inclination towards Zionism, and yet they were loaded onto buses and planes and, upon arrival in Israel, settled by the state into what can only be referred to as ghettoes. Ben Gurion, in a horrifying and shockingly strange display of racism just 3 years after the Holocaust, referred to these mizrahim as being sub-human and of a lesser mind than European Jews. For a full account of the atrocities committed to the mizrahim, read Joseph Massad, ‘Zionism’s Internal Others: Israel and the Oriental Jews’, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol 25, No 9 (1990).

Doesn’t Ahmadinejad’s 2007 quote, then, show him sympathising with the plight of non-European Jews? These are Jews nonetheless. It serves as further evidence that his troubles are with the governing regime of the State of Israel, not the Jewish people.

Finally, and most importantly, I want to address the world-famous ‘wipe Israel off the map’ quotation. It never happened. This is fact. The text of the speech in question, in the original Persian, is:

این رژیم اشغالگار قدس باید از صفحه روزگار محو شود

Transliteration: Ein razhim-e ishghalgar-e Qods bayed az safhahye rozgar mahw shawad

Literal translation: This regime that occupies Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time. source

The most crucial note to be made here is that he does not refer to ‘Israel’. To do so would be referring to the nation-state including not only its government but its inhabitants as well. He refers to the regime that occupies Jerusalem, implying that his quarrel is with the government and its policies. Of that government and its policies, he says they must vanish from the page of time. This is Farsi poeticism. They must be forgotten. They must eventually cease to exist. They cannot be a permanent feature in the pages of time. This is, as University of Michigan professor Juan Cole says, not at all the same thing as saying you will wipe someone off the map or that someone should be wiped off a map. It is not as violent nor as indicative of a wish to invade or actively destroy.

Christopher Hitchens, the BBC, and others have argued that there is no direct translation of the Persian idiom into English; that this could be interpreted a number of ways; that wiping off the map is an accurate idiomatic equivalency in English.

I simply have no idea how they’ve managed to arrive at such a conclusion. The translation I provided above is word-for-word (this can be confirmed by any Persian scholar) and still makes perfect grammatical and syntactical sense in English! Furthermore, if Ahmadinejad wanted to say anything about maps, he could have easily done so! The Persian word for map is naqshah and can be used freely, contrary to what Hitchens and BBC for some reason want you to believe, without befuddling the average Persian speaker. There is no idiomatic significance here. It was a normal sentence with a normal meaning. As they say everywhere from Morocco to India, khalas!

To conclude, Ahmadinejad’s remarks above clearly refute any claim that he has an aversion to Jewish people. That would have been the only grounds on which he can be branded anti-Semitic. Furthermore, if there are any quotations brought to my attention that I (and the ADL) missed which indicate otherwise, that would only prove that Ahmadinejad is a man with contradictory views, not set views in any one direction. This would allow us to brand him as two-faced, possibly as crazy, but not definitively as an anti-Semite. I strongly disagree with the Iranian regime as much as the next son of a regional exile raised in the West. But I cannot, as a young academic, stand for important and meaningful words in our society like ‘anti-Semite’ to be mutated and abused in order to expound false ideas about anyone.

As always, I am happy to accept comment, debate, and factual correction. Based on the evidence I have found and provided above, I don’t think Ahmadinejad is anti-semitic. I think he is just anti-Israeli government. I welcome any attempts to change my mind.

Rumi

But nine years on, the picture looks shakier than I like to admit. The Afghan people are trapped in a limbo between two styles of governance that do not fit in with their society: a Western-style democracy and a Wahhabist Taleban emirate. They believe in the ideals of freedom, equality, and national pride, but they need to be empowered to build a system that embodies these ideas in a uniquely Afghan way. This is the heart of the issue. The international community has imposed a system of governance that is exported from France and the USA. Rather than having the Western democratic system designed and imposed, Afghanistan needs a natural process of giving birth to its own revolutionary thinkers and champions of freedom in order to ensure long term stability.That would come at a price. Such a social revolution would be tumultuous at best. But it would have been easier if the opportunity was seized from the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom. It’s not too late, at least not yet. The international community needs to channel more of the current flow of human and material resources to instiling the values of open society and self-governance in the Afghan people so that they can take the pure knowledge of these concepts and convert it into something of their own.

Much of the onus lies on Afghan youth outside of Afghanistan as well. This is a point that I feel is never made often enough. Many of them are in a sad state, marginalising themselves into street gangs and expressing what I call ‘BS nationalism’ through gangster memorabilia like guns painted red, black, and green or rap songs about how being Afghan is synonymous with doing drugs and fighting and somehow that’s ‘cool’. The Afghan youth need to take up the intellectual mantle of Rumi and Avicenna and re-empower their homeland. It is the only way that we can prove that our society is capable of creating an Afghan system of government and society that we can all live with.

My hope is that a combination of all these factors and more would allow for the mental shift in both the international and Afghan communities that would naturally repel Talebanisation and reconcile democracy with Afghan identity. Once again, it’s not an easy process. In fact, revolutions in Turkey, Iran, and Egypt show us that it can be very violent. But as Avicenna, being a scholar of the natural sciences, would remind us, in the bigger picture a wildfire makes the forest grow healthier.

I know I haven’t gone into too much detail about what a plan for social revolution towards a uniquely Afghan system, in my mind, looks like. But that’s because that would be far too long to go on here and I’m not an expert on state-building (yet ). So what I’m going to do is write a series of articles over time covering various important sectors of civil society and how I think they can be further empowered. I’d love to hear your views as well on what this process would look like. I welcome comment and debate.