From the Washington Post
A Turkish writer's creative -- and popular -- sequel to "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
By Mustafa Akyol
Sunday, October 7, 2007; B02
ISTANBUL -- Look in just about any bookstore in Turkey, and you'll see some strange bestsellers. The cover of "The Children of Moses," the first and most popular book in a series of four, shows the country's devoutly Muslim prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in the middle of a six-pointed Star of David. Inside, you'll find a head-spinningly weird argument: that Erdogan and his conservative allies in Turkey's ruling pro-Islamic party are actually crypto-Jews with secret wicked ties to the conspiratorial forces of "global Zionism."
The books are hardly a fringe phenomenon. They're arrayed in chic bookstores along Istiklal Avenue, the funky pedestrian mall that's the heart of secular Istanbul. They're openly displayed alongside Orhan Pamuk novels at Ataturk International Airport. And they're even sold on tiny bookstands on the Princes' Islands, the vacation destinations in the Sea of Marmara that many well-off Turks view the way Manhattanites do the Hamptons. By the publishers' figures, they've sold about 520,000 copies since the books started rolling out this year -- a staggering figure for a nation of about 71 million people.
Of course, paranoid theories about Jewish conspiracies have never lacked for imagination. "International Jewry" has been blamed for destroying both czarist Russia and the Soviet Union, for cooking up both capitalism and communism. But dreaming up a conspiracy theory about a Zionist plot to create an Islamist state? That's a new one.
Continued...
No comments:
Post a Comment