The ghosts of Islam are haunting Europe

"A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of communism," Marx said at the opening of the Communist Manifesto.

In the first half of the 19th century, an atmosphere had formed across all of Europe in which the fear of communism, although it did not correspond to any reality, enveloped everything, and everyone was awaiting communism as one awaits Godot.

Fears are not to be underestimated. They can have a mysterious power that creates its own reality.

So much so that the measures taken to ward off these fears turn into self-fulfilling prophecies.

What ultimately unseated Pharaoh was the fear of an inevitable end that he based on a dream of his.

To ward off this fear he set about destroying all the male children of the Children of Israel born that year, and it was this desperate strategy that prepared his end.

After describing how all the powers of old Europe, from the Pope to the Tsar, from Metternich to Guizot, from French radicals to German police agents, had entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre, Marx thus lays out the rationale of the manifesto, to tell the truth about communism, which had turned into a spectre.

On the 100th anniversary of his death, the famous French post-structuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida, referring to this title, published a book called Specters of Marx. He of course also dwelt on the need to use "spectre" in the plural in his title. He explained that, as with everything in postmodern Europe, Marx too now had different manifestations and effects, but that, similarly to the way the spectre of communism once haunted Europe, even now, that is, in the years when the Berlin Wall had fallen and the socialist bloc had dissolved, the specters of Marx were roaming in Europe. He of course also drew attention to the irony this contained.

In what way were Marx's specters roaming in Europe in those years? Why were they roaming? Who took them seriously? Frankly, none of this matters very much at this hour.

A Europe that had largely exorcised the spectre of communism was, on the contrary, at the peak of the pleasure, in an intoxication of victory, of selling the "human values" it had appropriated as "European values."

Yet now a spectre, indeed spectres, are really haunting Europe, and these spectres are leaving precisely the real effect they leave on people. The spectres of the children of a people whose male children were for the most part slaughtered in the Çanakkale and Liberation wars and buried irregularly into history.

The spectres of the Turk, the spectres of the Muslim.

If there is even a crumb of conscience in Europe, they feel that the reckoning for the people they brutally exploited, humiliated and massacred in their colonies is slowly beginning to come into their sleep.

That is why all the decrepit powers of Europe are emerging again and uniting against Islam, that is, against the reappearance of the force they thought they had in fact killed.

But while uniting against these spectres, they are being scattered to pieces, just as much, by the panic they have fallen into.

They are throwing to the ground and trampling on all the human values they had earlier insolently appropriated.

Faced with the spectres of Islam, Europe is being dangerously swung toward the far right, beginning with its most democratic countries, those most respectful of human rights. The most important subject of the elections held in Europe in recent years is Turkey and other foreigners, that is, Islam. There is an increase in the votes of those who promise skill in closing the doors to them and even in taking measures against those among them who are inside.

The value in demand in Europe's elections is racism, xenophobia, that is, hostility to Turks and Islam.

Is this the end of Europe, or its real face hidden beneath the heavy makeup that is peeling off day by day?

We cannot know, but this time's spectre resembles neither the spectre of communism nor the specters of Marx.

In fact the historical fear that has always united Europe in its history and in a sense given it an identity has always been the fear of Islam and the Turk. According to one view, even the first parliamentary experience in Europe came about through the meetings of European feudal lords and churchmen gathered for measures to be taken against Muslims.

Europe had been resting easy, thinking it had killed both the Turk and Islam at the end of World War I.

Today it hears the footsteps of that force, which it knows it had killed, close by, and is seized by fear.

As if it had seen a ghost, a specter, it reacts to this situation by disrupting and suspending all its calibrations, all its measures and standards.

First Germany bans ministers and members of parliament of the Republic of Turkey from holding meetings in its country. Thus it reveals the falseness of all the speeches it has so far made for the freedom of expression of ordinary people in a democratic country. Then the Netherlands goes down the same road in a still more extreme way.

On every matter on which they have so far criticized Turkey, they were put to the test against Turkey and lost badly.

They spoke of freedom of expression and restricted the freedom of expression of ministers, let alone ordinary people. They spoke of freedom of assembly and demonstration, and hypocritically obstructed freedom of assembly in the most fascistic manner. They counted as a "deviation from democracy" Turkey's state of emergency, declared in the face of the coup attempt though not declared even in the face of terror that took thousands of lives,

while the Netherlands declared a "state of emergency" to be able to block a demonstration containing no violence or even possibility of violence.

What the Netherlands did, choosing between sense and nonsense to prevent Minister of Family and Social Policies Fatma Betül Sayan Kaya from reaching the consulate and finally settling on a "state of emergency," cannot be explained with reason, with the seriousness and quality of being a state.

Frankly, something is happening to Europe, and this condition cannot be explained by reason, politics or strategy. It is simply a set of irrational reactions that could only be given by people who are seeing, or think they are seeing, ghosts.

It is a pity for the European Union; despite everything, it was not a bad idea.