The surprise actors of the new Orientalism

The devil's tricks are many. He has the skill of approaching a person from the side the person does not know or notice. The tactics of coup-making as a form of satanic activity are the same. From time to time it acts in the name of saving the country from terror, from reaction, from partition or from communism, and hunts innocent minds that way. It appears with the most innocent justifications and makes its own existence, its intervention, its stepping onto the stage look very pleasant.

The December 17 coup attempt too built itself on the most innocent justification possible: the fight against corruption and bribery. There is no one who can object to this justification. But the December 17 operation itself is a movement in which a thousand and one kinds of corruption are intertwined. In terms of its timing, composition, the target it eyed, its effect and style, it is an action whose purpose is very obvious. But because of the de facto situation it created (and the way this de facto situation was created is itself a separate example of immorality and corruption), it aimed to hunt people's feelings about a clean society and lawful earnings. Yet those who took on this affair, taken as a whole, have very clearly exposed for what purpose the move was made and that the purpose was not corruption.

Besides the emphasis the front defending the December 17 operation places on corruption, the analyses it sets forth on the international reasons for this operation are actually very illuminating. Somehow, Today's Zaman's criticisms of the Prime Minister and Turkey's foreign policy for quite some time, and its publications that read as if informing on Turkey to the world, take their place among the grounds for the December 17 operation too. In fact a great deal has been written about this, so let me not repeat it. However hard it was to understand, we understood it all. But what I still have difficulty understanding is what Ali Bulaç has written during this time.

I go back and read it again and again, I struggle to understand, I wait for his next piece, perhaps I will read one or two more things that will set the situation right, but in vain. On the occasion of the recent events too, Ali Bulaç lays into the AK Parti and Erdoğan, whom he criticizes in the name of Islamism, mostly for its foreign policy.

For example, looking from the big picture that he thinks he sees, he says: "Forming an alliance with the Kurds of Northern Iraq and defying the world means accepting that both we and the Kurds will be beaten up by the world and the regional countries."

So it turns out that the beatings we take stem from our forming alliances with Northern Iraq despite all the objections of the world. We already know that many actors in the world will be disturbed by our forming such alliances with Iraqi Kurdistan, but why is Ali Bulaç disturbed by it? If he fears being beaten so much, why does he say he is an Islamist? Does being an Islamist mean obtaining a guarantee against being beaten? I would remind him that there can be no such guaranteed Islamism.

Bulaç characterizes not only the Northern Iraq matter but nearly every courageous initiative of Turkey, its independent politics, its attempt to stand on its own feet and advance, as a kind of overstepping of its bounds. It is as though he would almost recommend that we inform the global "authority holders" of every investment we are going to make and every policy we are going to undertake.

What, for example, does this mean, in Bulaç's words: "Turkey's breaking away from the Western system and approaching Russia is 'an option,' but Russia will not give Turkey the green light in spite of America and the West"? Since when does Bulaç think that Turkey should take every step it takes by taking America and the West into such great consideration? And besides, what would be left of a Turkey that does all this? Would the Islamist Ali Bulaç be proud of such a Turkey?

There are many parts of his writings where we would ask where to even begin correcting. For example, that we failed to read the situation in Egypt or in the Arab Spring and lost Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria alike. What would the right reading have been, I wonder? Should we have sent a congratulation delegation to Sisi as soon as the coup happened so as not to lose him? Should we have continued our relations with Assad as if nothing had happened despite all his massacres?

He says, "Since 2011, Turkey's 'defying the patron who gives it work' has brought trouble not only on itself but on Syria and Egypt as well." With this he in fact reveals how all his analyses against the AK Parti from the very start rest on an incorrigible ill-suspicion, and that for this reason he in fact could see and understand nothing. Treating international relations with the simplicity of one country giving work to another has nothing illuminating about it, and it also takes him miles away from the line of sincere self-criticism he announced at the outset.

While criticizing Turkey for all its openings in recent years that should in fact make it proud as an Islamist, the only advice that sticks or will stick in the mind is that Turkey should continue to regard the US or the West as its patron again and never step out of line with them. Above all, this country should not go making peace with the Kurds and the Arabs, forming good relations, and trying to become some sort of power. In fact I could not bring myself to say it either, but Orhan Miroğlu has named it most aptly: New Orientalism.

Perhaps it is a surprise that the actor of this new Orientalism is Ali Bulaç or the Hizmet movement. But life is full of surprises, and each of these surprises comes before us as a trial.

And besides, do they not say that Westerners will cause us trouble because of this dynamic foreign policy of Turkey? I wonder whether they think we do not see that the troubles said to be caused for us are themselves. Come on, if you would just step out of the way, there is nobody else to hold Turkey back anyway?