ANKARA, Turkey -- Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and several conspiracy-themed books depicting Turkey as under attack by American and European influences sell briskly in local bookstores. Turkey's $10 million movie "Valley of Wolves," the most expensive to date, vilifying Christians and Jews pulls in record crowds. A 28-year-old lawyer shoots a secularist judge to death inside Turkey's High Court. The Islamic and far-right press is filled with stories of missionaries within Turkish borders converting "defenseless" Muslims to "infidels."
Masked by Turkey's 80-year Kemalist embrace of secularism, these recent trends reflect a hard fact: Beneath the surface of the West's most crucial ally in the Muslim world, a dismaying anti-Western blend of political Islam and nationalism is blossoming. A series of recent patriotic shows of force -- including angry mobs protesting the arrival of Pope Benedict or deriding Elif Shafak for "insulting Turkishness" in a growing chorus for restriction of freedom of speech -- have revealed an increasing backlash in Turkey towards Western values. Even as Turkey aspires to join the European Union, the current administration led by the pro-Islamic Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made several attempts to roll back Turkey's brand of draconian secularism: criminalization of adultery, passage of punitive taxes on the wine industry, and decriminalization of Hezbollah-backed Quran courses were but a few items on the administration's agenda as recently as 2005. ...
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