Avoid this one in Istanbul, it honours an antisemitic Nazi supporter
By David E. Kaplan
What is it about Turkey these days that from being one of the most popular tourist destinations for Israelis, where hoteliers and restaurateurs in its tourist hotspots spoke Hebrew to welcome Israeli visitors in their multitudes, has turned not only anti-Israel but antisemitic?
The latest disturbing action – mostly ignored by the international media – was in November 2020, when the Istanbul metropolitan municipality named a park after a notorious antisemite – Hüseyin Nihal Atsız (1905–1975). The park – following a request made by members of İyi Parti (the Good Party) – is located in Istanbul’s Köyiçi region of Maltepe district, where Atsız spent most of his life.
What is “good” about this decision?
As much of the pre-Corona Western world made headlines of crowds storming statues and ripping them off their proverbial pedestals for their racist pasts, the Turks are fine with naming a park after someone who wrote in 1934:
“As the mud will not be iron even if it is put into an oven, the Jew cannot be Turkish no matter how hard he tries.”
While the world media dissected the controversial pasts of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and even Abraham Lincoln, they ignore the Turkish nationalist writer, novelist, poet, historian and philosopher who also wrote that:
“Turkishness is a privilege; it is not granted to everyone, especially to those like Jews…If we get angry, we will not only exterminate Jews like the Germans did, we will go further…”
How much “further” could they “go”? To name a park in Istanbul after a man who wants to compete with the Nazis as to how to treat or deal with Jews?
Apparently we should not be surprised according to Dr. Nikos Michailidis,Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and an expert on Turkey, who earlier this month told The Jerusalem Post that:
“It’s not shocking for those who know Turkey well that Ekrem Imamoglu, the supposedly ‘social democrat’ Mayor of Istanbul, supported and approved a bill to name a park in the city after a prominent ultra-nationalist writer and Nazi sympathizer. Turkish ultra-nationalist and supremacist ideology is not a marginal phenomenon, but rather the mainstream.”
He goes on to say that “With the exception of the pro-Kurdish HDP, and some liberal as well as a few social democrat politicians, all the other parties in the Turkish parliament are inspired – to different degrees – by openly racist ideologies.”
Madness – Marginal to Mainstream
If for years Atsiz’s haircut resembled Hitler’s, his rhetoric mirrored the Nazi leader’s genocidal antisemitism.
Some of the other tirades documented from Hüseyin Nihal Atsiz include:
- “The Jew here is like the Jew we see everywhere. Insidious, insolent, malevolent, cowardly, but opportunistic Jew; the Jewish neighborhood is the center of clamor, noise and filth here as [the Jewish neighborhoods] everywhere else… We do not want to see this treacherous and bastard nation of history as citizens among us anymore.”
- “The creature called the Jew in the world is not loved by anyone but the Jew and the ignoble ones… Phrases in our language such as ‘like a Jew’, ‘do not act like a Jew’, ‘Jewish bazaar’, ‘to look like a synagogue’… shows the value given by our race to this vile nation.””
So Jews are a “vile nation” to a man Turkey sees fit to name a park after!
This not only happened in the 1930s; this happened in 2020!
According to the late Prof. Jacob M. Landau of the Hebrew University’s Department of Political Science, “Atsiz was a great admirer of the race theories of Nazi Germany, expressing some of them repeatedly in his works during the 1930s and 1940s.”
Bad enough as Atsiz was as a product of his time, far more worrying is that he has no shortage of fans today in modern-day Turkey. Evidence of this is the annual commemorative ceremonies held in his honour attracting members from a number of political parties and now – a park in Istanbul!
Dr. Efrat Aviv, a senior lecturer in the Dept. of Middle Eastern Studies at Bar-Ilan University and a research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies reveals:
“Atsız wrote several articles accusing Jews of unrestrained greed and national disloyalty, and of being communist and cosmopolitan at the same time. Atsız labeled Jews and communists Turkey’s two main rivals, and claimed in an issue of Orhun published in November 1933 that “Germany has become the first country to solve the Jewish problem.” In 1944, he wrote that Jews are the secret enemy of all nations.”
The danger of Atsiz’s poison pen moved beyond imaginings to the real, reminiscent of the insightful quote of Heinrich Heine that:
“Wherever they burn books, in the end will also burn human beings.”
Motivated by the writings of Atsız and other antisemitic authors,continues Aviv, “Turks targeted the Jews of eastern Thrace in pogroms from June 21 through July 4, 1934, collectively known as the “Thrace Incidents”. The pogroms began with a boycott of Jewish businesses and descended to physical attacks on Jewish-owned buildings, which were first looted, then set on fire. Jewish men were beaten and some Jewish women reportedly raped. Terrorized by this turn of events, many Jews fled the region.”
When asked by the Post what can be done about Turkey’s glorification of Atsız and its disturbing direction, Dr. Nikos Michailidis suggested:
“primarily through extensive sanctions and with the use of other innovative diplomatic, economic, educational and cultural tools, the EU and the US can design and implement policies for the ‘de-Nazification’ of the Turkish political system and its irredentist, nationalist ideology.”
However, how likely is this to happen when as Michailidis notes that while the EU and the US rightly criticize and oppose the rise of Nazi ideologies in European countries, “they fail to raise the same criticism when it comes to Turkey, a NATO member-state and once an aspiring candidate for EU membership.”
They are also not helped by a global press that is rather reticent on Turkey’s disturbing direction.
If the message that Turkey sends to Jews is to honour those today that pride on killing Jews of yesterday, then maybe the message Jews can send to Turkey is – AVOID IT!
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