Turkey threatens EU over membership

If a member of the public threatened your club, would you vote to let them join?

The Times reports "Turkish leader warns of terror wave if EU rejects membership".

RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN, the Turkish Prime Minister, has told European Union leaders that they will pay a heavy price in continued and escalating violence from Islamic extremists if the EU rejects Turkey as a member and confirms itself as a Christian club.

“Accepting a country that has brought together Islam and democracy will bring about harmony between civilisations. If, on the other hand, it is not welcomed, the world will have to put up with the present situation,” he said, referring to terrorism by such groups as al-Qaeda — whose local affiliates hit Turkey last year, bombing the British consulate and three other targets in Istanbul.

“That is the very clear and present danger and it is all around us today. There is nothing we can do if the EU feels that it can live with being simply a Christian club . . . but if these countries burn their bridges with the rest of the world, history will not forgive them.”

Mr Erdogan’s powerful warning came just days before the EU summit that will decide whether to start formal accession talks with Turkey and against a furious European debate about the effects of incorporating Turkey’s 70 million, mainly Muslim, population into the Union.

Victor Davis Hanson writes about the corner the EU has painted itself in.

Turkey's proposed entry into the EU has become some weird sort of Swiftian satire on the crazy relationship between Europe and Islam. Ponder the contradictions of it all. Privately most Europeans realize that opening its borders without restraint to Turkey's millions will alter the nature of the EU, both by welcoming in a radically different citizenry, largely outside the borders of Europe, whose population will make it the largest and poorest country in the Union — and the most antithetical to Western liberalism. Yet Europe is also trapped in its own utopian race/class/gender rhetoric. It cannot openly question the wisdom of making the "other" coequal to itself, since one does not by any abstract standard judge, much less censure, customs, religions, or values.

So it stews and simmers. Not to be outdone, some in Turkey dare the Europeans, almost in contempt, to reject their bid. Thus rather than evolving Attaturk's modernist reforms to match the values of Europe, the country is instead driven into the midst of an Islamic reactionary revival in which its rural east far more resembles Iraq or Iran than Brussels. So the world wonders whether Europe is sticking a toe into the Islamic Middle East or the latter its entire leg into Europe.


And he notes the Europeans are starting to wake up to the fact that there is a "fungus amungus".

Only now are Europeans discovering the disturbing nature of radical Islamic extremism, which thrives not on real grievance but on perceived hurts — and the appeasement of its purported oppressors. How odd that tens of millions of Muslims flocked to Europe for its material consumption, superior standard of living, and freedom and tolerance — and then chose not merely to remain in enclaves but to romanticize all the old pathologies that they had fled from in the first place. It is almost as if the killers in Amsterdam said, "I want your cell phones, unfettered Internet access, and free-spirited girls, but hate the very system that alone can create them all. So please let me stay here to destroy what I want."
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