Turkey: Gingrich’s odd embrace of a secularist

Mustafa Akyol

Hürriyet

Newt Gingrich professes to revere modern Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, said Mustafa Akyol. He has frequently written about Atatürk and held him up as a model statesman, to the point where the Atatürk Society of America gave Gingrich an award in 2006 in “commemoration of his contributions to publicizing Atatürk’s legacy.” But does the Republican presidential hopeful really understand that legacy? Atatürk was “the greatest and the strictest secularist” in our entire region. He defied the will of his people to create a state free of religious interference, even banning religious garb in the workplace.

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In the U.S., Gingrich considers secularism “a nightmare” and an abomination. “A country that has been, since 1963, relentlessly in the courts driving God out of public life shouldn’t be surprised at all the problems we have,” Gingrich says on the campaign trail. He claims that “anti-religious bigotry” is responsible for a decline in American morals.

So how can Gingrich hold up as a hero the “militantly secular founder of a European one-party state?” The answer can only be that he favors secularism not for Christians but for Muslims, as a bulwark against what he sees as “creeping sharia.” The “obvious double standard” puts the lie to Gingrich’s claims of being an intellectual.