Have you no sense of decency?

When Gareth Jenkins came to the United States to present his controversial report on the Ergenekon case, he was asked whether he could reconcile his views on the process with the existence of Dursun Cicek’s newly unearthed “plan to fight radicalism”, which included planting weapons in houses of Gulen Movement sympathizers. This was back in the days when the Chief of Staff called the plan document “a piece of paper” and Jenkins’ view of the document was expectedly similar. He did add, however, that one would need to be particularly stupid to draft such a plan. After all, he said, “one can say anything about the Gulen Movement, but nobody can claim that they are violent.”

Mr. Jenkins was right. Not about the authenticity of the Cicek document, of course. That has now been established by both civilian and military prosecutors. He was right about the fact that the Gulen Movement has never been associated with violence. After all, the volunteers of this movement established schools, so called “Gulen Schools“, in simmering pots of conflict, where violence was the only way warring factions communicated. In these schools they taught the children of fighting parents how to coexist in peace. They brought together the children of Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia, the children of Muslims and Christians in the Philippines, and children from various clans and factions in more than one hundred countries. In Turkey they brought together intellectuals from all walks of life in common platforms and discussion spaces. During the post-modern coup of February 28 they urged everyone to refrain from taking their anger onto the streets, lest they fall prey to provocations.

Clearly none of the above deterred the masterminds of the Cicek plan. Not only they drafted it, they also attempted to put it part of it in practice in Erzincan. For doubters, this highlighted again how irrational these destabilizing actors can be. Evidently, the idea was not stupid enough for them.

And neither was it for Soner Cagaptay, the Turkey expert of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. In his new barrage of articles in several media outlets, he states, quite provocatively, that “the the Erzincan prosecutor was investigating alleged connections between Gülenist fund raising and Chechen and Hamas terrorists.” Cagaptay is clearly smarter than the thugs that drafted the Cicek document. He knows the Western psyche all too well, and he is fully aware of the damage that such an allegation, its truthfulness notwithstanding, can cause. The peaceful nature of the Gulen Movement is known to friend and foe, and basically anyone that bothers to build an informed opinion about Gulen, his ideas, and the movement itself. But not to the ordinary American, who relies on the opinion of a handful of experts as regards international affairs.

As the editorial of Hurriyet Daily News wrote a while ago, he is a true master of the ‘East-West media management’. He pops an article in the Foreign Policy, followed by similar pieces by him or others in other outlets, and then, after enough of such ‘opinion pieces’ have appeared for enough time, proceeds to call the Gulen Movement “a shady Islamic Brotherhood”.

Cagaptay works for WINEP, the policy institute of AIPAC, one of the most aggressive representative organizations of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. As such, one does not expect him to produce analysis or policy recommendations that are in the best interest of Turkey. Or in the best interest of the United States, for that matter. His analysis has to be, by definition, in the best interest of the Israeli lobby. That is the job he is paid to do.

Having said that, one still can’t help marveling at the levity with which Cagaptay makes the worst of allegations about honest, hard-working people devoted to peace and dialogue between cultures and civilizations. These are the education volunteers that have risked their lives in countries with horrible security conditions, with no one to trust but God and their good hearts. These are the youngsters that graduated from the best schools in Turkey and went on to become teachers in countries whose native sons wanted nothing more than to leave for greener pastures. These are the sons and daughters of Turkey who went to places their parents couldn’t even find on the map, and spent months without pay, bringing education to children otherwise condemned to poverty, violence and ignorance.

Making such allegations, in cold blood, over such people, is a new low for Cagaptay. There is no better way to describe one’s feelings than the words of Joseph Welch to Senator McCarthy in that famous hearing: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you no sense of decency left?”