Turkey's New President: Gul or Ghoul?

A ghoul in Islamic folklore is a demon that eats buried bodies, abducts children, and attacks unwary travelers. The new president of Turkey, Abdullah Gul, may not be that kind of monster, but he is a determined Islamist who will instead abduct Turkey's secularism, bury its democracy, and attack fellow travelers next door in Europe.

Indeed what happened with Tuesday's election of Mr. Gul, a leader steeped in political Islam, as Turkey's first nonsecular president in some 60 years, gave the ongoing Islamicization of Europe a huge boost.

The former foreign minister received a majority of votes from a Parliament dominated by his Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP). Add this domination to the fact that the country's prime minister is equally committed to political Islam, and it can no longer be argued that Turkey is firmly held by determined secularists.

The post of president yields enormous influence in Turkey. As commander in chief of its military and with the power to appoint ministerial, gubernatorial, and educational authorities, Mr. Gul can and will shape Turkey in the Islamist image he espoused much of his political life.

This takeover at the gates of Europe comes at a time the Islamist noose is tightening elsewhere. European citizens who are also militant Islamists in Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, and Scandinavia, among other places, have been hard at work carving out political space at the expense of secular values.

U.N. statistics show the Islamic population in Europe grew more than a 100%, to 14 million between 1989 and 1998, with concentrations varying between 5% and 10% of the population in such key countries as Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy. If those populations were joining the melting pot, their presence would not be an issue. Instead, they opt, with growing activism, to bring about the social alterations necessary for Islamicizing Europe.

Saudi-funded mosques and religious academies, sprouting from London to Cologne, complement the encirclement. All over the European continent, laws accommodate a creeping theology of Islam. As seen in the episode of the political cartoons depicting Muhammad in Denmark and the international protests against the Pope's anti-Islam pronouncement by Europe's new Muslims, freedom of expression is curtailed. Secular educational curricula are revised to erase science and history that may offend Islam.

With its 80 million people and huge military and strategic significance, an Islamicized Turkey will lend a huge momentum to such assaults.

In his first address after his swearing-in, Mr. Gul asserted that he would redouble his efforts to make Turkey part of the European Union. Thanks to sturdy opposition from France under President Sarkozy — one of the few leaders who see the mounting peril — this is not imminent. Still, Turkey now represents a bridgehead to the Islamists who are assaulting the fortress of Europe from the inside.

Earlier this year, this column called for the Turkish army to step in via a coup. More than ever, this intervention is now imperative. The Turkish army is the country's defender of the nation's secularist doctrine. Secularism in Turkey is the foundation of its prosperity and modernization. Lest we forget, Turkey did not get where it is riding the ghouls of Islam but rather by being liberated from them by Mustafa Kemal Attaturk after the Ottoman Empire collapsed. Political Islam will destroy Turkey as surely as Attaturk's secularism built it up.

The useful idiots of Islamic fundamentalism who push the tired argument that Prime Minister Erdogan and the AKP Party are the guardians of Turkey's economic progress overlook the actual history: The country has spent a decade growing its economy because it followed International Monetary Fund prescriptions for privatization and fiscal responsibility. Such concepts are not an Islamic monopoly. Pro-business policies certainly will continue under the new Turkish administration and be guided by the global economy of which Turkey is now a part. But only the Turkish army can guarantee protection against what is sure to be an assault by the Islamist troika now in power.

That is why Turkey's army must now step in: to protect real democracy.