Murder in Malatya

The murder of three Christians in Malatya, Turkey, is a crime that underscores the stakes of the war. The victims — identified in press accounts as Necati Aydin, 36; Ugur Yuksel, 32, and Tilmann Geske, 46, were two Turkish converts to Christianity from Islam and a German citizen. They were found in the office of their Bible publishing house, hand and feet bound, throats slit. Aydin was described in press accounts as the pastor of the 30-member Protestant community of Malatya. The German, Geske, according to the Associated Press, left a wife and two girls and a boy: Michal Janina, now age 13, Lukas, 10, and Miriam, 8.

Of the suspects in the murders, who are mostly ages 19 and 20, one, Muammer Özdemir, is the son of Vahap Özdemir, the mayor of Ayvali, according to a report in the Turkish daily Zaman. Another, Salih Guler, is from the nearby Malatya town of Dogansehir, where his father has been the muezzin at the central mosque for 30 years, according to a report in Hurriyet. Indications are, in other words, that it is going to be difficult for the Turks to try to pin this attack on the Syrians or the Kurds or other foreign fighters. Though the threat of violent Islamism is certainly a transnational one, in this case the attack appears to have been to a large degree homegrown. In February 2006, a 60-year-old Roman Catholic priest, Andrea Santoro, was shot in his church in the Black Sea port of Trabzon by a 16-year-old apparently motivated by Islamist religious fanaticism.

There is a reason that the freedom of religion is the first freedom in the Bill of Rights; it is a liberty that is fundamental. If one can't practice Christianity without fear of being murdered in Turkey, a NATO ally with ambitions to join the European Union and with a long history of official moderation thanks to the legacy of Ataturk, what hope is there for the rest of the Muslim world? It is a positive sign that the murders are being widely condemned by Turkish politicians and that a dozen suspects have been arrested and are being brought speedily to trial. But it is a sobering reminder, too, that what the enemy in the war is really upset about, at the core, is not the American liberation of Iraq or the Israeli settlements on the West Bank, but the existence of "infidels" in lands that were once Muslim. There is no appeasement of this enemy short of conversion to Islam, and no non-Muslim will be safe until victory is won.