Some time ago I wrote about Metin Kaplan, the ‘Caliph of Cologne’, and the attempts of the Keystone Kommisare to pack him off to his Turkish homeland. As I learned from Abiola Lapite this morning, they have finally succeeded. Kaplan has been flown to Istanbul and today stands before a Turkish court. (See here and hier.)
It will prove scant comfort to Kaplan, I suspect, that Turkey now has an ‘Islamist’ government.
This doesn’t, Mrs T, have much to do with the point at issue here. Going over to Abiola on your link I found this of yours on another post:
“I’ve often wondered …..why the Germans, more than any other people I can think of, have such a variety of names in non-German tongues.”
It may interest you to know that the morpheme german is of course related to ‘germans’, or brothers in Catalan, hermanos in Spanish.
Now having seen the latest Tony Scott film (the underrated brother: Pekinpah is back) last night, where the key reference was to the clandestine police syndicate ‘La Hermandad’, maybe I can help you think of yet another linguistically related association.
Abdullah Ocalan is awaiting his new cell mate as we speak. The Marxist Atheist and the Islamic Fundamentalist would make great cell mates wouldn’t they.
On the Islamist government, I suspect this is a painless way to burnish their secular credentials.
Oh, I don’t know, Serf. I’d give the Erdogan government more credit than that. This isn’t just a matter of ‘burnishing credentials’; they really despise Kaplan and all he stands for (and fair play to them for it).
There’s Islamism, and then there’s Islamism. Erdogan’s sort is very different to Kaplan’s, you know. I think Erdogan hits the nail pretty much on the head when he describes AK as ‘just like the Christian Democratic Union, except Muslim’.
Mind you, I think he’s being a bit hard on AK when he says that.
I don’t think that Erdogan is close to Kaplan in belief but he still has supporters who are. I believe him when he says his radical days are over and he wants to become the equivalent of the Christian Democrats. Its just that it will be a long haul to get there as he has many radical elements in his party.