Ibrahim
Kalin: Erdoğan's U.S.-Trained Enforcer
by Stephen Schwartz
Independent Journal Review
August 2, 2016
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[IJR title: "A U.S. College Helped Train Another 'Weaponized'
Servant for Islamist Ideology"]
A "weaponized academic" trained in the U.S. has risen to
become Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's "deputy
undersecretary and senior advisor," yet another servant for
Islamist ideology produced by the American Middle East studies industry.
Ibrahim Kalin received his doctorate in Middle
East Studies/Islamic Studies from George Washington University and is a
senior fellow with the Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for
Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) at Georgetown University. He
taught at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., from 2002 to
2005.
Kalin has served dutifully in his position since 2009, despite
Erdoğan's increasingly autocratic rule. He has been Erdoğan's main
spokesman in the aftermath of the failed military uprising in Turkey on
July 15. Within days of the July 15 insurrectionary attempt, Erdoğan
ordered the dismissal and/or arrests of tens
of thousands of officers, teachers, school administrators, judges,
and others suspected of disloyalty.
Most of the victims of Erdoğan's post-coup rage are charged, if only
informally by state media, with involvement in an alleged conspiracy
controlled from the U.S. by the Turkish Sufi Muslim Fethullah Gülen, who
lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania. Clamoring for compliance
from the U.S. in suppressing his ex-ally and opponent, the Turkish
president depends on Kalin to press the case.
By all accounts, Kalin has performed his function well. On July 19,
The Jerusalem Post described
the effort by Erdoğan's apparatus to induce the U.S. to extradite the
non-conforming cleric. The Israeli daily cited Kalin's comments, arguing
"If the U.S. insists on keeping [Gülen], people will start thinking
they are protecting him. A person can easily be extradited on the basis
of suspicion, and on this occasion there is a lot of suspicion that he
orchestrated this." Of course, Kalin lived in the U.S. long enough
that he should know that suspicion is insufficient to sustain a case for
Gülen's extradition to Turkey.
That same day, National Public Radio reported
that Kalin identified the anxieties of the Erdoğan clique as a
justification for the post-insurrection purge, saying "You have to
understand that we survived a coup — we could have been killed."
On July 24, the New York Times published
an op-ed in which Kalin again blamed Gülen and his movement for the
failed takeover and insisted on his extradition. Worse, he defended
Erdoğan's proclamation of a highly-questionable three-month state of
emergency and the arrests of thousands, including members of the military
and judiciary, which he claimed would make the Turkish government
"more transparent." Yet he ommited mention of the firing
of over 1,500 deans and thousands of educators across Turkey or reports
of torture and deprivation among those arrested.
Among Kalin's chief enablers in this sordid scheme is
Georgetown University's Islamic scholar John Esposito,
who boasts numerous ties with Kalin: founding director of ACMCU, where
Kalin is a senior fellow; co-editor with Kalin of Islamophobia: The
Challenges of Pluralism in the 21st Century (2011); and his role as a
key apologist for the Muslim Brotherhood, toward which the Erdoğan regime
has adopted a sympathetic posture.
That no one in academia has taken Kalin to task for defending the
repression of his country's educators is a telling indication of where
American Middle East Studies has arrived. As the enabler of Erdoğan in
the punishment of Turkish academics, Kalin has assumed a posture that ill
fits the professed ethics of the American academy, based supposedly on
fairness, objectivity, and respect for professional standing – which, of
course, are jettisoned when the Middle East is involved.
Kalin's American academic patrons should be ashamed at what they have
created: a man close to power, and distant from truth.
Stephen Schwartz, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is executive
director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism in Washington, DC. This
essay was sponsored by Campus
Watch, a project of the Middle
East Forum.
This
text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an
integral whole with complete and accurate information provided about its
author, date, place of publication, and original URL.
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