By State Representative Dave Belton (R-Buckhead)
Eight years after we elected the president who was going to “heal the nation” and bring us “hope and change,” little has changed that isn’t for the worse. The most recent attack, which seems to happen nearly weekly at this point, is especially poignant since it occurred in France, who is our oldest ally and a country which has suffered three substantial massacres in the past year. Days later, there’s a coup in Turkey mere months after another attack on the Ataturk Airport in Istanbul. Thanks to our mishandling of the “Arab Spring,” Egypt is no longer an ally and we all know what happened in Benghazi, Libya. Millions of Syrians are pouring into Europe and America, and Iraq is facing more bloodshed than ever. The world is literally unraveling before our eyes because of the lack of American leadership.
I’ve actually strolled down that very same crowded street in Nice for Bastille Day many years ago. That memory is now very bittersweet for me as I remember the faces of the delighted children eating ice cream and watching fireworks. I hope you’ll remember that we could not have won our American Revolution without the help of France, who, like ourselves, is a Republic who rejected their monarchy a few years after we did. In fact, France is the only major European nation we have not been at war with. The fact that yet another radical Islamic terrorist attack happened on Bastille Day, which is likened to the Fourth of July, is onerous and grotesque.
It is worth noting that for over a thousand years, before Turkey was eventually conquered by Islamic invaders in a conflict that lasted about 700 years, the city of Istanbul was called Constantinople and was the center of half of Christianity for about half of the time Christianity has been around. It should also be noted that the airport where the bombing occurred a month ago is named for Mustafa Ataturk, the military hero who united Turkey and made it into a modern nation and a member of NATO after the Ottoman Empire’s defeat during WWI. His revolutionary reforms in education, civil rights (especially for women) and the creation of a government where all religions were welcome have sadly disappeared in the decades that followed due to the corrosive influence of radical Islamic extremism.
I spent about half of my first tour in the Navy flying around Turkey, a country that was once one of our most important NATO ally against the USSR. Back then, it was a prosperous country with wonderful people who were very tolerant and westernized. Istanbul is literally juxtaposed on the crossroads between Europe and Asia on the Bosphorus Straits in a place that is called “the Golden Horn.” It’s because of its alliance to NATO and the tolerance it has championed that for the last 60 years that Istanbul has been attacked over a dozen times in the past few years, especially with the recent government that has shifted towards radical Islamic policies, which is the real cause of the failed coup.
I do not support military coups, but I am astonished that the media allows Turkish President Erdogan to blame his troubles on a harmless political refugee in America. It reminds me of “Big Brother” in 1984 accusing a fictional Emanuel Goldstein for the woes of the nation. The former imam in question is Fethullah Gulen, a progressive Muslim in self-imposed exile who says that Islam should be tolerant, that women should “absolutely not (be) confined to their homes and…never oppressed,” that terrorism “has no place in Islam” and who openly supports the destruction of ISIS. In short, he is one of the few voices in Islam that is actually promoting peace. Erdogan, on the other hand, is the “good guy” according to the lemmings in our media, and is commonly called a “dictator” for his blatant over-reach of executive powers and is famous for his religious intolerance, curtailing of women’s rights, serious allegations that he sold weapons to ISIS, electoral fraud, human rights violations, locking up journalists and his goal of creating a new religious Ottoman caliphate. He’s already bragging about his “cleansing operations” where he’s rounding up over 3,000 judges for some reason. The only reason to arrest judges, who had nothing to do with the military coup, would be to appoint new judges that will go along with his march to even greater power.
This is how democracy dies. Coups and terrorism don’t happen in a vacuum. Western civilization needs to unite against Islamic radicals who want to take the world back to the middle ages.
Patrick Henry once said, “Gentlemen cry, peace, peace: but there is no peace. The war is actually begun.” We, the sons and daughters of liberty, are undeniably engaged in a world war…and yet we have no plans to ever win it.
Representative Dave Belton represents the citizens of District 112, which includes all of Morgan County and the eastern side of Newton County. He was elected into the House of Representatives in 2014, and currently serves as a member of the Economic Development & Tourism, Education, and Interstate Cooperation committees.
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