Brights News Feed

Abdullah Gul has been elected to the Turkish presidency by parliament today.

His candidacy provoked military threats and mass secular protest back in April. He has said that he will not contravene the country’s secular constitution, and he has won kudos in Europe during negotiations for Turkey’s EU membership, but secular opposition and many secularist campaigners remain unconvinced that the new President Gul will not use his powers of veto in the direction of an Islamist agenda.

Only time will tell…

(See Guardian, Al Jazeera.)

The Independent calls Hrant Dink “the 1,500,001st victim of the Armenian genocide”.

An educated and generous journalist and academic - editor of the weekly Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos - he tried to create a dialogue between the two nations to reach a common narrative of the 20th century’s first holocaust. And he paid the price: two bullets shot into his head and two into his body by an assassin in the streets of Istanbul yesterday afternoon.

Turkey has been struggling to change the perception of itself, with the EU demanding that it relax censorial laws before it can enter the Union. Writers like Hrant Dink himself have previously been accused and found guilty of the crime of “insulting Turkishness”. The nationalists who are in all probability behind the assassination may at the same time have dealt a further blow to Turkey’s bid to join the EU.

The German interior minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has suggested that the German EU presidency, together with the European Commission, should train its Imams to improve the integration of the continent’s Muslim population, calm tensions and fight “home-grown terrorism”.

“Part of the Islamic world has yet to implement the Enlightenment,” said Mr Schaeuble, referring to a European movement that in the 1600-1700s valued freedom and reason rather than tradition.

Read the rest of this entry »

After failing to get a reference to “God” in the preamble of the EU constitution, European bishops have set their sights on pushing a reference to Christianity into the EU’s 50 year anniversary declaration next year.

In a document released last week, the Commission of the Bishops Conferences of the European Community (COMECE) promotes its views on the content of the so-called Berlin Declaration - to be signed by EU leaders in March next year - marking the 50th birthday of the 1957 Treaty of Rome which laid the basis for the current European Union.

Read the rest of this entry »

The so-called “Islamic Iraqi state”, an alias of terror group “Al-Qaeda in Iraq”, - today published a statement online denouncing Josef Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) for his widely publicised visit to Turkey, saying:

This visit of the pope has the aim of preparing a Crusade against Muslim countries following the failure of Crusade heads such as Bush, Blair, Berlusconi and Howard to extinguish the flame of Islam lit by Muslim brothers in Turkey.

The pope’s trip is aimed, they say, at “cancelling Islamic tradition and cutting Islamic roots … to send them [Turkey] into the arms of the European Union and stop the Islamic wave.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Spanish socialist government on Friday said the state will no longer give money directly to the Roman Catholic Church (International Herald Tribune: “Spain reaches new accord on financing Catholic Church“). Previously, the government had provided an annual contribution to the church separate from voluntary donations from individual taxpayers.
Read the rest of this entry »

The EU constition was roundly rejected by French and Dutch voters last years, but although it’s out of sight it isn’t out of mind. European commissioners and politicians have been talking about how - or whether - to revive the treaty.

Now COMECE, a group of European bishops have decided to try and get in on the act by commissioning a high-profile group of thinkers to draft a report on the EU’s common values in an attempt to spark off a debate on whether a reference to Christianity should be included in a new text.

The experts group - consisting only of Roman Catholics - notably includes three members of the previous European Commission - Mario Monti, Franz Fischler and Loyola de Palacio - as well as Jacques Santer, who led the EU executive from 1995-1999 and former European Parliament president Pat Cox.

Read the rest of this entry »