I noticed this most evidently in his August 24 piece (“Pure, honest, 100% Tayyip Erdoğan”) in which he not only attacked the Prime Minister, but also argued that he is “reminiscent of the days of Adnan Menderes and Adolf Hitler, both of who rose to power as a result of free elections and were hugely popular while in power.”

Menderes and Hitler?!

Excuse me for being so blunt, but this is totally absurd. Equating Menderes and Hitler is an outrageous vilification. We know who Hitler is. He was the mastermind of a Holocaust, a world war, and death and agony of millions of people. He was simply evil incarnate.

Menderes, on the other hand, was the elected prime minister of Turkey, who ruled Turkey peacefully between 1950-60. He killed no body, he started no wars, and he established no concentration camps. He rather fostered economic development and made Turkey a part of the free world. According to Time magazine, which ran a cover story about him in 1958, he did so much progress in the country that he deserved the title, “Adnan the Builder.”

Yet still there have always been Menderes-haters in Turkey, and they are divided roughly into two groups: The political left hate him for making Turkey an American ally, a NATO member, and an abode of capitalism. The ultra-secularists hate him for lifting the ban on Arabic call for prayer (the Muslim “ezan”) and for softening the state's pressure on Islamic orders and communities. In his later years Menderes showed autocratic tendencies — such as censorship in the media — but these are minor issues when compared with the single-party dictatorship that preceded him and the cruel military junta which executed him and two of his ministers in 1961.

So, no fair analyst would even imagine a parallelism with Menderes and Hitler. In fact Turkey has no equivalent of Hitler, but if we look for reflections of Nazi ideology in Turkish political history, we can well find them not in Menderes and his political line, but in the Kemalist regime of the 30's and 40's, which officially toyed with theories of biological racism — something which I have never heard Mr. Bekdil speaking about.

An impending exodus?

Although Mr. Bekdil seems to be fond of Menderes-bashing, his main target is the AKP and its leadership. Of course Mr. Erdoğan and Mr. Gül deserve criticism like all politicians do, but Mr. Bekdil's recent attacks go beyond the point of reasonability.

Take his interpretation of the recent controversy between Mr. Erdoğan and Hürriyet columnist Bekir Coşkun, for example. Mr. Coşkun is a fierce critique of the AKP, and he recently wrote that if Mr. Gül became elected as president, he would not recognize him. In return, Erdoğan said in a TV interview that if Mr. Coşkun would not recognize the country's legitimate head, he should abandon Turkish citizenship for look a new home. That was, to be sure, a wrong and excessive reaction by the prime minister. No wonder his office released a comment two days later which softened his rhetoric.

Many columnists in the Turkish press have been criticizing Erdoğan for this incident, and that's all welcome. Yet in his aforementioned piece Mr. Bekdil is exaggerating the issue and is claming that Mr. Erdoğan proposes “the modern history's biggest exodus” by dreaming to expel all those who did not vote for him. The problem is not only that this is a gross misreading, but it also ignores the litany of taunts made by Turkey's ultra-secularists against its practicing Muslims. Just a year ago, the ex-president (and ever-lasting political guru) Süleyman Demirel suggested that the ladies in headscarves should “go to Arabia” if they wish to have education. Bekir Coşkun himself repeated the same destination pointing to the Erdoğan and Gül families and millions of other conservative households in his column. “They should get on camels,” he said, “and all ride to Arabia.”

What I make from all these is that in Turkey we haven't yet understood the principle of pluralism. Instead of showing each other the door, we should accept to be a multi-colored nation of practicing and non-practicing Muslims, Christians and atheists, leftists and rightist. The binding principle should be tolerance.

Of dogmas and ‘taqiyya'

Actually Mr. Bekdil seems to agree with that liberal approach in most of his writings. Yet when he starts speaks about the headscarf, he accuses the Muslim women who wear it for “assuming that every man who sees a piece of female hair would be sexually seduced” and lashes at “the worldview behind that dogmatic faith.” But who said that all headscarved ladies assume that? Most of them wear it because they wish to obey what they see as the commandment of God, regardless of the opinions of men. And if that is “dogmatic,” so be it. Every religion — including the secular ones such as humanism — requires a leap of faith.

The problem is not believing in dogmas but presenting them as facts and turning them into political axioms. And that's what Mr. Bekdil seems to do with his unfaltering conviction in the existence of “taqiyya.” This fancy Islamic term refers to the mainly Shiite practice of hiding one's real faith and opinion for political considerations. Since Turkey's ultra-secularists learned about this term in the 80's, they vehemently argue that any step by Turkey's devout Muslims toward moderation is such a hypocritical tactic.

This “theory of taqiyya,” which Mr. Bekdil repeatedly refers to, is an “unfalsifiable” idea, to use a term coined by political philosopher Karl Popper. What this means is that the person accused with “taqiyya” can never falsify that. The more he rejects the accusation that he is willing to destroy the secular republic, the more the ultra-secularists become convinced about the imagined conspiracy he supposedly cooks up. It is like believing that all top politicians are freemasons; the fact they deny this would only prove how effectively the secret brotherhood works.

It is a pity that such an immature paranoia is shared not only by the superficial demagogues of secular fundamentalism, but also otherwise reasonable and sophisticated minds like Mr. Bekdil. I am sure he can do better than that.