The group's ideology is Turkish racism, pure and simple. Their name, “Ergenekon,” comes from an ancient Central Asian myth about the heroic origins of the Turkish stock. (Like the Nazis, Turkish racists love pagan myths that grant them inherent grandeur and superiority.) One of their prominent members, retired colonel Fikri Karadağ, is reported to have gone mad with the fact the Education Minister, Hüseyin Çelik of the AKP cabinet, "“is a man whose mother is Kurdish and whose father is Arab."” The same Karadağ made the news about a year ago due to the secret oath of the “National Forces Society” he had founded in the southern city of Mersin. The group's members had to swear they were “of "pure Turkish stock,"” and that they would love to “"kill and be killed"” for their cause.

Apparently the group is responsible for some terrorist acts such as the bombing of the daily Cumhuriyet's offices and the assassination of the Council of State (“Danıştay”) top judge, Mustafa Ozbilgin. What is remarkable is that these 2006 attacks against overtly secular targets looked like, and were widely labeled as, “Islamist terrorism” at the time. Demonstrators hit the streets to protest the AKP government for “encouraging” this seemingly religion-inspired violence. But if the reported confessions of the Ergenekon folks are true, then it turns out that these acts were deliberate provocations to spark a secularist uproar against the so-called-Islamist-but-actually-Muslim-democrat AKP government. (Islamist terrorism does exist in the world, and is very lethal, but in Turkey political violence comes generally from Turkish or Kurdish nationalists or the extreme left, and hardly from religious conservatives.)

This crackdown is a good step, to be sure, but it won't be decisive if Ergenekon's highly probable links with higher positions in the state apparatus remain unearthed. These 33 musketeers make up probably not the brain of the fascist Leviathan we have, to borrow a term from Thomas Hobbes, but one of its arms. Whether we will ever catch the beast is the million-dollar question.

The Latest Round With Mr. Bekdil

Let me move on to another issue, which I would love to keep short, but grows unavoidably in its own dynamic: The cerebral tennis match between my dear colleague Burak Bekdil and myself.

Mr. Bekdil's column last Wednesday had a witty title: “"My To-Do List to Avert a Self-Hating Mustafa Akyol."” It was a pun on my Jan. 19 piece, “"The Trouble With Self-Hating Turks ."” There I had criticized the “"Western wannabes"” in this country “who are "either out of touch, or, far worse, at war with their own tradition.”" I added that it is actually such people who have the potential to turn me into a second generation self-hating Turk. In return, Mr. Bekdil jokingly said that he would go back to a totally traditional Turkish life in order to calm me down. He would cut eating pizzas, start smoking heavily and buy guns to fire at weddings.

But all those creative points miss my point. What I criticized was not cosmopolitanism, or even self-denial, but self-hatred. "“People have the right for cultural choice,"” I said, and all choices would be fine "“if they [were] not combined with contempt for, and discrimination against, traditional people.”"

Personally speaking, I, too, prefer sushi to kebab and espresso to Turkish coffee. Moreover, I continuously criticize the machismo and the lack of individualism in our traditional culture. I just find it ridiculous when self-hating Turks think that they will be free from such attitudes simply by eating sushi, sipping mojito and hating the mosque community.

On second a note, in his piece yesterday, Mr. Bekdil criticized me for saying that the ban on Turkish campuses is only about the headscarf, but not “Zionist/Buddhist/Christian/atheist” symbols as he termed them. He pointed out that the Constitutional Court has indeed banned all “religious symbols.” That still leaves out Mr. Bekdil's “Zionist” and “atheist” stuff, but thanks for his clarification. Yet still I should note that the 1989 decision of the Constitutional Court specifically mentioned the headscarf as something to be banned, not any other symbol.

Moreover, if Mr. Bekdil realizes that the ban, and thus its abolition, relates to all religious symbols, then why did he worry about Buddhist and Christian ones? No one is speaking of a freedom that will exclude those. For my part, I am willing to open the gates of Turkish universities to all Christians, Buddhists, Hindus or New Agers. I just find it bizarre when such extravagant examples are used to suppress the rights of millions of headscarf wearers. It is like asking the blacks of South Africa in the early 1990s, “"first tell me what you will do with the Chinese,"” in order to uphold the apartheid regime, while freedom would benefit them too.