Obama's Favorite 'Ally' Turkey: "Finally we can pray at the opera".

                        I wonder what Kemal Ataturk would have said of this 'performance'?


Obama's Favorite 'Ally' Turkey: "Finally we can pray at the opera".(AM).Ankara - The "quasi-war" with Syria is not the only development keeping commentators and analysts busy in Turkey. The new "prayer war at the opera" has put the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's nationalist Islamist AKP party on a collision course with intellectuals and supporters of the secular state. A leading article by the author Ahmet Altan in the progressive daily newspaper Taraf lit the blue touch-paper. "Finally we can pray at the opera," he rejoiced sarcastically. "What a relief, we will be able to pray in the interval of Don Giovanni!". In the firing line is a law bill pushed through by the Ministry of the Environment and Urban Planning, which, according to Hurriyet, rules that a "masjid", a small mosque or prayer room, will need to be built in shopping centres, wedding halls, cinemas, theatres, museums, schools, hospitals, public buildings, ports, airports, hotels, university residences, underground stations and even at the opera. 
The battle against prayers at the opera has become a symbol of the resistance against the "hidden agenda" of "re-Islamisation" of the country that is attributed to Erdogan by the left and by "Kemalists" - defenders of the secular nature of the state, towards which the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, dedicated his efforts. "Have you ever heard a devout Muslim say that he would not be able to practice his religion if a prayer room were not built at the opera?" asks Altan, attacking the AKP government's latest manifestation of overzealousness.
"Has Muslim history seen any heated debates on the importance of prayer rooms in lyric theatres? Will audiences think about their prayers as they are watching the ballerinas in Swan Lake?" The war on prayers at the opera is just the latest episode in a long battle by secular forces that began when Erdogan became the AKP leader in 2002.
While the last ten years have brought Turkey an unprecedented economic boom, the Islamist government has lifted the ban on girls attending university wearing the Islamic veil, launched an education reform that allows youngsters to enter "imam hatip" (schools for preachers) as they leave primary school and has built new mosques across the country.
Censorship is growing, according to the Association of Publishers. In the Turkey of the "neo-Sultan" Erdogan, who has said that he wants to create new generations that live in fear of God, other signs are worrying western diplomats, such as the 100 jailed journalists or the recent accusations against the world-famous pianist Fazil Say, whose ironic comments on Twitter about muezzins and Islamic paradise mean that he is at risk of an 18-month prison sentence for "offending the religious values of part of the population".Read the full story here.