Rather to my embarrassment, I find that I missed last night’s episode of the BBC2 three-part series on The Ottomans, Europe’s Muslim Conquerors, in which I briefly featured. So Heaven knows what I actually said in it; it’s been a while since filming. But I’m rather hoping that the point I wanted to get across did, viz, that it’s nuts, barking mad, insane, away with the fairies, for Britain to be agitating for Turkey to be part of the EU. On David Cameron’s last visit to Turkey in 2010, he expressed anger at the delay in Turkey’s admission to the Union and blamed opponents for playing on fears of Islam in order to advance their case. Which more or less mirrors the rhetoric from Labour on the same subject. Turkey=moderate Islam in the Foreign Office view of things, so embracing Turkey is a means of promoting the kind of Islam we like rather than the sort we don’t, with happy consequences at home.
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