Turkey lobbies to criminalize criticism of Islamic extremism in Europe

The most recent edition of an annual report on so-called ” Islamophobia” in Europe, produced with the backing of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, indicates that Ankara has found a group of American and European scholars and activists willing to promote Islamic extremist propaganda and misinformation in Europe.

IslamismNews The 2020 edition of the European Islamophobia Report, (EIR), published by the Leopold Weiss Institute and its academic partners in December 2021, features French president Emmanuel Macron on its cover – a consequence, it seems, of his government’s counter-Islamic extremist efforts (which Erdoğan has repeatedly denounced).

The report, co-edited by Enes Bayrakli, an international relations professor at Istanbul-based Turkish-German University, and Farid Hafez, an Austrian academic said to be close to the Muslim Brotherhood,  is yet another attempt to weaponize “Islamophobia” and advance Turkish regime interests by opposing counter-Islamic extremist through the pretense of defending ordinary Muslims and by conflating genuine anti-Muslim violence with legitimate counter-terrorism efforts.

The definition of Islamophobe has now been expanded to include Muslims themselves: “it is therefore irrelevant if the person that re- produces Islamophobic structures, is himself or herself Muslim or not.”

While promoting their report in past years, EIR editors have even called for the criminalization of Islamophobia, which by their definition appears to include criticism of Turkey’s ruling party. The 2020 report, for instance, notes Albanian media criticism of a proposed law put before the Turkish parliament that, if passed, would have allowed rapists to avoid prosecution if they c

Each chapter offers a detailed chronology of “Islamophobic” events as well as “country-specific policy recommendations to counter this phenomenon.”

Reports from previous years defined Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism (what ‘race’ is Islam?), further describing Islamophobes as “a dominant group of people aiming at seizing, stabilising and widening their power by means of defining a scapegoat – real or invented – and excluding this scapegoat from the resources/rights/definition of a constructed ‘we.’”

This change is aimed at not just reformist Muslims active in the West, whom Islamic extremist groups and their fellow travelers have increasingly attacked as “anti-Muslim” in recent years, but also Muslim-majority states that have cracked down on Islamic extremists.

For example, EIR editor Enes Bayrakli has expressed concern about  “some ‘Muslim’ countries like the United Arab Emirates (UAE) financially [supporting] anti-Muslim circles.” And Hatem Bazian, head of EIR’s partner, the Islamophobia Studies Center in Berkeley, California, recently accused Muslim-majority states, including the UAE and Morocco, of “utilizing a form of Islamophobia by trying to draft or craft the good Muslim from bad Muslim.” While Bazian does not, of course, use the term ‘Islamist.’ he evidently holds the view that opposing Islamism is a form of Islamophobia.

A similar logic permeates the EIR. In the French section, for example, the authors suggest that France “recognize Islamophobia as a specific form of racism and fight it adequately in all spheres,” which apparently means “abandoning” counter-Islamic terrorism legislation “since it overly targets and criminalizes French Muslims.”

The French authors’ policy recommendations for the European Union (EU) include the suggestion that it “assess and acknowledge the discriminatory impact of counter-radicalization and counter-terrorism measures.  In 2017, the keynote was given by the then Turkish Minister of European Union Affairs, Omer Celik, who denounced “Islamophobia” as a “cultural racism” that “badly affects the lives of European Muslims.”

As every EIR presentation apparently necessitates the presence of a high-ranking Turkish official, the speech at the 2018 event was given by the Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlut Cavusoglu. This presentation marked the beginning of a more aggressive tone towards Europe – perhaps as retaliation for the EU’s decision to stop funding the EIR. According to the Turkish state-run Anadolu Agency, Cavusoglu “urged European countries to include Islamophobia as a crime in their constitution, without waiting for a Holocaust-like situation to unfold,” and accused European politicians and media of using “non-existing terminologies such as ‘Islamism.’”

Given the heavy influence of Ankara and its officials, it should not come as a surprise that the EIR has consistently tried to include anti-Turkish sentiments as examples of such “Islamophobia.” Year after year, concerns over anti-Turkey reactions have been expressed in EIR chapters, with examples from countries once part of the Ottoman empire particularly highlighted.

While the EIR claims to offer a “unique collection of […] analyses,” it has, in reality, been nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Turkish regime and its European and American Islamist partners. Its shifting definition of Islamophobes to include Muslims confirms that it will continue to misuse genuine examples of violence committed against Muslims in order to decredibilize anti-Islamist efforts and any concerns about malign Turkish regime influence in the West.