Turkish TV host Gözde Kansu wore this dress on the air recently.
Far more revealing outfits show up on Sabado Gigante every weekend.
But the cleavage-baring keyhole proved to be too much for Turkey’s Islamist government. Its spokesman, Hüseyin Çelik, got hot and bothered and called an unspecified dress he saw on TV “extreme.”
Soon enough, there had been a firing.
Following Çelik’s remarks, it was revealed that the host in question was Gözde Kansu, who was taking part on the show “Veliaht” on the ATV station, and rumors spread that she had been fired.
The show’s producer, Caner Erdem, previously said nothing had been resolved, adding that Kansu might not take part in the program next week “due to her busy schedule.”
However, after discussions between the channel and the producer, Kansu’s dismissal was confirmed on Oct. 8.
Turkey’s government denies that it got Kansu fired over her dress, but that denial doesn’t fly.
Celik knows what “unacceptable” means; he knew that Kansu was on ATV television, which belongs to a company called Calik Holding; and he knew that Calik’s chief executive officer is Erdogan’s son-in-law, Berat Albayrak. There is no coincidence or unintended consequence here. Celik wants to re-engineer Turkish TV.
There are plenty of other pointers about the depth of the government’s commitment to “democratization,” such as the repeated tightening of restrictions on the sale of alcohol, frowned upon by devout Muslims; the routine prosecuting and jailing of journalists; and the crushing of dissent in the Gezi Park protests earlier this year.
Turkey was once the secular example among Muslim-majority nations, as the United States was the example of secular representative republican governance to the entire world. Now Turkey is sliding toward Islamism in every way. As I’ve written before, the violent head-chopping, mall attacking, 9-11 inspiring jihad and its anti-cleavage cousin are parts of the same religious revival that is sweeping across Islam. It’s not a reaction to any US foreign policy, it’s not a reaction to anything that we have done. Our chickens have not come home to roost, no matter what Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Ron Paul and Ward Churchill think. It’s a religious revival that began with people like Sayyid Qutb, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who preached that Muslims should return to the Koran and take its strict behavior codes seriously.
Hüseyin Çelik takes Qutb’s message seriously, at least when he is on duty (he’s probably a hypocrite in his down time, as most of these radicals are). Turkey’s government reflects Qutb’s strictures more and more every day. The firing of Gözde Kansu directly follows Qutb’s revulsion after he witnessed the decadent American horror known as the sock hop in 1949.
While the old Turks follow Qutb and fire women who show too much cleavage, Barack Obama wants the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood wedged back into the Egyptian government.
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