A fundamentalist lawyer has killed a judge and wounded four others in Ankara. His motive was to protest the banning of headscarves. The judge’s funeral procession turned into a Kemalist (secular republican) display of anger, with people holding aloft pictures of Ataturk and venting against the ruling AKP party, which has vaguely Islamist roots. It’s a scenario practically lifted from the pages of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow (my Normblog essay runs this coming Tuesday). A friend writes:
“The lawyer who did the shooting apparently had close connection to an Islamist paper called Vakit, which had printed pictures of the judges… after they made a decision affirming the headscarf ban a few months ago. Vakit is the same paper that frequently publishes the photo of the chief rabbi accompanied by serpents and swastikas and talks about how they look forward to his funeral…. Their reporters travel on the prime minister’s private jet with other journalists when Erdogan goes abroad and I’ve seen government ministers being quite chummy with the paper’s editors. Either way, I think this shooting is going to put the AKP in a position where it will have to repudiate a part of its support base, or things might get quite ugly.”
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