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Some 125,000 flag-waving Turks, mostly women, denounced the Islamic-rooted government over its plans to lift a decades-old ban on Islamic headscarves in universities - a move the foreign minister said would expand Turkish freedoms.

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But here is what the Western media does not report, does not want you to know.

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Turkey takes action against the shadowy far right

Given the prevailing paranoiac obsession with Islam, the media have duly informed us that the "Islamist" government of Turkey is set to lift the "secular" ban on the hijab in universities.

Another view of this development would be that a democratic government is about to restore some basic human rights for women: freeing them from state strictures on what they should or should not wear.

Meanwhile, a more significant development in Turkey is going unnoticed in the West: the busting of a right-wing plot of murder and mayhem, designed to destabilize the country and trigger a coup against the elected government.

Number one on the plotters' hit list was Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.

Thirty-three members of a clandestine cell are charged with "provoking armed rebellion."

They include: A retired army general who was earlier allegedly associated with bombings and extrajudicial killings – incidents that were blamed on "Islamists" and others; A leading prosecutor who had hauled Pamuk and other writers into court, on the infamous charge of "insulting Turkishness" – such as questioning the official denial of the 1915-17 Armenian genocide; Some former army officers with links to an anti-Semitic academic, who thinks that "Hitler was right about certain things," and that 9/11 was the work of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.

Turkey is abuzz with the expectation that a thorough probe and a transparent trial may, finally, unmask "the Deep State."

That refers to the shadowy forces in the army, the judiciary and the bureaucracy long suspected of working with the mafia to advance their ultra-nationalist agenda.

They are thought to have been behind

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http://tinyurl.com/3yp9lg

[ 12 February 2008: Message edited by: adam stratton ]

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Turkey is now run by a party of observant Muslims, but its reigning ideology and law are strictly secular, dating from the authoritarian rule in the 1920s of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a former army general who pushed Turkey toward the West and cut its roots with the Ottoman East. For some young people today, freedom means the right to practice Islam, and self-expression means covering their hair.

They are redrawing lines between freedom and devotion, modernization and tradition, and blurring some prevailing distinctions between East and West.

Ms. Yilmaz’s embrace of her religious identity has thrust her into politics. She campaigned to allow women to wear scarves on college campuses, a movement that prompted emotional, often agonized, debates across Turkey about where Islam fit into an open society. That question has paralyzed politics twice in the past year and a half, and has drawn hundreds of thousands into the streets to protest what they call a growing religiosity in society and in government.

By dropping out of the education system, she found her way into Turkey’s growing, lively culture of young activists.

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