What he's missing, and what anyone who lives here could tell him, is that you don't need to establish laws based on religious sources to pursue Islamist objectives, you just need to enforce laws based on religious sources. If you enforce the tax code, laws on foreign financing of the media and laws on religious incitement selectively, well then, voila! — you've got yourself an Islamist press, all without writing a single law based on religious sources, and mirabile dictu, people like Thumann are none the wiser. 

Here, kitty: Erdogan sued the cartoonist who depicted him as a cat entwined in a ball of string 

I have no great love for Turkey's secular elites, who are pretty much as decayed as described. It's the enthusiasm for the AKP's equally decayed elites and the credulous swallowing of its party line that puzzle me. The party does, certainly, cultivate the foreign media carefully and shrewdly and sometimes you can see precisely where the effort pays off. In the wake of the bloodletting on the Mavi Marmara, for example, the veteran Middle East specialist Hugh Pope published a defence of Erdogan in the Israeli daily, Ha'aretz. "Erdogan's rhetoric may often be pugnacious and out of date," he wrote, "but his ideology is not devoted to Israel's destruction. Just over two years ago, he entertained Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to a long dinner in his official Ankara residence. Naively perhaps, but certainly sincerely, Erdogan believed that he had brought Israel and Syria to the brink of face-to-face talks or even a peace deal. Yet just days later, and having given no warning, Olmert launched Israel's winter 2009 assault on Gaza. This was the turning point, not the outburst against President Shimon Peres in Davos a few weeks later."

I've seen that explanation repeatedly in the Western media. I know exactly where it comes from. I've personally heard it from two senior figures in the AKP, both very smooth guys, fluent English speakers, who tell this story to journalists in cosy little salon settings, off the record, in precisely these words. You get tea and biscuits, they tell you this story and a few others like it and the story just keeps getting repeated, verbatim, in the press, as if the journalist writing the story had been a first-hand witness to this dinner. What seems to escape those repeating it is that clearly the AKP has an interest in spinning it this way — but that doesn't mean it's what really happened or that it's the most salient point. 

Indeed, I'd say one of the sources of this story — at least, the one from whom I last heard it — has a massive credibility problem on the face of it, because he followed this anecdote by denying the genocide in Darfur and proposing that whatever was happening there paled in comparison with the crimes against humanity being perpetrated in Gaza. That part never makes it into the press, even though I know at least a dozen other foreign journalists heard him say this. Watch for variants on the long-dinner-with-Olmert story, you'll see it everywhere — Erdogan was so personally hurt, because he doesn't smoke, in fact he hates smoking, but Olmert does, and he'd even dispatched his aide to get Olmert a cigar. 

I am regularly invited to lectures for foreign journalists here sponsored by the Gülen movement. The series is called, in a perhaps unintentionally ironic pun, "Covering Turkey". The speakers are usually high-ranking AKP officials who speak off the record. I've become accustomed to seeing their slant on recent events reproduced the next day, almost verbatim, in the foreign media. Likewise, the West's major media outlets — the New York Times, the Economist, the Financial Times — always quote the very same handful of English-speaking experts, who are inevitably close to the AKP or the media organs it controls. Amberin Zaman, who writes for the Economist, has had her articles reprinted by Today's Zaman and is actually employed by Taraf, the latter a newspaper always described in the West as "plucky" and "courageous" for its vigorous willingness to publish information about the Ergenekon case that has obviously been leaked to it by the AKP. (I might suggest different standards for assessing a Turkish newspaper's pluckiness. Is the editor in jail? No? Not so plucky.)