A Comic Magazine Raided in Istanbul, Israel’s Fury Unleashed at Glastonbury
Two issues this week: a comic magazine targeted over a cartoon in Istanbul, and Israel’s fury unleashed on pro-Palestine artists at Glastonbury.
On Monday night, Istanbul was visited by a spectre it has never fully exorcised. A crowd, some bearing the black banners of IBDA-C, an outlawed Islamist group—assembled outside the offices of Leman, one of Turkey’s oldest comic weeklies. Their fury targeted a cartoon in this week’s issue that said to mock the Prophet Muhammad. What might have remained a fleeting editorial controversy was quickly transfigured into a theatre of ideological intimidation. The choreography was familiar, echoing both the Charlie Hebdo attacks and Turkey’s own long history of religious vigilantism. .
Founded in the late 1970s by Salih Mirzabeyoğlu, IBDA-C (the Great Eastern Islamic Raiders’ Front) emerged from a volatile fusion of messianic Islamism and Turkish ultranationalism, heavily influenced by the theocratic vision of Necip Fazıl Kısakürek one of the doctrinal architects of Islamist thought in mid-20th century Turkey, whose writings continue to animate the moral imagination of the Islamist right. Also a personal hero of president Erdoğan. Though mostly dormant in recent years, the group has a documented record of attacking secular institutions—bookstores, cinemas, newsrooms—particularly during the tumultuous 1990s.
IBDA-C’s ideological orbit also intersects with some of the darkest episodes in Turkey’s recent history. Most infamously, the Sivas massacre of 1993, in which, exactly 32 years ago today, 37 Alevi intellectuals and artists were burned alive in the Madımak Hotel by a religious mob enraged by the presence of writer Aziz Nesin. These events are grim reminders of what happens when a state tacitly licenses violence from below.
On Monday night, it was BDA (an offshoot of IBDA-C) that issued the call to protest Leman, their online messaging laced with menace. That a crowd aligned with a banned militant group could gather unimpeded in central Istanbul speaks volumes. Obviously not about freedom of assembly, but about the regime’s selective toleration of gatherings. This is the same government that does not even allow a dozen people to assemble and protest, say, spoiled milk, fearing that any small grievance might crystallize into political opposition and pose a threat to the AKP’s rule. Yet here, a volatile mob was permitted to gather, chant, throw stones, even attempt to climb the building.
The police response was conspicuously restrained. Pepper spray was deployed sparingly, in marked contrast to the brutality habitually inflicted on peaceful protestors demanding social or economic justice. What might elsewhere have triggered water cannons and mass detentions here met with leniency, raising the question of who, in the eyes of the state, constitutes a legitimate threat and who qualifies as a preferred citizen.
Over the past decade, the Erdoğan government has steadily narrowed the space for dissent. The lines between satire and slander, critique and criminality, have been systematically blurred. Charges of “insulting religious values”—and “insulting the president,” for that matter—are now wielded to immunize power against irreverence. The sacred is whatever the regime declares untouchable.
While the angry mob gathered outside the magazine, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya personally circulated videos showing Leman’s editors and cartoonist being pinned to the ground by police. His post implied that “justice was served.” Yet Yerlikaya is no judge, is he? No trial had taken place. Still, he chose to share a ritual of humiliation—or more aptly, a digital sacrifice offered to an inflamed crowd. If challenged, he would likely claim he intended to calm tensions. But in a democracy, calming a mob by feeding it its target is not prudence.
Other senior officials followed suit. The president’s media adviser, the justice minister, and foreign minister Hakan Fidan all rushed to social media. No, no they did not defend due process or defuse tensions. They rushed to condemn the magazine. For a cartoon. At the very moment when violence seemed likely, the highest figures of state joined the chorus of denunciation. Correct me, if I’m wrong, but this is politics of vengeance. This is tribalism.
Watching the crowd outside Leman, I felt fear for those inside. Then came hopelessness due to the deeper immobility of certain pathologies in Turkey. The illusion of progress, I reminded myself, collapses easily before the kind of raw, unmediated rage that religion and nationalism still summon from the depths of the collective psyche. I fear in hopelessness.
Because I know. I know that in Turkey, escalation is rarely accidental. A slogan becomes a spark. A rock breaks a window. A fire follows. This is how many of the country’s worst nights have begun with a crowd incited, a state that looks away, and violence that is later disavowed as unforeseeable. But we have seen it all before. That is what makes the recklessness of these state officials, condemning a cartoon in such incendiary terms, all the more chilling.
As for the cartoon: it depicted two flying men—one named Muhammad, the other Moses—gazing down at a landscape of bombs and missiles. There was no mockery, no blasphemy, no caricature of sacred form. That I even feel compelled to clarify this, to build a factual defense, is itself absurd. Because in this climate, facts do not matter. Leman issued a statement explaining that the figures were symbolic, not intended to represent prophets, and that the magazine holds religious beliefs in respect. It made no difference. The truth is irrelevant to those who have already chosen their target.
Even if this episode eventually fades, I fear it will mark the end for the last surviving satirical magazines in Turkey.
Israel has a much bigger problem than Bob Vylan or Kneecap
There are crowds, and then there are crowds. Those gathering in front of satirical weeklies with stones in hand, and those at Glastonbury—sharp with words but peaceful in protest. Glastonbury, after all, has never been merely a music festival. It has long been a space where the artistic and the political merge, where what is unspeakable in official discourse is shouted from the stage. Rain or mud – usually both – Glasto has always had something to say.
This year, it was the genocide in Gaza.
The Irish rap group Kneecap, known for its critique of British colonialism and its vocal support for Palestinian liberation, was expected to take the lead. Their stance was unequivocal: call it what it is—a genocide—and call for a free Palestine. For precisely this reason, the BBC chose not to live-broadcast their performance. What it did not anticipate was that another artist, Bob Vylan, would ascend the stage and go further: not only affirming his solidarity with Palestine but chanting “Death to the IDF.” Within forty-eight hours, he had lost his agent, his record producer, and his U.S. visa.
Those embedded in structures of Western power and privilege— yani the editorial boards, the parliamentary lobbies, the PR handlers, big tech, finance — had not once condemn the genocide. But they condemned the breach of decorum at a festival stage with immediacy. The BBC was scolded for its oversight. Politicians questioned why Vylan had not yet been arrested. Accusations of antisemitism were deployed once again as a discursive shield. Weaponised not to defend Jews, but to silence dissent against a state. Underscore: state. A machinery. A Leviathan. How did we arrive at this point, where criticising, condemning, holding to account a state is not allowed, and comes with an accusation of racism? Wallahi beyond me.
The real problem, for Israel and its ardent supporters in Europe and the US, is not Bob Vylan. Nor is it Kneecap. Nor even the BBC. These are manageable disruptions: individuals and institutions that can be censured, defunded, deplatformed, doxxed. Tactics of containment are many: cancellation, surveillance, reputational smearing, economic pressure. It is the crowds that cannot easily be contained. The tens of thousands in Berlin, London, Brussels, Paris; marching week after week, despite censorship, despite smear campaigns, despite governments that remain subservient to Washington and paralysed before Tel Aviv.
What unsettles the Western political establishment is not an artist’s chant, but the fact that entire audiences are now refusing to look away. That despite the media’s best efforts to obfuscate or suppress, people have seen the truth. They have seen Gaza bombed into dust and Palestinian people are being attacked to vanish them off the land. And once seen, such things are not unseen.
How, one wonders, do Israeli strategists believe this is sustainable in the longue durée? What state in modern political history has carried out systematic mass violence while a growing global public rejects its legitimacy? There is no precedent in which the arc of public conscience bends so visibly against a state and yet that state persists unchanged. This is not merely a moral dilemma; it is a strategic impasse. To go on as if nothing has shifted is… I don’t know what it is.
Even voices once firmly within the establishment have begun to break ranks. Chris Patten, former Chancellor of the University of Oxford, one-time EU Commissioner, and a former diplomat long known for his moderation and measured stance, recently said:
“I’m very careful what I say about Israel, because if you cross an imperceptible line, you risk being accused of antisemitism. But I don’t think it’s antisemitic to criticise Netanyahu. I don’t think it’s antisemitic to criticise the way Palestinians have been treated in Gaza and the West Bank. I don’t think it’s in Israel’s interest to treat them that way, because the only solution to the Israel–Palestine conflict is two states... I’m surprised anyone can argue that what Israel has done isn’t in breach of international law. What is international law if it does not forbid starving civilians into submission? Israel is endangering its own future—and I say this as someone with many Israeli friends... I feel passionately against antisemitism. But I also believe it is deeply unwise, if Israel desires lasting peace, to act in ways that generate new generations of people who will hate it.”
This moment reveals the brittleness of liberal institutions and the practiced cynicism of official discourse. It also signals the formation of a new public. Restless, heterogeneous, and increasingly unwilling to be governed by silence or consent manufactured from above. And, that is the problem.
I’ve been reflecting on the Bob Vylan episode and reached the same conclusion as you: the best way to avoid anti-Semitism is to stop the genocide in Gaza and to stop the various other attacks on other sovereign states. People say things to me privately that I personally find abhorrent (about Jewish people). None of these would have been said or thought without this Western-sponsored, hypocritical double-think and carnage upon a people long suppressed for no real fault of their own. The protests of groups such as Palestine Action, Bob Vylan, Kneecap etc will get more and more extreme. And they should. Because nobody in power is actually listening.
Thanks for your knowledgeable explanation of the situation in Istanbul and for uttering what - in my opinion - most people at this moment in time think about the genocide happening to the Palestinians (it is not an anti-terror campaign anymore as everyone can clearly see - on the contrary, it is very counterproductive), and for making clear that this specific criticism is intended to be heeded and solely targeted towards the right-wing Netanyahu- government (full of war-mongers for different reasons, 1. he himself wants/needs/intends to stay in power so that he doesn't have to face due justice and 2. there are elements in this coalition who have always wanted to drive all Palestinians out of their country) and not in the least against Israelis who intend to adhere to international law, favour a two-state-solution or want to live peacefully with their Palestinian neighbours... It is not anti-semitic because waging war (as opposed to fighting terrorism) or policing a situation has nothing to do with the existence of Israel.
Demanding human rights for everyone is not inhumane - on the contrary.