Alcohol is not your friend – but neither is milk!
On May 31, 2013, your columnist promised to [then] Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that “We’ll drink to your health!” Alcohol is a simple substance in “normal” parts of the world. But it is often a useful litmus test with a broader socio-political meaning: It is a simple substance that shows why Islamists cannot have a pluralistic mind.
In 2012, an Islamist columnist, one of the doctrinaire darlings of the ruling class, Hayrettin Karaman, wrote: “Now we live with many people side by side... from gays to drunks to unmarried couples... a Muslim won’t like these actions, they hate them and if there is an opportunity he keeps the intention to correct and prevent these actions.” It was an honest manifestation of how the Islamist mind works: “I won’t be a good Muslim if I merely abstain from alcohol; I must also COMMAND others that they don’t drink either.”
It is the same Islamism that captures the intellects of Messrs. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Ahmet Davutoğlu, who are – proudly - motivated by the dictates of Islam. They have not hidden that they blame most of Turkey’s maladies, from road accidents to crime rates and diseases, on alcohol consumption.
The OECD’s latest report, “Health at a Glance 2015,” has good and bad news for the Turkish Islamists: Adults in Turkey consumed merely 1.6 liters of alcohol per capita in 2012, which was the second lowest in the 44-nation club. The bad news is that, despite a 13-year-long social engineering project and, subsequently, generous sanctions on alcohol consumption, Turks have been drinking “flat” at 1.2-1.6 liters per capita since 2000.
So, Turks still drink too little, but they have not cut down on their daily rations just because the Islamists in power have systematically Islamized society and encouraged too mean consumption since they came to power in 2002.
The Islamists dogmatically hate even the scene of the consumption of “a drop of alcohol.” They believe that someone who drinks a glass of wine a week is an alcoholic. They want to create a dry, sin-free Turkey - another grand illusion. They think alcohol is the enemy of the working classes - but perhaps “work is the enemy of the drinking classes.”
The OECD report puts Turkey’s per capita alcohol consumption at the second lowest among 44 member nations. In the same report, the second highest is Austria, with 12 liters per capita consumption, or 7.5 times more than in Turkey. Let’s look at dry Turkey and drunken Austria:
Fatalities in road accidents per 100,000 inhabitants are 5.3 in drunken Austria compared to 9.6 in sober Turkey.
Austria ranks 13th in the world in GDP per capita income with $46,164 (2014) and Turkey 61st with $18,783 (2013).
Life expectancy in Austria is 81 (ranking 19th in the world) and in Turkey at 75 (ranking 67th).
Austria ranks 5th in the U.N.’s Gender Equality Index, while Turkey ranks 69th (both rankings in 2013).
The murder rate per 100,000 people is at 0.9 in Austria, and at 2.6 in Turkey.
The UNDP’s Human Development Index, a composite statistics of life expectancy, education and per capita income, puts Austria in 21st place (2014) and Turkey in 69th (2013).
If alcohol is the “mother of all evil,” as the dogmatic Islamist mind is dogmatically programmed to think, per capita consumption in the lands where jihadists bomb mosques, behead people, kill fellow Muslims en masse and boast the most powerful nihilist features of any living culture must be at 1,200 liters per capita, a hundred times more than in “drunken” Austria – one of the favorite destinations of Muslim refugees. Ironically, the jihadists come from the same “too sober” ideology/faith.
I shall repeat advice from this column on Oct. 3, 2012: “[…] dear pious, try to do two things: 1. Mind your own business and keep on abstaining from alcohol, but leave others alone. 2. Stop pathetically trying to hide behind arguments that a drop of alcohol will damage our health and destroy the peace in our ‘oh–so-peaceful societies.’”