I am a great admirer of Amir Taheri and think he’s been spot-on about Turkey’s Islamist slide, as he is in the NYPost op-ed today (linked in NRO’s web briefing). One line, though, really rankles: “Since 1960, the Turkish army has staged a coup once every 10 years, either to curb the radical left or to stop the Islamist right from seizing control of the state.” (Emphasis added.)

I hate to see Taheri buy onto this mainstream media template. What is right-wing, as in conservative, about Islamists? A revolutionary movement that wants to overthrow the secular system and impose sharia is hardly conservative just because the interpretation of Islam it follows is a fundamentalist one. This seems to me close to the opposite of being a movement of the Right. Taheri implicitly suggests as much in his next sentence: “A new coup could trigger a bitter power struggle and push the more radical Islamists toward violent, even terrorist, methods.” What is conservative about that?