More of This Please

We need to support this kind of stuff:

Tens of thousands of Turks have turned funeral ceremonies for a judge shot by a suspected Islamist gunman, into a mass show of support for secularism.

They waved Turkish flags and chanted for the country to remain secular on marches through the capital Ankara.

A man calling himself "a soldier of Allah" shot dead Judge Mustafa Yucel Ozbilgin and wounded four others at a top administrative court on Wednesday.

He was immediately arrested. At least three others have since been detained.

The attack is believed to have been linked to the court's record of strictly upholding the ban on Muslim headscarves in universities and government offices.

The government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which has Islamist roots, has been campaigning for the regulations to be relaxed or removed.

However, at the judge's funeral at Ankara's main mosque, many protesters chanted slogans calling for the government to resign, calling cabinet members a threat to the secular republic.

Fundamentalism in all its guises, both here and abroad, indeed anything that rejects progress, inevitably will fail unless resuscitated by its equal yet separate partner. This is what gets me about this so-called "war on terror." If we hadn't backslid on our own values, if we didn't "fight fire with fire" and engage in torture and indiscriminant murder, this would be the easiest war of ideas you could possibly win. The idea that "people have a desire to be free," as the President puts it, is not far wrong but it needs an outlet, a contrast, some alternative that shows the downtrodden and oppressed that another world is possible. To the extent that we haven't done that is why we find ourselves where we are today.