Yet more evidence has emerged that Turkey’s proposed membership of the EU should be definitively ruled out on the grounds of the incompatibility of the proposed partners. To put it simply, despite the increasingly secular nature of contemporary Europe and certainly of the EU itself, nothing will ever change the fact that the cultural roots of Europe are Christian: and however insistent the Turks are about the secularity of Turkey’s political institutions, even these are beginning to show the ineradicably Islamic and increasingly Islamist character of Turkey’s underlying culture. And as an unpleasant case now unfolding demonstrates, this is Islam of a clearly anti-Christian character. Briefly, the Turkish Prime Minister, Recip Erdogan, has put his weight behind attempts to crush a small Christian community and to seize an important part of its assets. Though there are now only a few thousand Syro-Orthodox Christians left, they are still in occupation of one of the oldest monasteries anywhere in the world. There are now under way legal attempts to seize the land surrounding the monastery (necessary for the community’s continued existence) amid claims that the monastery itself was built on land on which there had once been a mosque; this, despite the fact that the monastery predates Islam by several centuries (!!!!). Here is Zenit’s take on the affair, just in case you think I’m just showing some kind of anti-Islamic bias: