No to EU, out of NATO, death to imperialism

In front of a crowd of 10,000 who were seated in gender-separated sections, Turkey’s iconic Mujaheed, the 83-year-old Necmeddin Erbakan, regaled the faithful with his party’s plans.

Erbakan also promised an economy without interest rates and a just order Ğ shorthand for an Islamic state.

Welcome to political Islam, Turkish style, out in force and on stage Saturday night at the Abdi İpekçi Sports Hall, festooned in party flags and banners.

Saadet is the latest in a series of political parties based on the National View, an Islamist ideology established by Mr. Erbakan in the late 1960s. Erbakan promised to save Turkey from moral corruption, Western imperialism and NATO membership. He also proposed an economy without interest and just order, which sounded very much like an Islamic state. In 2001, the reformist wing of Erbakan’s party broke off to become the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, whose rapid ascendance left the Saadet as a minor player. In the 2007 elections, Saadet received only 2.3 percent of the votes.

At Saturday’s rally, the 83-year-old senescent Erbakan, who could hardly walk, repeated his classic themes.

Speaking about the eternal battle on earth between righteousness and falsity, he described the latter’s modern incarnation as Zionism. Zionists were so strong, according to Erbakan, they had been manipulating both the United States and the European Union for the purpose of world domination. Yet he had also good news to give: his National View had been bravely resisting the Zionists' plans and defusing their plots.

The most eye-catching star of the night though, was Group Nasihat, a mind-blowing rap band consisting of five cool blue-jean-wearing youngsters. If you understood no Turkish, you could presume these were typical rap singers rapping about typical themes. But their lyrics were defiantly Islamist.

 "The army, the prophet, were only 305 people," one of their songs said, "but the angels were with them." International celebrities who were invited to the rally but who failed to show up, included Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, Hamas leaders Khalid Meshal and Ismail Haniyyah, and Qatar-based conservative cleric Yusuf Al Qardawi. Mehmet Bekaroğlu, another Saadet celebrity, who recently became popular with his rhetoric about the Islamic left, said Turkey needed to be saved from the "neo-liberal wave of imperial onslaught." If Erbakan was not pushed from power in 1998 by the military, he said, privatization of state companies, which took place under the AKP, would not have happened.