Our judiciary is independent and I am a ballerina

Our judiciary is independent, and we must trust our judges." But do the government bigwigs themselves trust our independent judiciary? Sometimes.

When a senior judge recently ruled that President Abdullah Gül must stand trial for allegedly embezzling millions of dollars of public money that had gone into the vaults of his former political party, but then disappeared, the usual chorus of pro-government columnists came to his aid.

That was when the otherwise nice "let’s-trust-our-judges" rhetoric instantly disappeared, only to be replaced with allegations that the judge’s ruling was based on political (read: secular) motivations. Even Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan commented, "Unfortunately, sometimes the judges can make political verdicts."

So, the practical jurisprudence is clear: When a court rules against the ruling Islamists, it is politically motivated and we all can bash our judges. But when a court case targets the Islamists’ opponents, we should not comment and should trust our judges. The ruling elite may be good Muslims who never touch a drop of alcohol or let a piece of female hair be seen by men, but they should read about more essential Koranic teachings on subjects like justice, the equality of all and how big a sin it would be to treat us, the mere mortals, unfairly.

Has anyone ever seen a pro-Justice and Development Party, or AKP, columnist or a member of this party’s high and mighty suspect political bias in the court rulings that should otherwise be quite embarrassing for a country knocking on the European Union’s door for accession?

Has, for example, anyone in the powerful Islamic alliance of government and the media establishments ever complained of political bias because an Istanbul prosecutor asked for a court ban on three books due to obscenity, including Guillaume Apollinaire’s "The Exploits of a Young Don Juan?" Although the Turkish Penal Code explicitly says that works of art and literature cannot be tried for obscenity, an expert report from an Istanbul university (ironically, one that boasts of teaching "commerce") found all three books obscene.

In a separate case, the government has given the go-ahead to the "independent" judiciary to prosecute Sezgin Tanrıkulu, the chairman of the Diyarbakir Bar Association. Tanrıkulu faces a prison sentence of one to three years for distributing diaries "in both the Turkish and Kurdish languages."

Is there any political bias here? No. That decision falls into the "let’s-trust-our-judges" category.

An even more interesting courtroom battle also falls into the same category. Most Turks were shocked when the now infamous Islamist columnist Hüseyin Üzmez, 76, was arrested and brought to court for sexually harassing a 14-year-old girl, but Üzmez’s comrades rushed to his aid with theories linking the case to a secularist plot.

The Islamist "intellectual" became the man in the news and once a stadium full of football fans chanted "not-so-nice" slogans against him.

The "Üzmez affair" naturally became the theme of a popular television program hosted by four women known for their secular worldview: an actress, a former model, a famous novelist and a prominent journalist. After the broadcast, another Islamist columnist, Abdurrahman Dilipak (and, by the way, note that Dilipak means "clean tongue" in Turkish), thought he had to rush to Mr. Islamist-pedophile’s aid. This was what he wrote in his column about the four women:

"Éare these [ladies] not porn people? ... [They speak] as if they don’t belong to the ’Lolita’ bunchÉ who make group sex and get into incestuous relationsÉ"

What do you normally do if you are a person with fame and someone writes that you belong to a "Lolita" bunch (whatever that is) and accuses you of being incestuous, working in the porn industry and engaging in group sex?

The four women appealed to a court, demanding an apology and a correction in Dilipak’s column. The court turned down the request. They appealed to another court, and got another rejection.

As a last resort, the four women appealed to the Justice Ministry, only to get a third "sorry, but no."

Now they are on their way to the European Court of Human Rights, or ECHR, and the verdict is fairly predictable Ğ unless, of course, the ECHR this time listens to Erdoğan’s words from a few years earlier and seeks advice from the Ulema, or Islamic scholars.

We can safely predict the unpredictably terrible consequences if, for example, I wrote in this column the same lines about anyone from the AKP’s power circle. No, I am not going to volunteer for that little socio-political experiment.

I am sure such a trial would fall into the "let’s-trust-our-judges" category.