Welcome to the Free World

Turkey's efforts to join the civilised world as led by Britain and its greatest ally have borne fruitcakes. The brilliantly-named Science Research Foundation, an Islamic creationist group, recently put out a six-kilogram Atlas of Creation which apparently aspired to disprove the theory of evolution by placing pictures of fossils and extant species next to one another. The group also blames Darwin's theory for "communism, Nazism and - under a large photograph of the World Trade Centre in flames - the 9/11 attacks", the last being a particularly delightful touch, surpassing even George W Bush's frequent implications that the attacks were the responsibility of Saddam Hussein.

"Hitler and Mao were Darwinists," said the Science Research Foundation's frontman, Adnan Oktar; "Darwinism is the only philosophy which values conflict". Since a scientific theory is usually a description of the way things seem to happen, rather than a scale of moral values, it is difficult to see where Mr Oktar has got this idea, unless Islamic creationists are as well-read and thoughtful as their Christian counterparts. It's true that Kurt Vonnegut once summed up Darwin's teaching as saying that "corpses are improvements"; but of course this does not necessarily imply a belief in the wonders of civilisational clashes, holy war, or even humanitarian interventionism. The necessities of evolution are equally well served if our less efficient contemporaries die from refusing blood transfusions or from trying to walk on water.

The Science Research Foundation, which seems as wealthy as most moral majorities, has been taken to court several times by believers in the atheistic superstition. The Supreme Court recently overturned a decision to drop criminal charges against the Foundation because of time constraints, and the Ministry of Education has been taken to court over references to creationism which have been placed in science textbooks, over and above the compulsory religious indoctrination which goes on in Turkish schools. The Minister of Education, Huseyin Selik, has said that omitting the doctrine of intelligent design from science textbooks would be tantamount to censorship. In a country where "insulting Turkishness" is a criminal offence, this sublime hypocrisy surely amounts to virtual Britishness.