Postscript
know that God is the only acceptable judge in moral matters. You usurped
his prerogatives and felt entitled to judge my acts, to condemn them, and
to execute a sentence of death against me. Would it not have been the
right thing to give me a hearing before you carried out the sentence?”^2
“From a bed in a hospital, where five bullets were removed from me,
I saw in retrospect the strange, kaleidoscopic patterns of Turkey’s career
and mine,” Yalman writes. “Once more, Turkey’s fate and mine were
inextricably interwoven.”^3Vicious anti-Dönme and antisemitic articles in the Turkish press in
the early 1950 s created a dangerous atmosphere for Dönme in general
and Yalman in particular. Representative articles include stories of Jews
attempting to use bacteria produced in Soviet labs to poison the Well
of Zamzam in Mecca to kill Muslims during the hajj—ironically, at a
time when Jewish physicians were being purged in the USSR for alleg-
edly spreading contagion.^4 Hateful cartoons of Mason Kapancı stockbro-
kers were published.^5 Articles labeled Yalman an “Avdeti,” and claimed
he prostituted Turkish Muslim women to American Jews by sponsoring
beauty contests, graphically illustrated in a cartoon in which Yalman ap-
pears as a spider trapping naked women in his web.^6 Like the Dönme
caricaturized in the anonymous 1919 treatise, Yalman was depicted as the
main disseminator of immorality. It is not surprising that within months
of Büyük Dogˇ u (Great East) publishing a cartoon of an arrow with the
newspaper’s name on it piercing the heart of a supine man wearing a Star
of David and labeled a Freemason, a far-right militant wounded Yalman
in an assassination attempt.^7 The seventeen-year-old Hüseyin Üzmez who
shot Yalman in Malatya had been influenced by Volkan and claimed that
he had acted in the name of all Muslims to rid the earth of a Freemason
(shorthand for atheist Jewish communist), “infidel,” and Dönme who had
insulted Islam and the nation.^8 Yalman’s newspaper Vatan was accused of
pimping Turkish girls for American Jews because it had sponsored the
competition in Turkey for the 1952 Miss Universe contest and run reveal-
ing pictures of Turkish women, and Yalman thought that the assassina-
tion attempt might have been triggered by this.^9 He and his brother had
also been Turkish agents for American companies, including Goodyear
and Caterpillar, importing American products to Turkey, and he had as a
result been called an American spy. Typical of the era, Yalman contends
that Moscow was behind the plot, using “the camouflage of religious reac-
tion and national chauvinism” to attack the dynamic, progressive, mod-