Look in just about any bookstore in Turkey, and you'll see some strange bestsellers. The cover of "The Children of Moses," the first and most popular book in a series of four, shows the country's devoutly Muslim prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in the middle of a six-pointed Star of David. Inside, you'll find a head-spinningly weird argument: that Erdogan and his conservative allies in Turkey's ruling pro-Islamic party are actually crypto-Jews with secret wicked ties to the conspiratorial forces of "global Zionism."

What is most striking in this nationwide division is that the so-called Islamists are generally on the liberal pro-Western side, while the secularists are often on the other.

In this context, the mystifying bestsellers make more sense: as a smear campaign cheered on by Turkey's spooked secularists