In Turkey, alleged terrorism requires a brand-new vocabulary.
CITY JOURNAL
3 January 2012
George Orwell’s greatest act of genius was the invention of Newspeak, the official language of Oceania, devised to meet the ideological needs of “Ingsoc,” or English Socialism. Explaining the nature of a mass trial in Turkey likewise requires the construction of a language all its own.
CITY JOURNAL
April 23, 2012
I came back late at night from the Distinguished Physician’s special dinner party for minorities, Leftists, and persecuted journalists. His villa in Istanbul overlooks the once-picturesque cove of Tarabya on the European shore of the Bosphorus. It is still picturesque, if you look only to your right. Harold Nicolson wrote of this view:
“To the south, fringing the soft lip of the Marmora, another ruin; the frail façade of a palace on the shore. Three marble arches opening to the sea: the carved brackets of a fallen balcony, the waves below splashing on heavy capitals half-buried in the sand.
Continue reading Supping Full with Horrors: A social evening with Turkish outcasts
THE NATIONAL INTEREST
June 8, 2012
The arrival of the World Economic Forum in Istanbul this week was overshadowed in the Turkish media by the arrival of Madonna and her entourage, although there was a symmetry in events—massive security, caravans of expensive cars with tinted windows, snarled traffic and cab drivers cursing them all. Tagging behind the Material Girl was her twenty-four-year-old lover, Brahim Zaibat; tagging behind Turkey’s mercurial prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. In both cases, the pair looked every inch the happy couple.
Gatestone Institute
June 26, 2012
TURKEY’S SUPREME COURT PUTS BLACKMAILERS IN AWKWARD POSITION
The news from Turkey, journalists here always complain, comes so hard and fast that they just can’t keep up with it. The Supreme Court obviously decided to take pity on them last week by declaring war on porn. Now, they didn’t criminalize all porn—let’s not exaggerate here—but the Supreme Court of Appeals ruled that anyone in possession of videos depicting oral or anal sex may be sentenced to prison.
It’s now easier to get news from Mars than Hakkari
August 9, 2012
GATESTONE INTERNATIONAL POLICY COUNCIL
I confess freely that I’m finding it difficult to make sense of recent events in Turkey, and I submit that anyone offering a confident analysis is exaggerating either his access or his analytic acumen. There is obviously a great deal happening; but the people who understand it aren’t talking, and the people who are talking don’t understand it.
Why we should worry about Turkey’s missing jet
GATESTONE INTERNATIONAL POLICY COUNCIL
August 11, 2012
It is apparently lore at the Economist that foreign correspondents have a shelf life of three years. After this, they know too much. They become too involved in the minutiae of local politics to explain a story to their domestic audience. Then, of course, there is the famous State Department “clientitis” problem—diplomats, it is said, need to be rotated out in roughly the same amount of time lest they begin to understand the host country’s point of view a bit too well.
Continue reading A Phantom Wrapped in an Enigma Wrapped in a Riddle
CITY JOURNAL
AUTUMN 2012
Controversial Muslim preacher, feared Turkish intriguer—and “inspirer” of the largest charter school network in America.
With the American economy in shambles, Europe imploding, and the Middle East in chaos, convincing Americans that they should pay attention to a Turkish preacher named Fethullah Gülen is an exceedingly hard sell. Many Americans have never heard of him, and if they have, he sounds like the least of their worries.
THE JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS
December 19, 2012
While Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan needs no introduction, the Turkish imam Fethullah Gülen is probably the most important person you’ve never heard about. He is an immensely powerful figure in Turkey, and—to put it mildly—a controversial one. He is also an increasingly powerful figure globally. Today, there are between three and six million Gülen followers. Gülen leads the cemaat, an Islamic civil society movement, that has until now been critical to the electoral success of Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). The cemaat is often described as Turkey’s Third Force—the other two being the AKP and the military.
Ahmet Sik and Turkey’s increasingly paranoid politics
15 April 2011
CITY JOURNAL
Zaytung is the Turkish equivalent of The Onion, and like The Onion, it tends to parody reality so well that for a moment you aren’t sure whether you’re reading fact or fiction.
A recent item:
“YOUNG COUPLE, STRANDED ON MOUNTAIN, RESCUED THANKS TO CEMAAT BOOK
The couple was stranded on Amanos Mountain yesterday evening owing to a vehicle failure. Although the police and gendarmerie searched for them for hours in heavy snowfall, they were unable to locate them.
Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide, by Paul Marshall and Nina Shea
Claremont Review of Books
September 10, 2012
In their new book, Paul Marshall and Nina Shea, a senior fellow and the director, respectively, of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, argue that the West has been slow to appreciate the devastating effects of blasphemy and apostasy laws in the Islamic world, even as these laws are the source of countless outrages against human rights, freedom, and dignity.