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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here in Turkey, we’re consumed by the hunt for the forbidden manuscripts of The Imam’s Army. The police have arrested the author, Ahmet ??k, on suspicion of membership in the Ergenekon conspiracy, and they’re hunting down every copy of the draft of his book.
What’s in that book? Who knows? Supposedly it blows the lid on Fethullah Gülen’s control of the Turkish police, or supposedly it contains the organizational blueprint for overthrowing Turkey’s democratically-elected government. I stress supposedly: I haven’t read it, and Turkey is conspiracy-theory central.
Book Review: The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance that Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East, by Mitchell Bard
National Review, January, 2011
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy in 2007. Its arguments are by now familiar; actually, they were always familiar: powerful, disloyal Jews; too many of them; bad for America. The book was, predictably and drearily, a best-seller.
