Bin Laden perpetrated or inspired a long list of horrors.
3 May 2011
CITY JOURNAL
We should not forget that Osama bin Laden’s evil extended far beyond the outrages of September 11, 2001. The list of terrorist acts he committed and inspired extends, literally, for pages. “At last, the mastermind of the bombing of the 1998 American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania—which together killed and wounded more than 5,000 people—is dead. At last, the leader of a group that planned to assassinate Pope John Paul II and President Clinton, and to bomb a dozen trans-Pacific airline flights, is dead. At last, the author of the 1996 truck bombing at Khobar Towers and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole is dead.
I moved here five years ago. In the beginning, I was sympathetic to the argument that Turkey’s ban on headscarves in universities and public institutions was grossly discriminatory. I spoke to many women who described veiling themselves as an uncoerced act of faith. One businesswoman in her mid-30s told me that she began veiling in high school, defying her secular family. Her schoolteacher gasped when she saw her: “If Atatürk could see you now, he would weep!” Her pain at the memory of the opprobrium she had suffered was clearly real.
A trip to the headquarters of the extremist group that sponsored the Mavi Marmara.
WEEKLY STANDARD
June 21, 2010
Istanbul
The street outside the IHH, the Turkish organization that recently dispatched the Mavi Marmara to its sanguinary fate in the eastern Mediterranean, suggests a hopeful world of multi-ethnic and religious harmony. Men and women in various forms of secular and religious dress—beards, clean-shaven, headscarves, burqas—walk in and out of the building in urgent conversation with Africans in dashikis, Swedes in stained proletarian-wear, anti-Zionist rabbis sweating nervously in black suits and payot. A gangly teenager strolls by in a T-shirt that reads, “Virgins required: No experience necessary.” It isn’t clear whether he’s off-message, highly ironic, or yet another Turkish kid who bought a T-shirt he didn’t quite understand.
What we don’t know about the Mavi Marmara incident: just about everything.
3 June 2010
CITY JOURNAL
I live in Istanbul and for obvious reasons have been receiving e-mails and phone calls in the past few days asking what, exactly, is going on in Turkey. The answer is that I’m not sure. This is the only honest answer any journalist can give, unless she has managed to place a listening device in the meeting rooms of the Turkish Cabinet. It’s not, however, the answer all are giving.
In the latest issue of City Journal, I published a story about a large cache of Soviet-era documents smuggled out of Russia by Pavel Stroilov, a Russian researcher now exiled in London, and a similar collection of smuggled documents held by the former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. I wrote that the world was incurious about these papers; this, I argued, was symptomatic of a dangerous indifference to the history and horrors of Communism.
Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?
CITY JOURNAL
SPRING 2010
In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz.
The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism
by Theodore Dalrymple
(Encounter, 163 pp., $23.95)
National Review
April 19
Many books have now been written about Europe’s malaise, most making similar observations, but Dr. Theodore Dalrymple has two great gifts and an advantage. His gifts are his prose style-effortlessly fluent yet never affected-and his keen powers of observation. His advantage is his experience of life.
Having trained as a psychiatrist, Dr. Dalrymple practiced medicine in such countries as Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and South Africa before returning to Birmingham to spend a long career treating patients in slum hospitals and inner-city prisons.
ISTANBUL “Hell no, angrily no,” says Galeri x-ist art director Kerimcan Guleryuz when asked if excitement about Turkish contemporary art exceeds the supply of real talent here. “They don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s not hype.” By “they” he means the collectors and gallery owners—and there are many—who are wondering if the Turkish art market is being set up for a fall.
My qualifications as an alarmist about the Islamization of Europe are second to none, according to my critics. But even I cannot find a good legal, political, or moral argument for Swiss voters’ decision, in a November referendum, to ban the building of minarets. Legally, it introduces a contradiction into the Swiss constitution, which is quite clear on this point: “Nobody may be discriminated against, namely for his or her . . . religious, philosophical, or political convictions.”
Last fall, having observed that few women in Istanbul took martial-arts classes, I conceived the idea to work with local instructors on creating a women’s self-defense initiative. My project met with initial enthusiasm, particularly among women concerned with the high rate of domestic violence in Turkey. But other martial arts instructors in the city grew uneasy, sensing a plot to swindle them out of their small pieces of the martial-arts pie.
