The Turkish prime minister miscalculated with his brutal crackdown.
CITY JOURNAL
June 3, 2013
As I began to write this, at 4:00 AM on May 31, protests against Turkish police—prompted by their crackdown on demonstrators opposing the demolition of Taksim Square’s Gezi Park—were spreading from the heart of Istanbul to the entire country. As of today, the headline on Drudge reads—not inaccurately—TURK BERSERK.
The Spectator
June 15, 2013
By now, everyone has heard of the brutal suppression of protests all over Turkey, which began with a peaceful sit-in in Istanbul to protect a hapless apology for a park from demolition. Right by the city’s unofficial centre, Taksim Square, Gezi Park had been slated to become yet another one of the ruling AKP’s signature Ottoman-cum-Disneyland construction projects. It was hardly much of a park, by London standards, but it was one of the last remaining places in the area with a few trees and a bit of room to stroll around.
Continue reading Turkey’s agony – how Erdogan turned a peaceful protest into a violent nightmare
FIRST POST, NOVEMBER 13, 2008
The Turkish Trial of the Century opened last month among scenes of pandemonium. With 86 defendants present, proceedings were temporarily adjourned for lack of space. The indictment against the alleged members of Ergenekon numbers 2,455 pages – the indictment of the Nazi high command at Nuremburg was less than 70 – and the defendants demanded every last page of it be read out loud.
Continue reading Ergenekon: Turkey’s Conspiracy to End Them All
The Spectator
Washington, DC
21 JANUARY 2010
By chance, my father and I were together when we heard the news. We had both just flown to Washington DC—he from Paris, I from Istanbul—to care for my grandmother, who’d had a heart attack. Before the words “major earthquake in Haiti” came over the car radio, we had been under the impression that we were living through a serious family emergency. Then we learned what those words really mean.
The Washington Post, March 2006
LAST SATURDAY MORNING, needing help to move several heavy cartons of books from my apartment in central Paris to a storage room, I hired two movers and a van from the want ads. Students were in the streets protesting the Contrat de Première Embauche (CPE) — a law proposed to combat unemployment by giving employers more flexibility to fire young employees — and the barricades and traffic diversions made our four-block drive into a half-hour ordeal.
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, September 08, 2006
The recent thwarted terrorist plot in England that aimed to blow up commercial airlines between Britain and the United States serves as another chilling reminder of the horror that multiculturalism has wreaked in Western Europe. A nightmarish fact: most of the terrorist suspects who aimed to engage in the mass murder of innocent civilians were home-grown — they were born and raised in Britain. In other words, Britain has welcomed immigrants whose children hate British and Western society and seek to destroy it.
Washington Post, May 2007
ISTANBUL: Bulent and Dogu are easygoing young Turks and unlikely authoritarians. Bulent just returned from the hippie trail in Southeast Asia, and Dogu’s son is named Cosmos. But when the military recently threatened to settle Turkey’s disputed presidential elections, they approved, suggesting just how hard it is to sort Turks into familiar political categories.
The Globe and Mail, December, 2007
A review of Other Colors: Essays and a Story.
The novels of Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s most celebrated and controversial man of letters, have been translated into some 20 languages. His novels Snowand My Name is Red are widely considered world-class achievements. The themes of Pamuk’s oeuvre include the conflict between the East and the West, the tension between Islam and modernity, and the intense melancholia of his native Istanbul. Admirers find his style complex, multilayered and allegorical; detractors find him faddish and incomprehensible.
THE AMERICAN
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Is the ruling party of Prime Minister Erdogan a threat to
Turkish democracy? Five experts share their thoughts.
Turkey’s Constitutional Court has agreed to hear a lawsuit brought against the ruling Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish acronym, “AKP”). This lawsuit would ban the party from politics for five years and would remove the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, from office. Does that amount to an assault on Turkish democracy?
Pajamas Media, July 29, 2008
On Sunday night, two consecutive explosions in the Güngören district of Istanbul — a poor, crowded, conservative slum near the Atatürk International Airport — killed 17 people, among them five children. The death toll may yet rise. Some 150 more were injured and maimed. It is still unclear who placed the bombs. No one has claimed responsibility. But the terrorist Kurdish organization–the PKK–is the chief suspect.