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.
CITY JOURNAL 23 November 2012
Embracing—and challenging—Bruce Bawer’s powerful new book
The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind, by Bruce Bawer (Harper Collins, 400 pp., $25.99)
In his new book, Bruce Bawer has proposed an answer to vexing questions: Why has our culture become degraded? Why have our politics become polarized? And why has our public debate coarsened? Bawer locates the source of these misfortunes in the changes that have taken place in American higher education over the last generation—above all, the emergence of multicultural “identity studies.”
POWERLINE
March 27, 2011
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.
National Review
October 3, 2011
Some virtues are by accidents of history associated with utopianism, hostility to private property, anti-clericalism, and other core beliefs of the Left. I can scandalize a yoga instructor anywhere in the world by declaring myself an avid admirer of Margaret Thatcher, though I challenge you to read the yoga sutras and conclude from them that devotees must favor an overregulated financial sector.
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.