Month: November 2006

Sunday, November 26, 2006
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ON SELF-KNOWLEDGE
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Of the many forms of ignorance the worst is ignorance of the self. If you don’t know yourself you don’t know where you are going, and once you get there you may even discover it was a big mistake getting there. If you don’t know yourself, what else can you possibly know and understand?
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My troubles begun on the day I decided I was smart. That’s when life went into action and devised a thousand ways to prove that I was a damn fool.
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On the day you close your mind, life will start opening it, and the longer you resist and keep it shut, the harder and more painful the operation will be.
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For a long time I didn’t see any practical benefit in using my imagination until I realize that reality has so many layers that the only way to penetrate them is by using my imagination.
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Memo to readers who find me depressing:
Read our great writers instead and if you find them even more depressing, have the courage and honesty to admit you are what the pigswill of our propaganda has made you, “a compulsive liar drunk with the folly of deceptive wine” (Gregory of Narek).
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Monday, November 27, 2006
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CRIME STORIES
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My kind of writing is not my favorite kind of reading. May I confess that I have never been able to read Montaigne’s ESSAYS from beginning to end. I prefer crime stories. I love Ed McBain, Richard Stark, Simenon. THE KILLERS is the only Hemingway story I have read three times. Chandler’s FAREWELL, MY LOVELY I have read four times with undiminished excitement for its poetic use of slang. No other story has given me as much pleasure as Hammett’s DEAD YELLOW WOMEN. I love these writers not so much for the suspense they provide as for their wit, humor, and dialogue. If I could, I would write crime stories. But my experience with cops and killers is next to nil. I have been inside a police station only once, many years ago, when I reported a roaming German shepherd attacking pedestrians. The burly cop at the desk didn’t even bother to look at me, he simply grabbed the phone on his desk and I didn’t wait long enough to hear what he said.
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My fascination with crime stories began with Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame, and Dostoevsky’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. And my fascination with Simenon (the most prolific of them all, over 600 titles) began with Andre Gide’s JOURNALS, where he describes at considerable length his own fascination with Simenon.
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There are some crimes stories in which the guilty party is neither the butler nor any of the usual suspects, but the narrator himself. On second thought, perhaps I too write crime stories when I focus on the origins of our complexes and contradictions, and instead of naming the obvious suspects (bloodthirsty neighbors and cynical West) I cross-examine myself.
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A headline in this morning’s paper reads: ISTANBUL: ALMOST 25,000 PROTESTERS DENOUNCE POPE BENEDICT. Nothing astonishes me more than the self-righteousness of the guilty. Instead of denouncing Muslim extremists, terrorists, insurgents, and jihadists, they protest against a remark made by a Christian emperor a thousand years ago. Figure that one out if you can.
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Speaking of self-righteousness: One of Simenon’s favorite themes is the guilt of the victim. In many of his stories, Simenon explains and to some extent justifies the criminal by exposing his victim’s insensitivity and unawareness of the consequences of his actions. And that’s what I am after too – our past and present unawareness, which at times assumes criminal dimensions.
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Tuesday, November 28, 2006
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WRITERS AND CRITICS
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The Catholic novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize (1952) Francois Mauriac (b. 1885) gave up writing fiction after Sartre, (b. 1905), a relative newcomer on the French literary scene and an atheist to boot, published an essay critical of his work. This may suggest that a competent critic has the power to deconstruct, demolish, and reduce to silence even a universally admired great writer.
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I look forward to the day when someone with average or even below average intelligence will give me a similar treatment and I will quit writing this stuff and go back to writing fiction. But so far I haven’t had much luck in my critics. If they are not brainwashed partisans or brown-nosing self-appointed Turcocentric pundits, they are intellectually challenged skinheads whose insults I find stimulating rather than wounding.
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Are we heading in the direction of a new renaissance or are we on our way to the devil? If you answer this question by resorting to chauvinist clichés and platitudes, then we have nothing to look forward to.
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I grew up with the notion that there was more truth in an Armenian lie than in an odar truth. It took me many years to realize that a lie is a lie and it makes no difference whether it is spoken in Zulu, Turkish, or Armenian. The same could be said of propaganda.
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Wednesday, November 29, 2006
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LET’S TALK TURKEY
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Common sense tells us, when two witnesses contradict each other, both can’t be right.
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Experience tells us, to say all politicians lie except ours, is to declare oneself to be a certifiable dupe of nationalist propaganda.
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Warning: If you question the validity of these two assertions, no need to read any further.
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Since some of my Armenian readers are convinced I am a pro-Turkish denialist, and some of my Turkish readers take it upon themselves to correct my occasional pro-Armenian and anti-Turkish lapses, I must conclude I am on the right path. It is not part of my agenda to please, mislead, or accuse anyone. There are already more than enough hirelings who make a comfortable living (thank you very much) by doing these things.
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“The Armenians were punished because they sided with the enemy,” a gentle Turkish reader reminds me. By “punished” he probably means deported and not massacred. Which is it? Since both of my grandmothers survived and both my grandfathers perished, I must conclude some were deported, others “terminated.” As for siding with the enemy, this may indeed be true of Armenians on the Russo-Turkish border, but definitely not of Armenians on the mainland, except for the very few agitators and revolutionaries who may have acted in the name of the people but who represented no one but themselves, very much like the Talaat, Jemal, Enver troika. The overwhelming majority of Armenians in the ghetto of refugees where I grew up were both illiterate and devoid of political awareness. To accuse them of harboring secret territorial ambitions and betraying the Empire is not just wrong but absurd. I don’t remember my father saying anything remotely kind about our political parties or remotely unkind about Turks. I write these lines not as an Armenian but as a human being, and my intention is not to assert moral superiority but to understand why two people who lived side by side for six centuries prefer to believe their political leaders and to ignore the testimony of witnesses who value honesty and objectivity above prejudice and nationalist propaganda.
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How can any tribe, nation, or race assert moral superiority and believe in it? Even worse: How can it also believe that in doing so it will not arouse the contempt and hatred of all men? The ancient Greeks knew better. They believed that pride or arrogance (hubris) is punished by the gods (Nemesis). And yet, in their eyes, all non-Greeks were barbarians. What happened next we know. They were defeated and colonized by Macedonians, Romans, and last but far from least, Turks. And unbelievable as this may see, even after centuries of enslavement, even in their present bastardized condition, they continue to cling to the notion that they are the real Chosen People. Figure that one out if you can.
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CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE MOVEMENT LAUNCHES DEMONSTRATION IN FRONT OF CC

Panorama.am
14:24 27/11/06

Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) has launched a demonstration in front
of the Constitutional Court (CC) calling the judges and CC chairman to
express their disobedience to authorities-in-power. Arkady Karapetyan,
commander of Yerkrapah detachment and a member of initiative group,
said they want to mobilize all public and political forces as well
as the individuals, "The whole Armenian nation," Karapetyan said.

"We celebrate one year of referendum on constitution with a protest
action. An exceptional event happened on November 27, last year. More
than one million fraud was drawn and the referendum passed," Michael
Apresyan, commander of Arstakh detachment, said. The initiators
connect little hope with CC administration to join the group. Apresyan
claims only 180,000 people participated in the referendum. "Where
are the remaining 1 million 200 thousand? People have boycotted the
referendum. They have written it was held," he said. The commander of
Artsakh detachment said the verdict of CC on incompliance of alienation
of property with the constitution was in vain. "The decisions of the
CC have no power in this country," he said.

One of the initiators of the movement, ex-minister of foreign
affairs, Alexander Arzumaynay, demanded resignation of the president,
pre-term presidential elections and formation of free, fair and lawful
authorities in power.

INITIATIVE AIMS TO CHANGE POWER

Panorama.am
16:08 27/11/06

Initiators of Alternative, Nikol Pashinyan and Vahagn Khachatryan,
told reporters today Alternative is organization which is above a
political party and any citizen, despite of party affiliation, may join
it in case of supporting its ideology. The ideology is connected with
the principles of the Armenian Pan-National Movement (HHSh) in 88s.

The initiative aims to change the authorities-in-power with clearly
defined mechanisms. They intend to mobilize the masses and invite
them to gatherings at Azatutiun Square.

The initiators say the do not want to put an aim of participation in
upcoming elections because they do not want anyone to think it is
an issue of seats in the parliament. "We want to be free citizens
and the choice of freedom must be at Freedom Square," Pashinyan
said.

RECTOR OF EUROPEAN ACADEMY VS. MINISTER OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE

Panorama.am
18:08 27/11/06

Today the rector of the European Regional Academy in the Caucasus,
Viktor Martirosyan, made a statement to journalists explaining the
reasons for the lack of state accreditation of the institute, as
minister of educational and science, Levon Lazarian earlier pointed
out. The rector said the European Academy is created based on the
decision of the government and intergovernmental agreements signed
with France, Italy and Germany.

"The academy has the status of intergovernmental higher educational
establishment just like the American, French and Armenian-Russian
universities," he pointed out. Last year 40 graduates were granted MA
degree of the European Academy. "They received diplomas equal to other
intergovernmental and government higher educational establishments
of the republic. Amendments in the law on higher education and
post-diploma education cancelled the notion of state diploma. Like in
many other countries, every educational establishment grants diplomas
of its establishment," Martirosyan noted.

Martirosyan said the academy has no obligation to copy the curriculum
of other educational establishments and has the right to have its own,
responding to Lazarian’s statement that the academy’s curriculum
is not approved by the state and differce from the program of other
higher educational establishments.

Reminder: The ministry of education and science opened a lawsuit
against the academy. The first court hearing will be held on December
1 in a district court.

European Regional Academy was opened on October 4, 2002. President
Robert Kocharyan took part in the ceremonial opening. Arthur
Baghdasaryan, ex-speaker of parliament and leader of Orinats Yerkir
party, is the chairman of the board of trustees of the academy.

AD BLITZ SATIRIZES LEBANON’S DIVIDES

Ya Libnan, Lebanon
Nov 28 2006

Provocative Signs Target Pervasive Sectarianism
Beirut – The evening was tense, as most are these days in Beirut,
its Maronite Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Sunni and Shiite Muslims and
Druze perched imprecisely between war and peace.

Malak Beydoun, a young woman, pulled her car into a parking lot in
the Christian neighborhood of Ashrafiyeh. She peered at a billboard
overhead, alarmed and then indignant.

"Parking for Maronites only," it read.

Beydoun recoiled. "How did they know that I was a Shiite?" she
remembered asking herself.

Part provocation, part appeal — with a dose of farce that doesn’t
feel all that farcical — advertisements went up this month on 300
billboards across the Lebanese capital and appeared in virtually
every newspaper in the country. Thousands of e-mails carried the ads
across the Internet to expatriates. Each offered its take on what one
of the campaign’s creative directors called a country on the verge of
"absurdistan" — cooking lessons by Greek Orthodox, building for sale
to Druze, hairstyling by an Armenian Catholic, a fashion agency looking
for "a beautiful Shiite face." At the bottom, the ads read in English,
"Stop sectarianism before it stops us," or, more bluntly in Arabic,
"Citizenship is not sectarianism."

The campaign, designed for free by an ad agency and promoted by a
civil society group, has forced Lebanon to look at itself at a time
when the country is spiraling into one of its worst political crises
in years. The timing was coincidental, the message universal, in a
landscape with ever dwindling common ground: The forces that dragged
Lebanon into one civil war are threatening another.

Many have praised the ads for asking uncomfortable, even taboo
questions about a system in which sectarian affiliation determines
everything from the identity of the president to loyalty to sports
teams. Some have mistaken the campaign for reality. Across the capital,
one in six billboards was torn down, prevented from being put up or
splashed with paint, usually the tactic of choice for conservative
Muslims irked by lingerie ads.

"They didn’t get it," said Fouad Haraki, a 53-year-old shawarma vendor,
idly dragging on a cigarette next to a kerosene tank, across the
street from billboards that had been defaced. "They just read what
was written on top, not what was on the bottom."

The result in his neighborhood, he said, was "a sectarian clamor."

It is almost a cliche that Lebanon is home to 18 religious sects —
from a tiny Jewish community to Shiite Muslims, the country’s largest
single group. The system that diversity has inspired has delivered
minorities a degree of protection unequaled anywhere else in the Arab
world. But it has left Lebanon a country where individual rights and
identity are subsumed within communities and, by default, the personas
of their sometimes feudal leaders, who thrive on that affiliation.

By tradition, the president is Maronite, the prime minister Sunni, the
parliament speaker Shiite. Other posts are reserved for Greek Orthodox,
Greek Catholic and Druze. Boy scouts are organized by community, not
country — the Mahdi Scouts for the Shiites, for instance. Television
stations have their own sectarian bent — the Lebanese Broadcasting
Corp. for Christians, Future for the Sunnis.

Christians are partial to the Sagesse basketball team, Sunnis the
Riyadi team. There are even two Armenian soccer teams — Homenmen
and Homenetmen — one faithful to Armenian leftists, the other to the
community’s right wing. Before this summer’s war, Sunni soccer fans
loyal to Ansar brawled in a stadium with Shiite youths loyal to Nijmeh.

The system, known as confessionalism, dates to long before Lebanon’s
independence in 1943. But there is a growing sense that the decades-old
principles underlying Lebanese politics have grown obsolete. In some
ways, today’s crisis is about the assertion of power — a coup to
its critics — by the long-disenfranchised Shiite community led
by Hezbollah. Hardly anyone can forecast with certainty how the
struggle will end, but almost everyone sees it as a turning point,
a crisis that intersects raw ambition with ideology, foreign policy,
perspective and history, all awash in sectarian combustion.

"This is today a very explosive situation where you have all those
sects being triggered, teased and hammered by all their leaders,"
said Bechara Mouzannar, the regional creative executive director for
H&C Leo Burnett in Beirut, which authored this month’s ad campaign.

He calls himself "a little dazed and confused."

"Something is about to explode, unfortunately," he said.

Added his colleague, Kamil Kuran: "If we keep thinking like this,
the future is going to look like this."

The inspiration for the campaign came almost by coincidence in their
cramped offices, its walls cluttered with ads for L&M cigarettes,
a poster for the film "Reservoir Dogs" and memorabilia from last
year’s protests after the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq
al-Hariri. Those protest signs appear a little dated; "Independence
’05" and "All of us for the nation." On one window hangs a handwritten
quote: "The greatest thing to be achieved in advertising, in my
opinion, is believability."

Manal Naji, a 27-year-old senior art director, had glanced at a
r?sum? tucked underneath another piece of paper. "Christian," it
read. "We were so shocked," she recalled. In the end, it turned out
it was the name of the applicant’s father, but it gave Naji an idea.

"What if it actually existed," she said. "What if it reached the
point of putting it on your job application."

"We wanted the same shocking effect," added Reem Kotob, a 25-year-old
member of the creative team.

This weekend, the two sat with another member of the team, 26-year-old
Yasmina Baz, in the agency’s conference room, looking over the ads
they designed in a burst of energy on that first night and a later
session at a nearby bar, Club Social.

One is a doctor’s plate: "Dr. Mohamed Chatila, Muslim Sunni." Another
is a three-story banner that reads, "For Druzes, Building for Sale."

A license plate is pictured: "A Shiite car," it says in Arabic,
"Shiite" in English. And an ad for a car: "2000 model, in near
perfect condition. Owned and maintained by a Maronite. Never driven
by non-Maronites."

The team took the ads to Amam 05, a grass-roots group that grew out of
last year’s protests. The name means "ahead," an acronym of the Arabic
for civil society. It states its mission, admittedly ambitious, as "a
modern, sovereign state built on non-feudalism, non-confessionalism
and non-clientelism." But even its leaders admit to being a little
glum, given today’s crisis.

"Very frustrated," said Nicole Fayad, one of the activists.

The original idea was to actually hang the signs in the city:
"Maronites only" in a parking lot, "For Druzes" on the side of
a building. But when Asma Andraos, one of the group’s leaders,
approached the owners, they cringed.

"They called me back, and they said they loved it, that I was crazy,
and that there’s no way they could do this," she recalled. She shook
her head. "If I had a building, I wouldn’t have done it, either,"
she said.

They went instead to newspapers, placing the ads in eight papers for
two weeks this month.

One printed them for free, the others at a 50 percent discount. A
billboard agency agreed to post 300 for free for a week. In all,
it cost the group $40,000; Mouzannar estimated it would have cost
more than $500,000 commercially.

But before the billboards went up, they had to go through the
formality of getting permission from the intelligence branch known as
General Security. At first, officials refused; one compared the ads
to Nazi-era segregation. It took two hours of face-to-face meetings
to reach a resolution, by convincing the officials that the campaign
was intended to be ironic.

Then when the billboards went up, 50 were defaced or torn down. Some
residents stopped them from going up in the first place. In Lebanon
and abroad, e-mails flitted back and forth, some of their authors
believing the messages were real.

"People were seriously panicked," Andraos recalled. "Are there really
signs like that in Lebanon now? The mere fact that people think it’s
possible, that there might be signs like that in Lebanon now, means
we’re not really that far off."

Members of the group say people have criticized the timing, and
the group delayed the campaign’s next step after the assassination
last week of a government minister, Pierre Gemayel. But they plan
to distribute as early as this weekend 15,000 business cards with
the same theme at bars and restaurants in Beirut. Each card lists a
person’s name and religious affiliation. Next, they will send copies
of the cards to Lebanon’s 128 legislators.

"We want it to be raised as an issue," Fayad said, "but we don’t have
the pretension to say we have the answer."

At a cafe near downtown, Randy Nahle, a 21-year-old student,
wondered about the way out. His father is Shiite, his mother Maronite
Catholic. The neighborhood he sits in, like virtually every one in
Beirut, has its markers: the posters and religious symbols on walls,
the muezzin or the church bells that identify its affiliation.

For once, he said, something organized spoke to his rejection of being
"categorized or oversimplified."

He smiled at his favorite ads, the ones that identified doctors by
their sect. "It has infiltrated our fabric so much, almost indelibly,"
Nahle said. "If I have an earache, an Orthodox doctor will understand
it better. It’s an Orthodox ear."

He recalled sitting with a Shiite woman at a cafe near the American
University in Beirut. She treated him as a fellow Shiite until he
revealed his mixed background. She looked at him disapprovingly. It’s
bad for the children, she said. "They’re going to come out confused,"
she told him.

"I said, ‘You know, the problem of this country is we don’t have
enough confused people. The problem is we have too many people blindly
convinced by their political orientation, by their religion, by their
community’s superiority.’ "

She smiled, he recalled, and then laughed a little uncomfortably.

2006/11/ad_blitz_satiri.php

RESURGENCE OF NATIONALISM AND ISLAM THREATEN TO TURN TURKEY AWAY FROM WEST
Handan T. Satiroglu

World Politics Watch
Nov 28 2006

Adolf Hitler’s "Mein Kampf" and several conspiracy-themed books
depicting Turkey as under attack by American and European influences
sell briskly in local bookstores. Turkey’s $10 million movie "Valley
of Wolves," the most expensive to date, vilifying Christians and Jews
pulls in record crowds. A 28-year-old lawyer shoots a secularist judge
to death inside Turkey’s High Court. The Islamic and far-right press is
filled with stories of missionaries within Turkish borders converting
"defenseless" Muslims to "infidels."

Masked by Turkey’s 80-year Kemalist embrace of secularism, these
recent trends reflect a hard fact: Beneath the surface of the West’s
most crucial ally in the Muslim world, a dismaying anti-Western blend
of political Islam and nationalism is blossoming. A series of recent
patriotic shows of force — including angry mobs protesting the arrival
of Pope Benedict or deriding Elif Shafak for "insulting Turkishness" in
a growing chorus for restriction of freedom of speech — have revealed
an increasing backlash in Turkey towards Western values. Even as
Turkey aspires to join the European Union, the current administration
led by the pro-Islamic Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made
several attempts to roll back Turkey’s brand of draconian secularism:
criminalization of adultery, passage of punitive taxes on the wine
industry, and decriminalization of Hezbollah-backed Quran courses were
but a few items on the administration’s agenda as recently as 2005.

So how did this Mediterranean nation often promoted by Western
politicians and media as a "model Islamic nation" develop such a
taste for pro-Islamic nationalist sentiments? In a recent Pew poll
asking why Islam’s role is gaining strength in Turkey, the largest
reason cited was "growing immorality in our society." "The current
mood is a reaction to an anxiety felt by some people that some of the
values that are important to us are being sold out by the EU drive,"
Suat Kiniklioglu, head of German Marshall Program in Ankara, commented
in The Christian Science Monitor in 2005. Last year, "the country’s
hopes and forward-looking vision were behind the EU drive.

Now people are becoming confused. There is fatigue, and nationalism
becomes an escape route," he lamented.

Across the ocean, Jim Stroup, former Marine Corps foreign area
officer and now head of Bosphorus Consulting in Istanbul, echoed
similar sentiments: "The form of pro-Islamic nationalism we are
witnessing today is largely defensive and reactionary," he said
in an October interview. "It arises in response to what are seen
as attacks on Turkey’s viability or the honor inherent in being a
Turk." But perceived hemorrhaging of Turkish values hardly explains
why many Turks are taking to the flag and political Islam; ethnic
rivalries between Kurds and Turks and an increasing distrust of the
West, heightened by the Iraqi war and the cold shoulder given by the
EU have also been touted as possible causes for the resurgence of
nationalist pro-Islamic fervor.

A Wounded Pride

It would be simplistic to speak of a single nationalist current in
this country that has long been the guardian of the secular Kemalist
heritage. Indeed, it is viable to speak of two nationalist currents;
one "strongly positive and forward looking," as Stroup sees it, and the
second, injured and angry — the kind that is making headlines during
Turkey’s infamous controversies. The first sees grounds for optimism
on both political and social fronts and revels in the achievements of
the last decade. The country has managed to shake off some its most
dated laws against its ethnic minorities, achieved full EU candidate
status, and tamed inflation from a high 70 percent in 2002 to below
8 percent in 2005. During this period, Turkey has also managed to
attract record flows of direct foreign investment, while doubling
its foreign trade in the last three and a half years.

Articles on this Issue Borat vs. Nazarbayev: An International Incident
France: The Al-Dura Defamation Case and the End of Free Speech More
on Culture Articles by this Author Turkey and Europe: An Invitation
To Dance?

More by Handan T. Satiroglu In the last decade, the positive and
West-looking brand of nationalism prevailed as each subsequent
government led Turkey increasingly closer to the European Union. The
fiery eruption of nationalism that we are witnessing today,
however, feels humiliated and cast aside by its European and American
friends. Suggestions that Turkey is unfit to join the EU, coupled with
"campaigns of everyone from revisionist nationalist groups such as
Armenians and Kurds, and religious personages such as the new pope,"
claims Stroup, which paint Turks as "backward barbarians," gravely
offends the Turkish sense of dignity. To the Turk on the street,
the seemingly endless demands for reform and trickle of criticism
from Europe are not only deeply wounding to Turkish pride, but also
spark some historical resentment.

The perceived sense of public humiliation should come as no surprise;
the EU issue is just the contemporary face of a much older history.

Turkey was, after all, the central figure of a formidable 400-year-old
Empire, now forcibly condensed to its Eurasian backend.

In the same fashion as Arabs, the Turks perceive themselves as heirs
to a rich and diverse Islamic tradition, the focal point of all
things in their heyday. Stroup cautions that we shall see more of the
vengeful, unproductive expressions of wounded pride "that express
the sentiments of ‘enough’ and ‘we are Turks, we ruled the world,
and we will again.’" The ferociously anti-American movie "Valley of
the Wolves" that pits Turks against Americans, he concludes, reflects
this longing for a resurgence of a new Ottoman Empire, combining the
Turkish identity with principles of Islam.

The West — Foe or friend?

The nationalist outburst is not limited to perceived displays of
public humiliation. Inside the country, simmering tensions between
Turks and ethnic Kurds proves to be a fertile cause for nationalist
zeal. While today’s escalating violence is nowhere near the bloodshed
witnessed in the 90s, which claimed the lives of an estimated 35,000,
the potential of Kurdish separatist violence has come back to haunt
the Turkish social landscape. Images of mothers and wives wailing in
wretched sorrow, kneeling over their sehit (martyr) wrapped in the
Turkish flag have become commonplace in the mainstream media. The
emotionally charged funerals are not only public events for the
soldiers who died fighting Kurdish rebels in the rugged southeast,
but are also becoming the focus of growing anti-U.S. sentiment.

Many Turks cite the U.S. invasion in Iraq as the most important
factor in the rise in Kurdish terrorist group PKK’s violence. Despite
stabilization in U.S.-Turkish ties after the immediate fallout of
the war, Turks have come to believe Washington’s inaction against the
PKK is a ploy to divide the Middle East. As Yektan Turkyilmaz, a Ph.D.

candidate at Duke University, observes, the current nationalist
outburst is a reaction to perceived imperialistic goals to divide
Turkey along ethnic lines, "in order to destabilize the entire
region and intensify exploitative efforts." Turkish media is rife
with provocative articles about the pro-American activities of Kurds
in Northern Iraq, as well as stories linking the PKK with the U.S.

occupation force or the CIA. "There is widespread belief in Turkey
that the U.S.’s new Middle East project also entails the formation
of an independent, but satellite, Kurdish state not only in the Iraqi
soil, but also on Turkey’s southeast," Turkyilmaz said in an interview
earlier this month. Convinced that the West is fueling ethnic tensions
in the same spirit with which European influences brought down the
Ottoman Empire, a growing number of Turks have come to "take on an
anti-EU and more specifically anti-American position," he explains.

Add to this the perceived illegitimacy of the U.S.-led war in
Iraq, Turks’ confidence in most Western projects has plummeted to
record levels. Probably nothing characterizes this disillusion more
graphically than the recent figures published by the Pew Research
Center: Seventy-one percent of Turkish people believe that the United
States may someday threaten their country, while a mere 12 percent
held a favorable opinion of Americans. Similarly, positive opinions
about Christians have fallen from 31 percent in 2004 to 16 percent,
just one percent higher than their dislike of Jews.

With only 35 percent of the public in favor of the EU (half of what
it was in 2004), a sense of drift away from the EU accession has also
deepened in the country — a mood that is unlikely to change with the
just-released highly critical "Progress Report" by the EU Commission.

The report lists a host of problems in human rights, freedom of
expression, and judiciary and military reform, and highlights Turkey’s
failure to make concessions about the Cyprus issue. In a thinly veiled
cautionary note, the Commission indicates it will suspend some parts
of the EU negotiations if there is no further progress over Cyprus

Meanwhile, Turks fault the country’s old rivals Cyprus and Greece
for the acrimonious report, claiming they are lobbying Brussels
to take a stance against Turkey’s refusal to open its ports to
Greek-controlled Cyprus. Today, demands that Turkey acknowledge the
Greek part of Cyprus, as well as the changes aimed at bringing Turkey
closer to Europe, are seen by many as undermining the integrity of
Turkey. In a recent poll, 51 percent of Turks claimed to see the
EU-inspired reforms as a reproduction of the widely despised 1920
Treaty of Sèvres, which led to the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire by
Western interests. Echoing a populous sentiment held by everyone from
storekeepers in villages to college students relaxing in cafes, Ahmet,
a cab driver in the boisterous streets of Ankara, expressed the point
in percipient bluntness: "Europe is asking a lot. I believe all these
reforms are designed to weaken the state in order to break it up."

For a very long time Turkey has been touted as a model secular
Muslim state. But the sweeping tide of Muslim nationalism might leave
Turkey more isolated by the West than it has ever been before. For
decades, Ataturk’s Turkey looked to the West for political, social
and economic cues. That, however, is fast changing as a result of
bitter relations with the EU and the Iraqi war, which has everyone
from leftists to Islamists angered. The rocky relationship with the
West would not be so alarming if it weren’t for the shift in Turkish
attitudes towards the Muslim Middle East. Alliances with neighboring
Damascus, Dubai and Tehran, as opposed to Washington and Brussels,
now seem to make more sense to Turks. For the first time since the
inception of the Turkish republic in 1923, a growing number of Turks,
primarily of the populous rural constituency, seem comfortable with
the notion of aligning with the greater Islamic ummah, rather than
traditional American and European allies.

Indeed, Turkey’s next presidential and parliamentary elections
should help determine the country’s direction. If center-right and
center-left parties manage to defeat the Islamists, Turkey’s Western
ambitions might continue. If the current pro-Islamic and nationalist
AKP is victorious, then what will happen is anybody’s guess.

Handan T. Satiroglu is a sociologist and writer who divides her time
between the U.S. and Europe.

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ALIEV, KOCHARIAN IN FRESH KARABAKH TALKS
By Harry Tamrazian in Prague and Emil Danielyan

Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
Nov 28 2006

The presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan were meeting in the Belarusian
capital Minsk late Tuesday for crucial peace talks which international
mediators hoped will produce a breakthrough in their long-running
efforts to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Robert Kocharian and Ilham Aliev came face to face for a third time
in less than a year on the sidelines of a summit of former Soviet
republics making up the Commonwealth of Independent States.

An Armenian diplomatic source told RFE/RL that the talks, held at the
Russian embassy in Belarus, began in the presence of Russia’s Foreign
Minister Sergey Lavrov and the chairman-in-office of the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Belgian Foreign Minister Karel
de Gucht. French, Russian and U.S. diplomats co-chairing the OSCE’s
Minsk Group were also in attendance before the two leaders continued
their discussions in a tete-a-tete format, the source said.

Kocharian’s spokesman, Victor Soghomonian, was quoted by the Russian
Regnum news agency as saying that no statements are likely to be made
after the talks.

The Minsk talks were widely seen as the last real chance to settle
the Karabakh conflict before national elections that are due to take
place in Armenia and Azerbaijan next year and in 2008. The mediators
have indicated that failure to cut a framework peace deal now would
keep the conflict unresolved at least until 2009. They arranged the
latest Armenian-Azerbaijani summit during a visit to Baku and Yerevan
last week. It followed a series of negotiations between the foreign
ministers of the two South Caucasus states.

Those talks reportedly centered on what the Minsk Group co-chairs
call "complementary elements" to their existing peace plan that was
discussed by Aliev and Kocharian during their two previous encounters
earlier this year. The two men failed to reach any far-reaching
agreements, contrary to unusually high expectations of a breakthrough
in the Karabakh peace process.

The Minsk Group plan calls for a gradual resolution of the dispute
that would lead to Armenian withdrawal from most of the Azerbaijani
districts surrounding Karabakh and culminate in a referendum on
the disputed territory’s status. Officials in Yerevan have said the
peace formula is largely acceptable to the Armenian side. Official
Baku’s position on the issue is more ambiguous, with Aliev repeatedly
stating that he will never recognize Karabakh’s secession from Soviet
Azerbaijan.

The unpublicized "complementary elements" are aimed at helping the
parties bridge their differences. Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian
and his Azerbaijani counterpart Elmar Mammadyarov indicated after
their recent talks that they managed to make further progress towards
that goal.

However, Kocharian sought to cool fresh talk of Karabakh peace during
a visit to Germany earlier this month, saying that he is not optimistic
about the success of the Minsk meeting.

EN GARDE! BELIEN VS. PETERS

Pajamas Media, CA
Politics Central
Nov 28 2006

When we read Ralph Peters’ NY Post column last Sunday – The ‘Eurabia’
Myth: Muslims Take Over Europe? Sorry, There’s No Chance – we at
Pajamas Media thought Peters’ ideas were a good subject for debate.

And we could think of no one better to do it than Paul Belien of The
Brussels Journal. Belien accepted our invitation and he did such a
good job we decided his riposte would be the start of a series of
such responses on PJM. EN GARDE, Mr. Peters!

* * *

Ralph Peters’ latest book "Never Quit the Fight" proposes a map of
how America should redraw the borders in the Middle East. This enraged
many Muslims.

Perhaps, having enraged Middle East Muslims, Peters, a retired US
Army intelligence officer, thought it was about time to restore the
balance and enrage non-Muslim Europeans.

Last Sunday he published an op-ed piece in the New York Post, entitled
The ‘Eurabia’ Myth: Muslims Take Over Europe? Sorry, There’s No Chance.

Peters’ argument is that Muslim immigrants will never be able to
conquer Europe because the Europeans are "world-champion haters"
who will never let "impoverished Muslim immigrants" take over
their societies. On the contrary, Peters asserts, the "continent
that perfected genocide and ethnic cleansing" will "over-react with
stunning ferocity." Europeans, Peters reminds us, "are just better
[than Muslims] at the extermination process. […] It’s the difference
between the messy Turkish execution of the Armenian genocide and the
industrial efficiency of the Holocaust. Hey, when you love your work,
you get good at it."

Hence, "Europe’s Muslims will be lucky just to be deported," Peters
says. Fortunately for these Muslims, however, Peters is more than
willing to deploy the U.S. Army in Europe "to guarantee the safe
evacuation of Europe’s Muslims." He even invites a good number of
them to settle in America since the United States has such a good
track record with Muslim immigrants, who "have a higher income level
than our national average."

Ralph Peters’ diatribe against the Europeans reminds me of
those anti-American Europeans who accuse Americans of being the
"world-champions of genocide." To prove their point they invariably
refer to the plight of the American Indians, once the rulers from the
Redwood Forest to the New York Island, now exterminated and confined
to reservations. Though the number of people voicing such opinions is
growing in Europe I do not take their vicious arguments seriously. I
do not take Peters’ vicious anti-Europeanism seriously either, though
I have noticed that this type of American anti-Europeanism is growing
as well.

While visiting the US recently I met a conservative professor who
told me almost literally the same thing as Peters. He, too, said
that Europeans were ineradicably vicious, that hating others is in
their blood and that they can never be cured of their mass-murdering
impulse. He, too, said that, rather than taking native European
immigrants in, America should open its doors to Muslims, because
those people "can at least be respected while Europeans can only
be despised." He even added that the biggest mistake the U.S. made
during WWII was to nuke Japan instead of Europe.

I can understand why these conservatives have come to despise Europe.

They despise it because it refused to assist the U.S. in Iraq and
because it refuses to stand with Israel. They know well enough,
however, that the reason why European governments, such as that
of France, do not stand up against radical Muslim regimes in the
Middle East, such as Iran’s, is because these governments fear the
large minorities of Muslims within their own borders. In short, they
despise Europe because it has lost the will to fight for its own
survival. Nevertheless, they blame Europe for exactly the opposite
reason.

Their contempt has turned to hatred, which is understandable because
it is all too human, but it is nevertheless utterly wrong.

Those who despise Europeans for having lost their willingness to
fight back against Muslim arrogance are now accusing them of wanting
to exterminate the Muslims. Those who have come to hate the Europeans
are now saying that Europeans are "exacerbating fear and hatred."

They claim that Europeans are contemplating a second holocaust –
this time with the Muslims as their victims.

In their hatred for Europe some conservatives even seem to have begun
to embrace the Muslims. Stephens is prepared to invite the latter
to come to America, thus welcoming to the U.S. the cause of Europe’s
disease today. It is said that hatred makes people blind, and Peters’
article in America’s most conservative newspaper is the best example
of this.

As a European who loves America I belong to a minority. I edit an
online magazine The Brussels Journal which tries to rally the small
band of pro-American Europeans and warn America not to make the fatal
mistakes we have made in Europe.

I can assure you that "Eurabia" is real enough. We have received
threats from extremist muslims, we have been harassed by the
authorities. I was present when earlier this year a group of scholars
met in The Hague to discuss Eurabia. I saw how they had to do so
anonymously, under assumed names and under police protection.

Eurabia is not a myth. Eurabia is all too real.

We see how the inner cities and suburbs in various European countries
are degenerating into "no go" areas, where people get killed, where
the police no longer venture and where radical Muslims hold sway. The
French authorities have published a list of 751 "sensitive urban
areas," which are no longer under the control of the authorities and
which have become, as Daniel Pipes remarked, the "Dar al-Islam, the
place where Muslims rule." Almost 5 million people, or 8% of the French
population, live in these "sensitive urban areas." But, apparently,
there is hope, because here is Ralph Peters in The New York Post,
offering to have the U.S. intervene and evacuate the inhabitants
to America!

Americans do not realize how dramatic the situation is in Europe
today. The Europeans are running. Instead of fighting they are
leaving. They are leaving the cities for the countryside. In my
home town of Antwerp 5,000 immigrants move in every year while 4,000
Antwerpians move out. Many Dutch are leaving their highly urbanized
country for places such as rural Norway. Some are leaving Europe
altogether.

The Netherlands and Germany have more emigrants than immigrants today,
and in other countries, such as Belgium, Britain and Sweden the number
of emigrants is rising. These people are not driven by hatred, they
are driven by despair and the hope for a better future which they
realize their Eurabian home countries are no longer able to provide.

Paul Belien is editor of The Brussels Journal and an adjunct fellow
of the Hudson Institute.

eurabia_is_real_enough_unfortu.php

GHOSTS OF MASSACRED ARMENIANS COULD HAUNT TURKEY’S CHANCES To Join European Union
By Sherwood Ross

CounterCurrents.org, India
Nov 28 2006

Turkey’s bid to join the European Union could suffer by its refusal
to admit the genocide of its Armenian Christian population nearly a
century ago.

When European Union leaders meet in Brussels Dec. 14-15, the debate
to admit Turkey likely will hinge on, among other issues, its failure
to open its ports and airports to Cyprus, which opposes all talk of
membership. The Netherlands, Germany, Austria and France are cool to
admitting Turkey and are backing Cyprus.

Lingering in the background, though, will be the ghosts of the
Armenian genocide, a crime Turkey has denied at every turn and is still
"investigating" to this day.

As recently as March, 2005, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
called for an "impartial study" into the genocide as if the facts of
the slaughter of a milion Armenians were ever in doubt.

When the "Young Turk" nationalists created the Republic of Turkey
after World War I, they refused to punish the perpetrators of the
1915 genocide. Mustapha Kemal formed a new government in 1920 that
forced the Allies to sign the Treaty of Lausanne, ceding Anatolia,
home of the Armenians, to Turkish control. Two years earlier Anatolia
had been parceled out to Italy and Greece after the Ottoman Empire’s
surrender to the Allies.

As author Elizabeth Kolbert put it in the November 6th The New Yorker,
"For the Turks to acknowledge the genocide would thus mean admitting
that their country was founded by war criminals and that its existence
depended on their crimes."

"Turkey has long sought to join the European Union, and, while a
history of genocide is clearly no barrier to membership, denying it
may be; several European governments have indicated that they will
oppose the country’s bid unless it acknowledges the crimes committed
against the Armenians."

So opposed is Turkey to discussion of the subject, when the
U.S. Congress sought a resolution in 2000 to memorialize the Armenian
genocide, Turkey threatened to refuse the U.S. use of its Incirlik
airbase and warned it might break off negotiations for the purchase
of $4.5-billion worth of Bell Textron attack helicopters.

President Clinton informed House Speaker /Dennis Hastert passage of the
resolution could "risk the lives" of Americans and that put an end to
the bill. Like his predecessor, President George Bush has bowed down
to Ankara’s wishes and issues Armenian Remembrance Day proclamations
"without ever quite acknowledging what it is that’s being remembered,"
The New Yorker points out.

The cover up denies Turkey’s historic victimization of some 2-million
Christian residents treated as second-class citizens by special
taxation, harassment, and extortion. After Sultan Abdulhamid II came
to power in 1876, he closed Armenian schools, tossed their teachers
in jail, organized Kurdish regiments to plague Armenian farmers and
even forbid mention of the word "Armenia" in newspapers and textbooks.

In the last decade of the 20th Century, Armenians were already being
slaughtered by the thousands but systematic extermination began April
24, 1915, with the arrest of 250 prominent Armenians in Istanbul. In
a purge anticipating Hitler’s slaughter of European Jewry, Armenians
were forced from their homes, the men led off to be tortured and
shot, the women and children shipped off to concentration camps in
the Syrian desert.

At the time, the U.S. consul in Aleppo wrote Washington, "So severe has
been the treatment that careful estimates place the number of survivors
at only 15 percent of those originally deported. On this basis the
number surviving even this far being less than 150,0000…there seems
to have been about 1,000,000 persons lost up to this date."

In our own time, the Turkish Historical Society published "Facts on
the Relocation of Armenians (1914-1918"). It claims the Armenians
were relocated during the war "as humanely as possible" to keep them
from aiding the Russian armies.

In 2005, Turkish Nobel Prize recipient Orhan Pamuk, was said to
have violated Section 301 of the Rurkish penal code for "insulting
Turkishness" in an interview he gave to a Swiss newspaper. "A million
Armenians were killed and nobody but me dares to talk about it,"
Pamuk said. Also, Turkish novelist Elif Shafak was brought up on a
like charge for having a fictional character in her "The Bastard of
Istanbul" discuss the genocide.

Fortunately for him, Turkish historian Tanar Akcam resides in
America. His new history, "A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide
and the Question of Turkish Responsibility"(Metropolitan) otherwise
probably would land him in jail.

As there are few nations that have not dabbled in a bit of genocide,
one wonders why Turkey persists in its denials? After all, genocide
is hardly a bar to UN admission or getting a loan from the World Bank.

Turkey has every right to membership in the same sordid club as Spain,
Great Britain, Belgium, Russia, Germany, Italy, Japan, France, China,
and America. Why must it be so sensitive? Let them confess and sit
down with the other members to enjoy a good cup of strong coffee.

They’ll be made to feel right at home, as long as they don’t mention
Tibet, Iraq, Cambodia, the Congo, Chechnya, Timor, Darfur, Rwanda ad
nauseum. After all, there are ghosts everywhere.

Sherwood Ross is an American reporter and columnist.

ross291106.htm

ALARM AT CALL FOR ABOLISHMENT OF SWISS RACISM LAW
By Youri Hazanov

European Jewish Press, Belgium
Nov 28 2006

GENEVA (EJP)— The Democratic Union of the Centre, the right-wing
party that won a majority in the last Swiss elections, has proposed to
the abolishment of Switzerland’s anti-racist law, arguing it impedes
freedom of speech.

The Federation of the Swiss Jewish communities has expressed concern
after the declaration by Ueli Maurer, the Democratic Union’s leader and
previously Switzerland’s justice minister, and members of his party,
known as UDC.

The law was adopted on Jan. 1, 1995, and forbids any discrimination
against a person or group on the basis of race, ethnicity or
religion. It also mandates punishment for denying or attempting to
justify a genocide or crime against humanity, especially the Holocaust.

The UDC holds that the law is too abstract and that Swiss do not
understand what they can and cannot say in public. Maurer said his
party was fighting for freedom of speech in Switzerland, and that
everyone should have the right to express what they thought, even if
it was not right.

Moreover, the UDC charges that the law has encouraged a passive form
of racism. They say the penal law is not the best way to combat to
revisionism, and that more faith should be placed in people’s ability
to discern between right and wrong.

Still, others argue the law is not harsh enough.

Tobias Hirschi, a member of the extreme-right party PSN, was recently
acquitted by a Solothurn court after being charged for carrying a
banner with the slogan "Who directs the workers?" next to a Star of
David in a May 2005 demonstration.

Hirschi was accused of tapping into the Nazi ideology that led to
the Holocaust, but the judge ruled that although the banner was
anti-Semitic, there was no link to the Nazis. As such, it did not
violate the anti-racism law.

The debate on the law began after Swiss Minister of Justice Christophe
Blocher, a former UDC leader, declared during a visit to Turkey that
everyone has the right to an opinion and the right to express it,
and that the law should be abolished.

It was enacted in another case in 2005 after a July visit by Turkish
politician Dogu Perincek to Lausanne. Perincek denied a genocide of
Armenians by Turkey took place in 1915. The Swiss government, which
has officially recognized the genocide, charged him with negating it.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress