March 9th, 2007 by
Los Angeles Times
George Washington and Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, had much in common. Both men led successful wars of independence; both fought ferociously against the British; both became the first president and “father” of their respective countries, and both proved to be uncommonly forward-looking statesmen who made sure their new republics were secular democracies.
And yet the national cultures that the two men helped to create are vastly different, which explains partly (if glibly) why the United States produced YouTube while Turkey is producing ridiculous justifications for banning it.
Though Washington’s name graces the nation’s capital and currency, it is also used for such crass purposes as selling used cars and mattresses. Ataturk, on the other hand, who died in 1938, remains the object of a cult of personality, one in which merely insulting his memory is grounds for imprisonment. That’s why the file-sharing company YouTube was banned from Turkey this week after it hosted a sophomoric video titled “Kemal Gay Turk.” [Read More]
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March 8th, 2007 by
Los Angeles Times
Looking to check out the latest videos of cavorting kittens and lovelorn lip-synchers on YouTube? If you live in Turkey, you’re out of luck.
After receiving a court order, Turkey’s largest telecommunications provider Wednesday blocked access to the popular video-sharing website because it featured clips that were seen as insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.
The censorship is evidence of YouTube’s growing social and political resonance. It also marks the latest battle between Web titans such as YouTube’s corporate parent, Google Inc., and foreign governments over free speech on the Internet as the companies expand into new markets.
YouTube and other technologies that allow users to share information “shift power away from central institutions to communities,” Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li said. “Whenever you hold a lot of power, you’re very threatened when that power is taken away from you. That’s what the Internet does, and that is what YouTube is doing.” [Read More]
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March 7th, 2007 by
A Turkish politician went on trial Tuesday in Switzerland for denying that the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War I amounted to genocide.
Dogu Perincek, head of the Turkish Workers’ Party, called the Armenian genocide “an international lie” during a speech in the Swiss city of Lausanne in July 2005.
The state prosecutor has called for a six month prison term for violating a 1995 Swiss law that bans denying, belittling or justifying any genocide. The maximum penalty is three years.
Perincek told the Lausanne criminal court that there had been no genocide against Armenians, but there had been “reciprocal massacres,” according to Swiss Radio.
“I defend my right to freedom of expression,” Swiss Radio quoted Perincek, 65, as saying in German. “There was no genocide, therefore this law cannot apply to my remarks.” [Read More]
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March 5th, 2007 by
As the nearly century-old debate rages half a world away about whether Turks committed genocide against Armenians, members of both cultures came together yesterday to commemorate what some see as the latest casualty of the conflict.
Hrant Dink, an Armenian-Turkish editor, was slain in Istanbul in January. His newspaper columns had long demanded respect and improved conditions for Armenians and recognition of the deep and tortured history of Armenians in Turkey. Dink was gunned down in broad daylight Jan. 19 on a sidewalk outside his office — allegedly by a teenage boy.
Hundreds of Armenian-Americans — and some Turkish-Americans — gathered yesterday for a commemoration known as a Karsunk,the traditional end of the mourning period of a person’s death and an opportunity to reflect on a person’s legacy. [Read More]
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March 1st, 2007 by
At a recent dinner party on the shores of the Bosporus, the bookish chatter among the Turkish writers and academics present took a sudden grim turn: Are you under police protection yet?
“We were all comparing notes about which of us had only one bodyguard and which of us had two, and we joked a little about being in competition with each other over this,” said journalist and novelist Perihan Magden, who was among those placed under police protection after threats by ultranationalists. “It was comical, but also very tragic.”
In the wake of the January assassination in Istanbul of prominent ethnic Armenian editor Hrant Dink, Turkey’s intellectual community is feeling under siege to a degree not experienced in decades. [Read More]
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