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The ban on the Ülkü Ocaklari (Idealist Hearths), also known by the moniker “Gray Wolves,” is framed by various national parliaments as a crackdown on Turkish far-right extremism. In its annual Turkey report released last month, the European Parliament urged the EU and its member states to consider adding the Gray Wolves to the EU terrorist list and to ban their associations. This constitutes the first official bid to link the organization to terrorism. Firing back a rapid denunciation, Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesperson Tanju Bilgiç described the Gray Wolves as part of “a legal movement, which is associated with a long-established political party in Turkey.”

The Ülkücü movement is the outgrowth of the far-right Nationalist Action Party (which later became the Nationalist Movement Party, MHP) led by the party chairperson Devlet Bahçeli, a seasoned politician who has commanded do-or-die loyalty among the party’s rank and file since taking over from Alparslan Turkes after his death in 1997. The Idealist Hearths or Gray Wolves began as the party’s youth movement in the 1960s but gained notoriety for its daredevil brand of Turkish nationalism and nefarious role in armed violence in the Cold War modus operandi of the 1970s and 1980s that targeted so-called internal enemies in the murky underworld of the Turkish “deep state.” Among the more notorious members of the Gray Wolves is Mehmet Ali Ağca, the gunman behind the assassination attempt 40 years ago against Pope John Paul II, said to be “in revenge” for an attack on the Grand Mosque of Mecca.

Legend, folklore, and a romanticized history of conquest and victory are central to the Ülkücü worldview, not unlike other ideologically organized movements elsewhere. In Turkic mythology, a gray wolf in pre-Islamic times led ancient Turkish tribes out of the wilderness of Central Asia, where they had been trapped for centuries following military defeat, and into salvation.

An astonishing 45 million documents were ripped up, and stuffed into rubbish bags

The reunified German state insisted that the files be reconstructed, and a team of 30 in Nuremberg set about manually sticking the documents together using old-fashioned puzzle methods, tweezers and lots of sticky tape. But in the course of 15 years, just 350 sackfuls of paper have been reassembled this way: completing the task, it was estimated, would take at least another 400 years.

the E-puzzler, the most sophisticated digital pattern-recognition system in the world

Western-produced surveillance technology sold to one authoritarian government became an investigative tool of choice to gather information about political dissidents -- and silence them

“The technology is becoming very sophisticated, and the only thing limiting it is how deeply governments want to snoop into lives,” says Rob Faris, research director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Surveillance is typically a state secret, and we only get bits and pieces that leak out.” Some industry insiders now say their own products have become dangerous in the hands of regimes where law enforcement crosses the line to repression.

Across the Middle East in recent years, sales teams at Siemens, Nokia Siemens, Munich-based Trovicor and other companies have worked their connections among spy masters, police chiefs and military officers to provide country after country with monitoring gear, industry executives say. Their story is a window into a secretive world of surveillance businesses that is transforming the political and social fabric of countries from North Africa to the Persian Gulf. Monitoring centers, as the systems are called, are sold around the globe by these companies and their competitors, such as Israel-based Nice Systems Ltd. (NICE), and Verint Systems Inc. (VRNT), headquartered in Melville, New York. They form the heart of so- called lawful interception surveillance systems. The equipment is marketed largely to law enforcement agencies tracking terrorists and other criminals. The toolbox allows more than the interception of phone calls, e-mails, text messages and Voice Over Internet Protocol calls such as those made using Skype. Some products can also secretly activate laptop webcams or microphones on mobile devices. They can change the contents of written communications in mid-transmission, use voice recognition to scan phone networks, and pinpoint people’s locations through their mobile phones. The monitoring systems can scan communications for key words or recognize voices and then feed the data and recordings to operators at government agencies.

Turkish nationalists have been trying to reframe Talaat’s historical role as a hero for a long time, but with increasing intensity in recent times. As a result, he has become a hero for parts of the Turkish public who have been fed a mixture of the official state ideology and its fabricated history as well as the slightly varying narrative lines of nationalists and neo-nationalists in more recent times

“There is a clear document trail connecting him to the genocide during these years, and he ended his career as grand vizier of the empire in 1918, when he fled to Germany. Along with other leaders, he was court-martialed in 1919 and sentenced in absentia. He was not returned by Germany to Ottoman authorities, but he was assassinated there in 1921 by Armenian Revolutionary Federation [ARF] member Soghomon Tehlirian,”

Talaat Pasha has remained a powerful symbol for Turkish denialism. His sublimation is the work of Turkish ultranationalists, the center right and the bulk of Islamists, but the myth is also respected by large numbers of Kemalists, the leading circles of the Republican People’s Party [CHP] and some parts of the marginal Turkish left,

“There was some dispute about enshrining sharia,” he said, “that’s why we had to push away the controversy and we settled for what was said in the 1959 constitution about Tunisia as an Arab country.” 

there will be no sharia or anti-blasphemy laws in the Tunisian constitution

Rabbi Benjamin Hatab leads Tunisia’s main synagogue and said that Ghannouchi had reached out to the country’s Jewish community. "He declared that the country would not change and that the only difference would be that it would be more democratic than Ben Ali's Tunisia,” the Jewish leader told Ynet.

Germany's leading newspapers have together offered their support to Turkish opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet, which has been raided by authorities, with the publication of a guest editorial.Thirty-seven German newspapers and their websites, including Spiegel Online, Die Welt, Die Zeit and Sueddeutsche Zeitung, ran the article on Tuesday as German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier visited Turkey.

"When the existence of civil society is threatened, then democracy is also threatened.”

Architecture has been part of that work. The unspoken assumption was that houses should fit together along alleys and streets, that no private house should be so ostentatious as to stand higher than the mosque or the church, and that the city should be a compact and unified place, built with local materials according to a shared vocabulary of forms. Thick walls of stone created interiors that would be cool in summer and warm in winter with the minimum use of energy. The souk was conceived as a public place, embellished appropriately so as to represent the heart of the city, the place where the free trade of goods expressed the free mingling of the communities.

The old souk of Aleppo, tragically destroyed in the current Syrian conflict, was a perfect example of this, the delicate and life-affirming center of a city that has been in continuous habitation for a longer time than any other. That city rose to eminence as the final station on the Silk Road, the place where treasures were unloaded from the backs of camels coming from Mesopotamia onto the carts that would take them to the Mediterranean ports. The fate of this city, which has, in the 21st century, faced destruction for the first time in 5,000 years, is a fitting emblem of what is happening to the Middle East today.

it is not only civil conflict that has threatened the ancient cities of the Middle East. Long before the current crisis there arrived new ways of building, which showed scant respect for the old experience of settlement and disregarded the unwritten law of the Arab city that no building should reach higher than the mosque, it being the first need of the visitor to spy out the minaret, and so to find the place of prayer. These new ways of building came, like so much else, from the West, first through colonial administration and then through foreign “advisors,” often taking advantage of the insecure land-law of the region, introduced by the Ottoman land code of 1858. By the time France had been granted the mandate to govern Syria in 1923, modernist building types, the mania for roads and motorized “circulation,” the idea that cities should be disaggregated into “zones”—residential, commercial, industrial, and so on—and the obsession with hygiene had all made their destructive mark on the urban fabric

Egyptian authorities have forced a Guardian journalist to leave the country after she reported on a scientific study that said Egypt was likely to have many more coronavirus cases than have been officially confirmed.

She cited a study accepted for publication in the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, which had analysed flight records, traveller data and infection rates to estimate that Egypt could have had 19,310 coronavirus cases by early March, with the lower end of the range about 6,000 cases. The Egyptian government’s official count at the time period covered by the data was that three people were infected.

On 17 March, Michaelson’s press accreditation was revoked. The Guardian offered the Egyptian authorities the chance to write a letter for publication rebutting its report or the Canadian study, but received no response to the offer.

The Saudi government’s new “instant visa” fast tracks the process of hiring foreign workers for nascent firms, and is accompanied by a one-year grace period on Saudization requirements. Coming in the wake of aggressive moves to limit job opportunities for migrants, including sector-wide bans on the employment of migrant workers, the new policy highlights the challenges of striking the right balance between creating jobs for Saudis and supporting Saudi businesses. The debate is hindered by fundamental analytical errors that proponents of each side make when arguing their case.

Decades of providing Saudi businesses with an inexhaustible supply of low-cost workers has made them into primitive enterprises: their business model scarcely develops beyond importing foreign goods, putting low-cost foreign hands to work, having a couple of Saudi overseers—usually the establishment’s proprietors—and reselling the imported goods domestically with minimal value added.

Counterintuitively, a key flaw in this commercial model is its ability to effortlessly adapt to changes in the economic climate. When business is booming, new workers can be hired instantly at exactly the same wage as before. And when the economy contracts, such as when oil prices fall, the migrant workers on the company’s books are made redundant at the stroke of a pen, stabilizing the firm’s finances. In both cases, managers fixate on migrant workers as the primary control variable, at the expense of considerations relating to productivity and innovation.

In a virtual library found in Minecraft -— a game where users can build virtual worlds out of blocks and create their own storylines — users can access the work of journalists who have been killed, jailed or exiled by governments, including articles by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The project, launched by Reporters Without Borders, design collective Blockworks, advertising agency DDB Germany and production company MediaMonks, gives users access to articles banned in five countries that rank poorly on the nongovernmental organization's World Press Freedom Index: Egypt, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam.

Work in the library, launched Thursday to mark the World Day Against Cyber Censorship, is available in English and the original language in which the texts were written.

"Young people grow up without being able to form their own opinions. By using Minecraft, the world's most popular computer game, as a medium, we give them access to independent information,"

it is one of the endless ironies of Turkey that the liberals and democrats who were among the first to oppose the putschists’ sinister attempts to overthrow the A.K.P. government would also become the first to be punished and silenced by that very same government

what we do not know are the effects of the ongoing crackdown on those of us who are “free.” As one commentator wrote on social media, “If all these writers are ‘inside,’ none of the other writers can really said to be ‘outside.’ ”

Since the Arab Spring, I have had many exchanges with writers from “wobbly geographies”—Egypt, Pakistan, Libya, Tunisia. We all know that when you are a novelist from such territories, you do not have the luxury of being apolitical. And although every discipline in the arts is susceptible to degeneration and manipulation under authoritarian regimes, fiction is particularly at risk in such circumstances—prose, rather than poetry. In “The Prevention of Literature,” George Orwell considered the fates of the two genres under nondemocratic rule. A poet could survive despotism relatively unscathed, unhurt, Orwell thought, but not a prose writer, who could neither control nor limit the range of his thoughts without “killing his inventiveness.” Orwell examined the ways in which literature had withered away in Germany, Italy, and Russia whenever autocracy was on the rise. Then he warned future writers, “Poetry might survive in a totalitarian age, and certain arts or half-arts, such as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial, but the prose writer would have no choice between silence or death.”

By the time Albert Eckstein died in 1950 at the age of 59, he had served as a German soldier in the First World War, suffered exile at the hands the Nazi Party, and helped to lower the rate of child death in Turkey that claimed nearly one in every two children in rural Anatolia during the 1930s.

Covering the period from 1935-39, the Eckstein Albums document a medical survey of maternal fertility and infant mortality in a country that had only come into being just over a decade earlier, following the Ottoman Empire's defeat in the First World War.

the social and economic realities of rural Anatolian villages

The civilian wing of the Sudanese state is bankrupt but unwilling to confront powerful generals, who control a sprawling network of companies and keep the central bank and the Ministry of Finance on life support to gain political power

Chronic shortages of basic goods and soaring inflation have come to define the life of ordinary Sudanese. In villages and towns that rely on gasoline pumps – such as Port Sudan – the taps have often run dry, forcing people to queue to buy barrels of water.

Western countries and international institutions have let the civilian wing of the government down: they failed to provide the financial and political support that would allow Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok to hold his own against the generals

Iran unleashed a wave of missiles and drones on the headquarters of three separate Iranian Kurdish opposition groups based in Iraqi Kurdistan today, killing at least nine people and wounding 32 others, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of Iraq’s Ministry of Health said, adding that it expected the death toll to rise.

An estimated 10 million Kurds, mainly Sunnis, who make up around a tenth of Iran’s population have long been denied political and cultural rights. At least 1,500 Kurdish activists were arrested in the last days’ tumult. The Kurdish majority areas in the country’s northwest, alongside Balochistan in the southwest, are among the least developed. The demonstrations over Amini’s murder first erupted in Tehran but rapidly spread to Iranian Kurdistan.

Persian demonstrators are chanting “Kurdistan is the eyes and the light of Iran,” Mohtadi noted. “The Kurds, instead of being perceived as the usual suspects, are now hailed as being at the vanguard of popular protests. It’s unprecedented,”

Rather than simply serving as crude propaganda for Erdoğan’s regime, Contemporary Turkish and World History aspires to do something more ambitious: embed Turkey’s dominant ideology in a whole new nationalist narrative. Taken in its entirety, the book synthesizes diverse strands of Turkish anti-imperialism to offer an all-too-coherent, which is not to say accurate, account of the last hundred years. It celebrates Atatürk and Erdoğan, a century apart, for their struggles against Western hegemony. It praises Cemal Gürsel and Necmettin Erbakan, on abutting pages, for their efforts to promote Turkish industrial independence. And it explains what the works of both John Steinbeck [Con Şıtaynbek] and 50 Cent [Fifti Sent] have to say about the shortcomings of American society.

Turkey has long had competing strains of anti-Western, anti-Imperialist and anti-American thought. In the foreign policy realm, Erdogan’s embrace of the Mavi Vatan doctrine showed how his right-wing religious nationalism could make common cause with the left-wing Ulusalcı variety.[5] This book represents a similar alliance in the historiographic realm, demonstrating how the 20th century can be rewritten as a consistent quest for a fully independent Turkey.

Ankara is currently being praised for sending indigenously developed drones to Ukraine and simultaneously criticized for holding up Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership. Contemporary Turkish and World History sheds light on the intellectual origins of both these policies