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Ed Webb

Turks intolerant of religious diversity, says poll - 1 views

www.todayszaman.com/...gious-diversity-says-poll.html

Turkey religions tolerance opinion poll data ethnicity

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Oct 09 - No Cached
  • Turks intolerant of religious diversity, says poll A survey conducted by a private research company has shown that a great majority of the public does not want atheists, Jews or Christians for neighbors and also disapproves of their employment at top state institutions, the Radikal daily reported yesterday.
  • Fifty-seven percent of 1,108 people surveyed in the poll said they did not want to have atheist neighbors, while 42 percent said they did not want Jewish neighbors and 35 percent of respondents were reluctant to have Christian neighbors
  • When participants were asked whether they have close friends who are Alevi, Kurd, atheist, Greek, Armenian or Jewish, 64 percent stated that they had a Kurdish friend, while 53 percent said they had a friend from the Alevi community.
rafasln

First draft of the 'Başbuğ doctrine' - 0 views

www.hurriyet.com.tr/...11433645.asp

shared by rafasln on 15 Apr 09 - Cached
  • İlker Başbuğ suggested ways to build healthy relations between the military and the government, used the phrase “the people of Turkey” instead of “Turks,” stated that cultural identities should be protected and emphasized that the military has never been opposed to religion, only its abuse by politicians.
  • The civilian-military relationship in Turkey is often problematic, with the powerful military frequently interfering in politics, staging coups in 1961, 1972 and 1980. The European Union has pressed Turkey to harmonize its rules with those of the EU, finding unsatisfactory the steps the government has taken thus far to decrease the military’s influence in politics.
  • The pious parts of our country love their army and trust it," he said. "The army of the Turkish people is the nation itself. It comes from the nation and is for the nation." In the second part of his speech, Başbuğ looked into the fight against terrorism and emphasized that the struggle against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, was not an ethnic conflict
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  • "Let’s remember what Atatürk said: ’It’s the people of Turkey that founded the Republic of Turkey.’ If you say, ’the Turks’ the whole meaning will fade away. Who founded the Republic of Turkey? The people of Turkey. Atatürk is pointing at all parts of the nation. No ethnic and religious distinction. If he had used the word ’Turk’ instead of the people of Turkey than it would be an ethnic definition," he said.
  • Responding to the claims by religious groups, Başbuğ said: "The military has never been against religion. What we oppose is the abuse of religion for personal and political interests," he said. "Arguing that secularism is against religion and saying the military is an anti-religion institution is the gravest unfairness against Atatürk and his military."
Ed Webb

Erdoğan's Turkey and the Problem of the 30 Million - War on the Rocks - 0 views

warontherocks.com/...-the-problem-of-the-30-million

Turkey AKP Erdogan politics media authoritarianism parties minorities Kurds left nationalism xenophobia

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Erdoğan’s brand is waning in the cities, the coasts, and among young people. Neither the new Erdoğan-shaped presidential system, nor his expansionist foreign policy are popular in these parts. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, chronic unemployment and inflation extinguished any hope of him bouncing back in the polls. Despite his total control over the state, mainstream media, and major capital groups, the president is unlikely to ever get much more than half of the popular vote.
  • The Erdoğan government now faced a question that all successful populist regimes must solve: What to do with the minority? They certainly can’t be granted free and fair elections, lest they attain the means to exact revenge. Nor can they be deprived of all their rights of representation, lest they be driven to revolt or treason. So how does a very slim majority of a country suppress the other half indefinitely? How does it rest easy, knowing that its hegemony is locked in?
  • The Erdoğan government surely knows that an attempt to “nationalize” all of the 30 million would be unrealistic. Rather, it seeks to separate the leftists and Kurds among them and brand them as terrorists, then turn around and securely pull the center opposition into the nationalist opposition.
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  • the government first needs to contain the spread of the left
  • The left, however, puts up genuine systemic resistance: They reject the idea that the Turkish nation is pure and infallible. Like leftists elsewhere, they deconstruct official history, focusing on massacres of minorities and exploitation of the working classes. There is also an inextricable tie to the Kurdish movement, which in turn is linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) — an insurgency that has been waging war on the Turkish state for over four decades. The connection between the non-Kurdish left and the Kurdish movement is complicated and has gone through various stages in the recent past. For the Turkish right, there is little difference between leftist subversion and Kurdish insurrection. “I joined the police to beat up Communists” a crescent-mustached officer once told me, and he was talking about arresting Kurdish protesters.
  • Many in the urban middle class, who are fairly indifferent about Kurdish rights, wanted to see Demirtas grow the HDP into a Turkish-Kurdish version of the European Greens. The idea at the time was to also expand into a grand center-left coalition that would prevent Erdoğan from establishing his hyper-centralized presidential system. Their momentum was cut short when months after the coup attempt, in December 2016, the government detained Demirtas on charges of terrorism and began a ruthless crackdown on the HDP’s activities that has since only gained in intensity.
  • The second part of the government’s strategy is to keep the left — crippled and branded as terrorists — within the political system. While Turkey’s politics is polarized between the government and the opposition, this creates a second polarization, this time within the opposition camp. It is this second polarity where the vast majority of political discourse takes place. From the perspective of a nationalistic system of valuation, in which being “local and national” reigns supreme, this is a fatal flaw. On the one hand, the various factions of the opposition can’t win a national vote unless they partner with the HDP to form a 50 percent bloc against Erdoğan. On the other, the nationalists within the opposition cannot be seen working with the “terrorists” of the pro-Kurdish left.
  • the People’s Republican Party (CHP), Turkey’s founding and currently main opposition party, has tried to contain this “patriot-terrorist” polarity. Its umbrella candidates for the presidency, ranging from the soporific Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu in 2014, to the firebrand Muharrem Ince in 2018, have failed. In the 2019 municipal elections, however, the CHP’s mayoral candidates did well, uniting the Kemalist-nationalist camp, Islamists, liberal cosmopolitans, as well as leftists and even some sympathizers of the Kurdish movement. These candidates won against Erdoğan’s men in all major cities, including Ankara and (in a repeat election) Istanbul. This was the first, and so far only, time Erdoğan’s containment of the left had been breached.
  • the Erdoğan government finally seeks to pull the entire bloc to the right. This means focusing on liberal-minded urbanites whose nationalism has lapsed, and rekindling their faith in the national mythos. This is the most challenging aspect of its effort, and where it has done most poorly.
  • restructuring of the media. For the past few years, the government has been taking over media channels that centrist voters traditionally follow, then gradually shifting their tone to favor the government. The Dogan Media Group, owner of Hurriyet (Turkey’s former newspaper of record) and CNN Turk (a 24-hour TV news channel) used to cater to a secular, urban, and increasingly progressive audience. The group’s main audience overlapped with the centrist-opposition CHP’s voter base, whose older members are secularist-nationalists and younger members (often their children) are leftist-progressives. In March 2018, the media group was sold to an Erdoğan-friendly conglomerate, which fired many of its veteran journalists and changed editorial guidelines. The result has been a desensitized, less colorful version of the jingoist carnival running across Erdoğan’s formal channels. CNN Turk, especially, became a tool for the government to enter the living rooms of CHP voters and tell them that they were voting for terrorist collaborators. So insidious were these attacks that the CHP had to ban its members from getting on the channel, and call upon its electorate to boycott it.
  •  Erdoğan said “We have 18 martyrs and close to 200 wounded. In our country, we have the terror group’s so-called political organism. Aside from that, our nation is now in a state of Yekvücut.” The term is a favorite of the president. It is a combination of the Farsi term “Yek” meaning “single” and the Arabic word “vücut” meaning “existence,” or in the Turkish use, “body.” Erdoğan was thinking of the nation as a single biological organism, with the leftists and the Kurdish movement as foreign bodies
  • The opposition media — largely relegated to the internet — was reporting on the plight of the working class and the brewing economic crisis. Like free media across the West, they also questioned the quality and veracity of their government’s COVID-19 data. In a speech delivered in May, Erdoğan was unusually angry. He had clearly expected a Yekvücut moment and was struggling to understand why it hadn’t come about. His strategy to create a “local and national” opposition wasn’t working, and the frustration of it seemed to hit him head on. “I want to warn once again the media and other representatives who are in league with the CHP’s leaders,” he said, before launching into what was — even for him — an unusually vituperative attack: “You are not national, and your localness is in question,” he said, “you have always sided with whoever was treacherous [bozguncu], whoever was perverted, whoever was depraved” adding, “you are like the creatures in mythology that only feed on enmity, hate, fear, confusion and pain.”
  • The absurd accusations of fraud and coup-abetting aside, there is something to the idea that the opposition wants things to get worse. The Erdoğan government’s consolidation over the past decade has been so suffocating for opposition voters that many do look for deliverance in economic or natural disaster.
  • The Erdoğan government may have cut short the HDP’s rise, but it hasn’t been able to prevent leftist ideas from spreading. The CHP’s youth wings today are highly class-conscious and hostile to militant nationalism. Figures like the CHP’s Istanbul provincial head Canan Kaftancıoğlu , who campaign on a mix of feminism, workers’ rights, and anti-fascist slogans, are gaining a national following. The polarization within the opposition is likely deepening, with part of the 30 million become more “national,” while another part is becoming more leftist. This means that the great mass of right-wing sentiment is growing, but so is the left-wing minority. The “problem,” in the government’s view, may no longer be 30 million strong, but it is more acute, and perhaps more vexing, than before.
  • (gun ownership has soared since the 2016 coup attempt)
  • To Turkey’s governing class, the military coup of their imagination is not a matter of defending against an armed force trying to take over the government. Rather, it is a night of free-for-all, in which politics is stripped down to its violent core, and a majority at the height of its powers can finally put down the enemy within: the haters, the doubters, the creatures of mythology.
  • “Turkey will not only reach its 2023 goals [the centennial of the Republic], it will also be rid of the representatives of this diseased politics,” he said in May, hinting that he might cut the left out of the political system entirely. If this should happen, politics would be an uneven contest between Islamist, pan-Turkic, and secularist hues of Turkish nationalism. Far off, in the back streets of the big cities and in the Kurdish provinces, in second-hand bookshops and hidden corners of the internet, there would be a progressive left, weathering out what is surely going to be a violent storm.
Ed Webb

'Seni bilen hayran, bilmeyen dusman' or, Why Erdogan Remains so Popular - 0 views

www.jadaliyya.com/...lmeyen-dusman-or-why-erdogan-r

Turkey politics economy AKP Erdogan analysis opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Mar 14 - Cached
  • a poster held aloft at the Bakırköy rally: Seni bilen hayran, bilmeyen düşman. “Those who know you are your followers, those who don’t are your enemies.” What struck me about this slogan was that it perfectly summed up the strength of the political message Erdoğan is espousing. It is a mantra that encompasses both support and resistance; it presupposes, even requires, opposition, while simultaneously dismissing that opposition as illegitimate
  • his narrative becomes even stronger the more he is seen to be under attack by his “enemies.”
  • Erdoğan’s slogan of the “national will”—a concept that sounds deeply creepy concept to many people—is far more compelling and less nebulous to many Turks than notions such as “the separation of powers” and “the rule of law,” particularly given that law itself has been tainted by the motives of the Gülenists.
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  • Opponents of the government view these accomplishments with a jaundiced eye. To them, physical buildings seem insignificant when compared to fundamental rights that are denied or threatened: a woman’s right over her body, for instance, which Erdoğan constantly contests with his threats against abortion and his oppressive glorification of motherhood. There is a large portion of the population, however—and in general a poorer segment of the population—to whom the AKP’s concrete achievements are far more substantial than a series of concepts, which, when they do impact their lives (a conservative girl forced to have a backstreet abortion, for instance), tend to not to be view in politicized terms: as part of fate, or the will of God, or the way of the society.
  • the AKP is performing—unlike many of its predecessors—the basic functions of a government. Without drawing attention away from the corruption, lack of consultation, and environmental destruction underlying much of its development (though the latter issue lacks popular traction in Turkey), the opposition should acknowledge clearly and unequivocally the massive material progress of the last decade, and the AKP’s role in it
  • What is missed here is that the success of the AKP in its first decade, and the reason Turkey was viewed with such high regard by much of the outside world during this time, was that it was a democracy operating with the consent of almost all its people. Even those who despised the AKP acknowledged its right to govern. Erdoğan, of course, still has a very strong democratic mandate in the basic sense, and he may hold on to it in upcoming elections. But he will no longer be able to have stability unless he is willing to enact drastically repressive measures, and that will cost Turkey its democracy.
  • Drawing on the idea that he is facing a coup-like attack, Erdoğan repeatedly seeks to channel the spirit of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, another charismatic populist who took an authoritarian swerve in his later years and was ultimately deposed in a military coup ın 1960 and hanged following a show trial. “What they did to Menderes, they want to do to me,”
  • whatever the veracity of the corruption allegations, they have undoubtedly been raised as a calculated attempt either to eject Erdoğan from office, or to weaken him as much as possible at the polls
  • Just as Turkey’s opposition misapprehend the solidity of government support and the deep resonance of Erdoğan’s message, so his own camp misapprehends the significance of the still-fractured opposition ranged against him. This misapprehension issues from Erdoğan’s narrative itself (and the endemic divisiveness of Turkish politics), namely the claim that he and his supporters are synonymous with the concept of democracy. It is this belief that allows him to claim with a straight face that winning 49.9 percent of the vote in the last general elections allows him to claim ownership of “the national will,” even though more than half of the electorate voted for someone else
  • Unlike in Gezi, where the government’s “coup” allegations were patently ridiculous to outsiders, no one really disputes that Erdoğan is correct when he claims the graft probe is an attempt to overthrow him. In the eyes of many Turks, it is this fact, rather than the truth or falsehood of the allegations themselves, which resonates most strongly, tying the graft probe into a long-established and deeply emotive historical and political narrative.
  • the rising perception that given the extent of the government’s alleged corruption and the high stakes (Erdoğan could end up in prison if he ultimately loses power), the elections may be rigged
  • Erdoğan may be deeply alienated from half of the population, but he absolutely has his finger on the pulse of the other half, and he knows it.
Michael Fisher

Identity Crisis Permeates Turkish Society : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...story.php

Turkey identity NPR Middle East Islam

shared by Michael Fisher on 20 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Michael Fisher on 20 Feb 09
     
    Modern Turkey was founded as a secular, Western-oriented state. But these days, Turks say the country is expressing its Muslim identity more than its secular one. And the critical question of Islam versus secularism colors just about every debate in the country.
Ed Webb

Turkey's media landscape shaken up by major foreign players | Middle East Eye - 0 views

www.middleeasteye.net/...e-shaken-major-foreign-players

Turkey media Russia UK Britain Germany Azerbaijan KSA Saudi China

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Feb 19 - Cached
  • At a time when press freedoms are regularly described as under threat and investment in the shaky Turkish economy is no sure bet, foreign media companies could be expected to avoid the country. Instead the opposite is true. A swathe of often state-backed foreign media outlets have begun expanding their output in Turkey, with Chinese, German, Russian and Azeri companies establishing radio stations, websites, online portals and even a news channel in recent years. 
  • Alper Gormus, a prominent Turkish media critic, said that the Turkish public depended on outlets such as Russia's Sputnik Turkiye, the UK's BBC Turkce or Deutsche Well Turkce because trust in government-controlled media was extremely low.
  • “The conditions are very similar to post-coup Turkey in the 1980s in the sense that the majority of the media is supporting the government,"
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  • "Ironically, government supporters themselves don’t read pro-government newspapers. Best-selling newspapers lost their circulation after they were seized by government-friendly businesspeople."
  • Ismail Caglar, an analyst at Ankara-based conservative think tank SETA, says Turkey’s rising profile in the region attracts foreign interest. Foreign companies make media investments in Turkey to propagate their point of view and take part in domestic political debates, he said
  • A report by US government-funded think tank the Rand Corporation said last year that Sputnik Turkiye and other Russian media outlets were trying to undermine NATO by fomenting mutual suspicion between Turkey and its Western allies, enlisting Ankara’s support and impeding its opposition to Russian actions in the Middle East.
  • Sputnik Turkiye published an article on 2 December 2015 with the headline “Russia: Erdogan and His Family Directly Involved in ISIS’s Illegal Oil Shipment in Syria”. Turkey later banned Sputnik Turkiye’s website and revoked its bureau chief’s work permit and visa, but Sputnik Turkiye radio continued to broadcast. Following the rapprochement between two countries in 2016, Sputnik Turkiye’s website began to freely operate again. Its Twitter account has roughly 600,000 followers.
  • "As Turks look for fresh perspectives and alternate sources of information in a tightly controlled media environment, Sputnik Turkiye draws readers in through its shockingly open coverage on domestic issues,"
  • Other outlets, such as Germany's Deutsche Welle Turkce, have also taken a generally critical line. Prominent journalist Nevsin Mengu, whose newscasts on YouTube are watched by thousands of Turks, has recently joined its ranks.
  • BBC Turkce, which has been broadcasting since 1939, is known for an editorial style perceived to be critical of the current Turkish government. 
  • “There is this sense that stories edging on activist journalism have been regularly published because they think it will generate traffic,” 
  • BBC Turkce has more than 3 million followers on Twitter.
  • Caglar, the SETA analyst who is also preparing a report on the subject, criticised BBC Turkce for being opaque about its staffing and operational information. “They didn’t even want to acknowledge with how many people they have in their staff.”
  • Ali Duran Topuz, the editor-in-chief of independent news portal Gazete Duvar, told MEE that the current media structure in Turkey made it easier for foreign-owned outlets to operate. “It could be also financially profitable for the investors. Fox, for example, is mildly criticising the government and it posts profit. Because of large numbers of unemployed journalists, the labour cost is also very low,"
Ed Webb

Why this TV series causes high drama between Cairo, Ankara - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...tes-tensions-egypt-turkey.html

Egypt Turkey Ottomans Mamluk history TV television series politics

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Nov 19 - Cached
  • Turkish series, including shows about Ottoman sagas, have enticed audiences in the Middle East and beyond for the last decade. Particularly “The Magnificent Century,” a hundred-episode series of love and intrigue at the Palace of Suleiman the Magnificent, created a strong audience in the first half of the 2010
  • “Kingdoms of Fire” ("Mamlakaat al-Nar") tackles the struggle between the Mamluks and the Ottomans over the control of the Middle East, particularly in Syria and Egypt. Produced by the Emirati production company Genomedia, it is shown both on Saudi channel MBC and Netflix. However, it is not being streamed in Turkey.
  • The historical drama revolves around two central figures: Sultan Selim I, the Ottoman ruler (r. 1512-1520) known as Selim the Grim, who is played by young Syrian actor Mahmoud Nasr. Toman Bay, the Mamluk sultan, is played by Khaled Nabawy, an Egyptian actor known for his leads in historical drama ever since his discovery by award-winning director Youssef Chahine in 1994.
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  • The series revolves around how Selim I, who is trying to extend the empire he forcefully took from his father, is faced with the opposition of the people of Cairo led by the fighter-turned-leader Toman Bay as he fights to conquer Egypt.
  • The $40 million series caused still another tension in Turkey’s strained relations with Egypt, due to Ankara's support of the banned Muslim Brotherhood and late President Mohammed Morsi. Ankara’s ties are also tense with Saudi Arabia — whose channel broadcasts the series — over the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Moreover, the launch of the series is also believed to be strategically timed, to precede another Turkish production on the Ottoman Empire and the life and times of Osman, who gave the empire his name.
  • ome challenged his description of the Ottomans as “occupiers” and the Mamluks as the locals, whereas the Mamluks were also an occupying force in Egypt. Faisal bin Fahad bin Jasim Al Thani, chairman of one of Qatar’s biggest conglomerates, tweeted that this sentence was “ignorance” coupled with hate. “Toman Bay and the Mamluks are Turks [not Egyptians], and the Ottomans are also Turks. So, if you consider the Ottomans to be an occupier, you need to concede that the Mamluks were, too,” he tweeted.
  • In recent years, there have been requests in Egypt to remove the name of this violent sultan from streets and squares in the country. The first attempt was in February 2018 when the Egyptian authorities decided to remove Selim’s name from a street in the Zeitoun neighborhood in the east of Cairo.
Ed Webb

Prominent Turkish literary figures slam controversial media law in joint statement - Tu... - 0 views

www.turkishminute.com/...l-media-law-in-joint-statement

media Turkey internet socialmedia censorship law literature

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Oct 22 - Cached
  • More than 200 members of the Turkish literary world have released a joint statement to raise their voices against a recently approved law regulating the media that makes “spreading false information” a criminal offense, saying, “We will not be silenced,” the Gazete Duvar news website reported on Wednesday.
  • Approved by the Turkish parliament on Oct. 13, the new law consists of 40 articles that amend several laws, including the Internet Law, the Press Law and the Turkish Penal Code (TCK).
  • As an overwhelming majority of the country’s mainstream media has come under government control over the last decade, Turks have taken to social media and smaller online news outlets for critical voices and independent news. Turks are already heavily policed on social media, and many have been charged with insulting President Erdoğan or his ministers, or criticism related to foreign military incursions and the handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Turkey was classified as “not free” by Freedom House in its “Freedom in the World 2022” index. More than 90 percent of Turkey’s media networks “depend on public tenders and are owned by large businesses with close personal ties to President Erdoğan,” according to a Freedom House report released in February.
Ed Webb

Israeli and Palestinian textbooks: Researchers have conducted a comprehensive study tha... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...ed_a_comprehensive.single.html

Israel Palestine israelpalestine textbooks propaganda history censorship education

shared by Ed Webb on 04 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • “Dehumanizing and demonizing characterizations of the other were very rare in both Israeli and Palestinian books.” The research team found 20 extreme negative depictions in the Israeli state books, seven in the ultra-Orthodox books, and six in the Palestinian books. An example of this rare occurrence from an Israeli book: A passage saying that a ruined Arab village “had always been a nest of murderers.” And an example from a Palestinian book: “I was in ‘the slaughterhouse’ for 13 days,” referring to an Israeli interrogation center. This could be a lot worse, right?
  • 84 percent of the literature pieces in the Palestinian books portray Israelis and Jews negatively, 73 percent of the pieces in the ultra-Orthodox books portray Palestinians and Arabs negatively, and only 49 percent of the pieces in Israeli state schools do the same. In an Israeli state school text, a passage reads: “The Arab countries have accumulated weapons and ammunition and strengthened their armies to wage a total war against Israel.” In the ultra-Orthodox, it ratchets up: “Like a little lamb in a sea of 70 wolves is Israel among the Arab states.” In the Palestinian case: “The enemy turned to the deserted houses, looting and carrying off all they could from the village that had become grave upon grave.” These statements aren’t necessarily false, but they are just one-sided and fearful—and they are rarely balanced by anything sunnier
  • The research team found that 58 percent of Palestinian textbooks published after 1967 (the year in which Israel took control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, Gaza and Sinai from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria) made no reference to Israel. Instead, they referred to the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as Palestine. In the Israeli state system, 65 percent of maps had no borders and made no mention of Palestine or the Palestinian Authority, while in the ultra-Orthodox system that number was a staggering 95 percent.
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  • One striking difference between the Israeli state books on the one hand, and the ultra-Orthodox and Palestinian books on the other, is their willingness to engage in self-criticism. For the Israelis, this is an evolution that began in the late 1990s, after many historians began to re-evaluate early Israeli history, and a left-wing member of the Knesset became education minister. Israeli state textbooks began to admit that some Palestinians left their land within Israel because they were expelled. And they began to make reference to the Arabic name for Israel’s War of Independence in 1948: the Naqba, or Catastrophe. They also began ask Israeli Jewish students how they would have felt about Zionism if they’d been in the place of the Palestinians. There is still far less of this in either the ultra-Orthodox or Palestinian books. For example, the Palestinian texts don’t deal in any significant way with the Holocaust or its relationship to the founding of Israel.
  • just how politicized the teaching of history and geography has become for Israelis and Palestinians—with both sides at times quite literally wiping each other off the map. Not that Israelis and Palestinians are alone on this score. Think of Cyprus, where for decades Greek and Turk Cypriotes did not consider themselves part of a single people, or Northern Ireland, where even the name used to describe the territory continues to be highly charged. (Is it a province? A state? A region?) The process of ending such misrepresentations, the authors of the study find, is therefore “exceedingly difficult and requires deliberate and courageous effort.” It also takes time.
  • Palestinian textbooks are still in their first generation
  • Sociologist Sammy Smooha of Haifa University, who conducts an annual survey of Arab and Jewish relations, says that the goal now should be to write textbooks that do more to expose each side to the other’s narrative. “You have to engage with the other side’s arguments in a serious manner and not just build up a straw man in order to break it.” Eyal Naveh, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University and the author of several textbooks for middle-school and high-school students, agrees. “If you ignore it, it’s as if it doesn’t exist,” he said.
  • a book called Side By Side that included a “dual narrative” of all major events in the region since 1917, through the Second Intifada in 2000. Naveh calls the book “a successful failure:” Though it had been lauded by the international press and continues to sell abroad, the book was banned by both the Israeli and Palestinian education ministries. Naveh now believes that getting such a textbook to become part of the Israeli and Palestinian curricula is “impossible.”
Ed Webb

Press freedom a fundamental characteristic of democracy - 1 views

www.todayszaman.com/mnistDetail_getNewsById.action

Turkey press media censorship propaganda ownership

shared by Ed Webb on 24 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • The state of the Turkish media is rather troublesome. Today, pro-government outlets dominate both electronic and written media. The recent seizure of the Akşam daily by the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund and its quick sale to the Ciner Group further consolidated pro-government supremacy over public discourse. The appointments to the Akşam daily have left little doubt as to what sort of line the paper will take. It is no wonder that Reporters Without Borders recently ranked Turkey 154th out of 179 countries in terms of press freedom. According to a report published by the main opposition party, there are 64 journalists under arrest in the country and another 123 facing trial on charges of terrorism. This is, of course, not healthy and is extremely worrying for a country that has been seen as an inspiration for many others in the Arab and Islamic world.
  • there are extremely vocal oppositional views expressed in papers such as Sözcü and Taraf, but these are far from able to reach mainstream Turks. Also, there are some successful online media outlets, such as T24, that have welcomed Hasan Cemal and many other alternative pens. However, these are unable to penetrate the Anatolian heartland
  • such contradiction with what the AK Party stood for in 2002
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  • there is distance to be made before Turkey's political class will treat freedom of expression as a default setting of a normal democracy
Ed Webb

Turkish Media a Casualty Of Erdogan's Policies - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East - 1 views

www.al-monitor.com/...rkish-media-under-erdogan.html

Turkey media censorship AKP erdogan propaganda

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • After days of on-location observing, I have come to the conclusion that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s biggest loss is the erosion of the Justice and Development Party (AKP)’s intellectual support base. This loss curtails Erdogan’s ability to control Turkish public opinion significantly because the average Turk has lost his trust of the mainstream media, and the internal rifts within pro-AKP media establishment are taking their toll.
  • Either run by friends of the AKP or manipulated through different means ranging from incentives to outright crude pressure, media outlets that are functioning today are only semi-independent when it comes to political news.
  • when dissenting opinions are continuously punished in courts as well as through other means (social media attacks, threats, loss of prestige or maybe employment), voicing any sort of criticism becomes an act of bravery The system has perfected itself so much so that corruption monitoring and transparency in government spending remain unspeakable.
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  • None of the tactics adopted in the post-Gezi repression is new. The witch hunt of activists and journalists, assigning blame to ambiguous “foreign” enemies, unknown internal illegal organizations, Orwellian investigations, increasing paranoia and fear for personal and national security — these and other methods have been applied for decades. However, the intensity of the repression is now expected to increase because the AKP’s confidence in its intellectual base has decreased.
Ed Webb

State Dept. rejects Davutoglu's denial of media watchdog report - Al-Monitor: the Pulse... - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...ee-report-media-davutoglu.html

Turkey freedomhouse media press censorship AKP politics US USA EU

shared by Ed Webb on 07 May 14 - No Cached
  • Only a day after the US-based watchdog Freedom House, in its "Freedom of the Press 2014" report that was released May 1, relegated Turkey from the league of “partly free” countries to the league of “not free” countries, Davutoglu exploded. Speaking at a joint news conference with Omani Foreign Minister Yousef bin Alawi bin Abdullah in Ankara on May 2, he said, “No one can put Turkey in that category. All kinds of opinions are openly voiced in Turkey. In this sense, the press freedom in Turkey is freer than some countries called 'partly free.'” If he had left it there, there would be no problem. But, he urged Turkish reporters to act against the Freedom House report: “I’m calling on the press and the intellectuals to display a stance against this report. We expect our journalists to reject this report,” he said, and alleged that “a perception operation is being conducted against Turkey.” The term “perception operation” is increasingly used by government officials and pro-government media to describe an alleged smear campaign underway against the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government of Turkey.
  • in a manner that would further complicate the AKP’s image in the Western world, the pro-AKP mouthpiece daily Star drew attention to Freedom House President David J. Kramer’s “Jewish origin,” and also alleged that Freedom House is financed by philanthropist George Soros and Jewish lobbies. Mehmet Ocaktan, editor-in-chief of the staunchly pro-AKP daily Aksam (who is also a former MP of the ruling party), was very blunt. He wrote: “Half-witted Turkish friends of proven anti-Turkey foreign sources are quietly skilled in covering up anything good that has been done. For example, they grab as a salvation nothing but a scandalous Turkey report of the Freedom House that is financed by famous speculator Soros, who has made a billion dollar profit from domestic troubles he instigates in various countries, and [the] Israeli financial lobby. For one thing, the data about detained journalists in Turkey [are] old and almost none of them [are] accurate. For Freedom House, [which] always lists Israel among free countries, to put Turkey in the same bracket as Uganda, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Tanzania and Kenya is not only dimwitted but also an indicator of absolute ignorance.”
  •  “What I think would change the way people look at Turkey is if they unblocked YouTube, if they didn’t block Twitter. I think that’s what drives people other places to say, ‘Hey, maybe freedom of expression isn’t that great in Turkey right now,’”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “Freedom House has noted complaints by the government of Turkey about Turkey being ranked “not free” in our report, "Freedom of the Press 2014." The government’s objection that the ranking does not take into account events occurring in 2014 is misplaced, as made clear by the report. “The report evaluates events that occurred during 2013. The rating does not take into account events that occurred in Turkey since January 1, 2014. They include the government’s recent releases of journalists in the Ergenekon and KCK cases, regressive changes to Turkey’s Internet law 5651, the blocking of Twitter and YouTube, and the law increasing the powers of the National Intelligence Organization (MIT). These and subsequent events occurring in 2014 will be evaluated in Freedom of the Press 2015. “Freedom House also notes with concern that some media outlets resorted to anti-Semitism in criticizing the report. Freedom House calls on the government of Turkey to join us in condemning the use of hate speech.”
Ed Webb

Al Jazeera English - IRAN: AFTER THE REVOLUTION - Iranian Arabs seek equal rights - 0 views

english.aljazeera.net/...200812691745418706.html

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Feb 09 - No Cached
  • Ahwazi Arabs have not been included in Iran's economic development and prosperity derived from oil exports, according to a 2007 Human Rights report published by civil rights organisations in Europe in coordination with the Belgium–based Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 13 Feb 09
  • I do not think there is an official will to marginalise Iranian Arabs or deny them their basic rights
  • administrative inefficiencies are often wrongly blamed on religious or ethnic discrimination
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • "In Iran for example, this problem is not only with Arabs but with Kurds ... and other ethnicities as well, and all these groups live in far rural areas, and their complaints are usually taken from [a] political point of view."
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 13 Feb 09
       
      Is this a case of essentially class struggles, or rural-urban divides, being mapped onto identity politics as a mobilizable issue? If so, why? Is it the international discourse of human rights and self-determination? Is it the primordial connection or glue of ethnic and other groups?
  • rumoured that Tehran wanted to disperse the Arab communities throughout Iran.
  • Amir al-Musawi, an Iranian political analyst and former consultant to the ministry of defence, says foreign governments have been fuelling dissent in Ahwaz. "The Ahwazi people are supporters of the Iranian revolution, but there are some mercenaries who have been funded by foreign powers to create a situation where it appears there is a falling out between Iranian Arabs and the government," he said. "We know the British in Basra are fuelling some Ahwazi mercenary acts but we are sure they will get nowhere."
  • a mixed Shia and Sunni community
  • Ahwazi Arabs have traditionally attempted to mark Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar in which Muslims fast from dawn to dusk, in conjunction with Sunni Arab countries.
  • "Iran's history is characterised by rich debate over the meaning of Shia doctrine and the implications of theology, and much of this diversity has been suffocated in the Islamic Republic,"
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 13 Feb 09
       
      States tend to prefer a single orthodoxy over a 'rich debate.'
  • "Iranians believe that Arabs led the Muslim nation for 1,000 years, and the Turks had that opportunity for several centuries until World War One. Tehran thinks the time has come for it to lead the Muslim world."
  • "In 1980 when the Iraqi army attacked Ahwazi cities, Ahwazi Arabs defended their cities despite the fact they had the chance to get annexed to an Arab country, Iraq. It is true the idea appealed to some Ahwazis but they were [a] minority," al-Musawi told Al Jazeera. Al-Seyed Nima denied that Ahwazis willingly fought with the Iranian army and said they had been hired as mercenaries or forced to enlist.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 13 Feb 09
       
      Notice that history matters hugely in these debates about identity, and becomes mobilized in particular causes.
  • Zhaleh United States 11/02/2009 I was born and raised in Khouzestan and this is the first time I hear iranian arabs being refered to as Ahwazi. Ahwaz is a city with mix population. If you see less improvement in Khouzestan than rest of the country is because this area was worst hit by 8 years of Iran/Iraq war and not because half of the population are arabs. Amnesty International needs to define what they see as discrimination. In Iran arabs can dress in their traditional attire, free to speak their language. Pure nonsense....
  • Chris Sweden 11/02/2009 To Mike, Canada Persian 51%, Azeri 24%, Gilaki and Mazandarani 8%, Kurd 7%, Arab 3%, Lur 2%, Baloch 2%, Turkmen 2%, other 1% Simple facts is stupid to lie about
  • minorities are not able to have equal rights in any country
  • I am an Azeri (Turkish Iranian) and I do NOT feel culturaly repressed!
Zach Hartnett

Major controversy in Turkish parliament | Middle East | Jerusalem Post - 0 views

www.jpost.com/...Satellite

jerusalem parliament turkish

shared by Zach Hartnett on 02 Mar 09 - No Cached
  • The leader of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) in the Turkish Parliament, Ahmet Turk, created a major controversy when, on Tuesday, he became only the second person in history to speak Kurdish in the Turkish parliament, causing the state-run TRT TV channel to stop its live feed of the session,
Ed Webb

BBC NEWS | Europe | Turkish children drawn into Armenia row - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...7956056.stm

Armenia Turkey BBC education

shared by Ed Webb on 24 Mar 09 - Cached
  • commissioned by the Turkish General Staff and distributed in recent months by the education ministry. It is an attempt to counter what Turkey calls "baseless" claims that Ottoman Turks committed genocide against the Armenians in 1915. The DVD was sent to all elementary schools with a note instructing teachers to show it to pupils and report back.
  • "They're promoting discrimination, branding certain people as 'others' and teaching children to do the same. My daughter will not be part of this enmity."
  • "We teach children who our enemies are and which countries tried to divide up our territory, but we don't teach them about the Armenians. "So I thought this film was good, and objective."
Ed Webb

Obama starts well with Muslims but must do more - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/...ypintak

obama Islam public_diplomacy MiddleEast

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Mar 09 - Cached
  • By visiting Prime Minister Erdogan, Obama is overtly reaching out to what Americans would call "moderate" Islamists. Going to non-Arab Turkey also appears to be an effort to separate US relations with Muslim countries from US policy toward the Arab world.
  • Half of all Indonesians and about 80 percent of Egyptians and Turks believe the goal of US policy is to expand Israel's borders. Few buy US claims that it supports a Palestinian state.
  • Earlier this month, newspapers here in Cairo carried front-page photographs of Clinton being kissed by Israeli President Shimon Peres during her visit to Jerusalem. Arabs saw in that a clear message. Ditto what she said – and did not say – about Gaza, Israeli settlements, Hamas, and human rights in Egypt. Many Arabs fear it's Condoleezza Rice redux. The Israel lobby's success in torpedoing Obama's nominee for head of the National Intelligence Council – widely reported here – underlines the perception of business as usual.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Bush, it seems, gave democracy a bad name.
  • Arabs are still willing to be convinced about Obama's motives. The flurry of diplomatic activity and indications that the administration is willing to talk directly with Tehran and even with the Taliban are being praised on the region's editorial pages. Arabs welcome the fact that the myopia of the past eight years has been jettisoned in favor of a nuanced approach that recognizes the interconnectedness of the many complex policy challenges of the Middle East.
  • Obama has the symbolism of outreach to the world's Muslims down pat, but gestures are cheap in a region where lives are readily sacrificed in symbolic acts of martyrdom. Now he must follow up with real, concrete engagement.
Ed Webb

A New Mosque in Nicaragua Fires Up the Rumor Mill - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...SB125772737927737439.html

Nicaragua Islam mosque Iran Honduras rumors

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Nov 09 - Cached
  • "All the Taliban," declares William Martinez, a 24-year-old barber at Le Moustache, a hair salon across the street.
  • "There are two types of people who use the mosque," she says, matter-of-factly. "The Arabs and the Iranians."
  • Many here refer to all Muslims or Middle Easterners as Turks, and seem to know next to nothing about their religious beliefs. "They pray to the god of the moon so they only gather at night," says Ms. Melendez.
  • Ed Webb on 09 Nov 09
     
    Largely a non-story, except for what it reveals of public attitudes and knowledge, or lack thereof.
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