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October 29, 2008
Rejoice! Rejoice! Obama is Coming!
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
WASHINGTON - It has been a little more than an hour since I turned on the TV in my hotel room, but I have come across Barack Obama almost a dozen times. American channels are full of ads that are in favor of, or against, the Democratic presidential candidate. The ones that his party put out talk about his vision for America and how great it will be. The ads given by his rival, John McCain, counter by saying he is inexperienced and will get confused in the first crisis he faces.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 6:55 PM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2008
The Greater Ergenekon That We Can't Touch (II)
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
An interesting suspicion made headlines in Turkish media last July. Retired General Hilmi Özkök, who was chief of General Staff between 2002 and 2006, said in an interview that for a long time he did not eat or even drink anything that was prepared in his office. Rather he brought his food from home in a basket every single day.
But why would he do that? Some commentators inferred that Gen. Özkök might have been worried about poisoning. He soon denied this half-heartedly and said the problem was that the military’s canteen food was “too fatty.”
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 9:54 AM | Comments (0)
October 23, 2008
The Greater Ergenekon That We Can't Touch (I)
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
“The trial of the century,”or at the very least this decade, started Monday in Istanbul. The alleged members of “Ergenekon,”an ultra-nationalist covert terror network that was trying to bring Turkey to the brink of a military coup, faced their judges for the first time. It won't be the last, for sure, and I bet the court will continue for at least a year. And most of us will be puzzled, and sometimes confused, about what is going on.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)
October 19, 2008
Can Shariah Be Better Than Secular Law?
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
Have you been reading the series titled "Letters from the old civilization," which the Turkish Daily News has been running in its opinion pages since last Monday? If not, I would recommend them. The writer, Markus Urek, is a member of the Assyrian community of Turkey, which is one of the oldest Christian denominations in the world. He is currently a Fulbright Scholar at the New School of New York, but he has apparently traveled to the Middle East recently to write those stories from Syria and Iraq.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 12:50 PM | Comments (1)
October 16, 2008
Torture As Usual — But A First-Time Apology
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
When the movie Midnight Express made headlines in 1978, many Turks were quite angry. The film presented Turkey's prisons as slices of hell and many people here denounced it as "anti-Turkish propaganda."
I was too young to understand such matters then. But I grew up a little and watched Midnight Express in the early 1990's, when it was, for the first time, shown on Turkish television. (Before that, it was banned.) And unlike most of my countrymen, I was not offended by its content.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 9:13 AM | Comments (8)
October 12, 2008
Will Non-Muslims Go to Heaven, Too?
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
WARSAW – I was walking heedlessly in the Old Quarter of the Polish capital last Sunday until I saw a group of joyful singers on the street. Then I stopped and stared. They were about a dozen young Poles who were singing and clapping in the middle of a busy street and in the midst of a bitter cold. Soon, I realized that their art was very much related to their faith. As evangelical Catholics — a category which I just learnt that exits — they were praising God and calling on other people to do the same.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 1:04 PM | Comments (16)
Good Morning Capitalist Vietnam
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
HO CHI MINH CITY - Some of the most striking images of the ’70s were from the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese forces. After a bloody war that lasted for two decades, the Vietcong had finally captured this capital city of U.S.-supported South Vietnam in April 1975. While the Americans were hastily evacuating their personnel, the gates of the Presidential Palace, which used to host the pro-U.S. leaders of the south, were crushed by tanks of the People’s Army of Vietnam. It was a victorious day for communism — and a tragic one for capitalism.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)
October 9, 2008
A Clear and Almost-Present Danger: Ethnic Conflict
BELFAST – When you stroll down the streets of this city, you see how painful and enduring an ethnic conflict can be. Despite the recent peace process, which brought an end to the decades-old war between Catholics and Protestants, the bitterness is still very much alive. There are “peace walls” in around 80 different spots of Belfast, which divide the neighbors who abhor each other simply for who each other are. In order to avoid the stones thrown off the walls, some houses are protected with barbed wires.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 10:29 AM | Comments (2)
October 7, 2008
Insulting Kurdishness (And Even More Than That)
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
As you would have known, “insulting Turkishness” has long been a criminal offence in the Turkish Republic. But this lovely republic, which is so eager to uphold the honor of Turkish identity, hardly cares about other groups. “Armenianness” or “Greekness,” if you will, has often been humiliated by officials and the civil likeminded. And so has Kurdishness. This ethnic identity, to which 12 to 15 percent of Turkish citizens subscribe, has been not just banned but, also, repeatedly insulted by the official ideology. The Kurdish people were denigrated as “a bunch of tribes,” their language was defined as “primitive,” and their history was mocked. The only good Kurd, in this mindset, was the Turkified one.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 5:14 PM | Comments (2)
