Free Republic

Hundreds of thousands of Turks took part in two days of protests hoping to persuade the Prime Minister against running for president, amid concerns that his election would put at risk the separation of religion and state in the predominantly Muslim country. Recep Tayyip Erdogan is expected to decide this week whether to stand for president next month. Since his Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has roots in political Islam, has a substantial parliamentary majority, its candidate is assured of succeeding Ahmet Necdet Sezer, the President, who is a staunch secularist. Mr Erdogan, who has presided over strong economic...

At 98, Anahid "Annie" Boghosian of Emerson still recalls details of the day her family was driven out of its village during the Armenian genocide of 1915-1923. Hagop Bahtiarian was 5 years old when police came to his home near Ankara, Turkey, in 1915 and said the mayor wanted to speak to his father. That would be the last time Bahtiarian saw him.  "My father went and never came back," the 97-year-old said on a recent afternoon at the Armenian Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Emerson. "It's impossible to forget. I [was] 5 years old, but my memory is...

Finally, an item in Reuters’ "Oddly Enough" category that truly is odd: It seems that the German government is training its Turkish citizens, the majority of whom are unskilled school dropouts, to make döner kebab: Clad in white overcoats and plastic gloves and caps, the students attend classes twice a week. They learn to cut meat properly, calculate how much meat to put on a skewer and how to avoid the spread of germs. Döner kebab now rivals sausages as the most popular fast food in Germany. Reuters reports that tens of thousands of people throughout Germany work in kebab...

Last night, The Stiletto went to see "Screamers," a powerful and moving documentary that asks why genocides keep occurring – from the 1915-1917 near-annihilation of Armenians by Ottoman Turks (warning: graphic images) to today’s ethnic cleansing in Darfur. You can watch the trailer here.The title of the documentary is meant to refer to those who don’t silently stand by as genocides are unfolding, notably Harvard Professor Samantha Power, author of "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" (2002). Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, assassinated 10 days ago in Istanbul by a Turkish nationalist sympathizer, is also interviewed.The film...

ANKARA, Jan 9 (Reuters) - Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday Turkey could not stand idly by if Iraqi Kurds seized control of oil-rich Kirkuk in northern Iraq, though he did not spell out what Ankara might do to prevent such a scenario. Erdogan fears the Kurds want to carve out an independent state in northern Iraq, embracing Kirkuk, which could in turn fan separatism among its own Kurds living in southeast Turkey. Ankara has accused the Kurds of deliberately boosting their numbers in Kirkuk, at the expense of Arabs and Turkish-speaking Turkmens, to ensure the city votes in...

The Stiletto is a committed carnivore (nutrition police be damned!), as anyone who’s clicked through her FAQs: The Spam Edition already knows. Having said that, she was horrified by the hundreds of thousands of calves, goats, sheep and other animals brutally slaughtered worldwide to celebrate Eid al-Adha about a week ago (second item, The Daily Blade, January 3, 2007). There is a difference between the state executing Saddam Hussein after a fair trial as opposed to a vengeful mob tearing him apart limb from limb. So too, there is a difference between an animal being slaughtered in humane, hygienic conditions...

More than 1,400 Turks spent New Year’s Eve - also the first day of the Muslim feast Eid al-Adha (or Eid ul Adha; for some unfathomable reason, no two Muslims can agree on a standardized spelling for anything) - in hospital ERs after stabbing or otherwise injuring their hands and legs while sacrificing thousands of cows, sheep, goats and bulls. Four of the injured were crushed by the weight of large animals falling on them; three others suffered fatal heart attacks. The rite is meant to commemorate G-d having provided a ram for Abraham to sacrifice in place of his...

The clash of civilizations is as old as history, and equally as old is the blindness of those who wish such clashes away; but they are the hinges, the turning points of history. In the latter half of the 16th century, Muslim war drums sounded and the mufti of the Ottoman sultan proclaimed jihad, but only the pope fully appreciated the threat. As Brandon Rogers notes in the Ignatius Press edition of G. K. Chesterton’s poem “Lepanto”: Pope Pius V “understood the tremendous importance of resisting the aggressive expansion of the Turks better than any of his contemporaries appear to...

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) - Thousands of nationalist Turks marched in the capital Saturday, vowing to defend the secular regime against radical Islamic influences and urging the government not to make too many concessions in order to gain European Union membership. Some 12,000 people from more than 100 pro-secular associations waved Turkish flags as they marched to the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. "Turkey is secular and it will remain secular," they chanted during a march broadcast live on some TV channels. Ret. Gen. Sener Eruygur, president of the Ataturk Thought Association and former commander of...

PARIS: Lawmakers in France approved a bill Thursday introducing fines and prison sentences to those who deny that the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during and after World War 1 amounted to genocide. Deputies in the National Assembly, France's lower house of Parliament, voted 106-19 favoring the bill, which recognizes the killings of about 1.5 million Armenians from 1915 to 1919 as genocide and imposes a fine of 45,000 euros and a year in prison on those denying it. Senators from the upper house will now consider the bill, which upon passage, will go before president Jacque Chirac. The...

The search continues for the numinous or hieroglyphic significance of the date September 11. Believers in propaganda by deed, like Gavrilo Princip and Timothy McVeigh, usually choose to invest themselves with portentousness by selecting an anniversary that will freight their murder with meaning. Often, it is a date that only meant something to a very limited or arcane circle until its true value was unveiled to a stunned world. Thus Princip chose the date of Serbia's 14th century defeat in Kosovo and McVeigh chose the anniversary of Janet Reno's bloodbath at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. I've also...

A shadowy Kurdish rebel group has threatened to turn Turkey into "hell" after a two-day bombing spree which killed three people and wounded dozens of others at popular tourist resorts. The Kurdish Liberation Hawks (TAK) said it bombed a busy shopping area in the coastal resort of Antalya on Monday, killing three people and wounding dozens, including European tourists. The attack followed four bomb blasts in the Mediterranean resort of Marmaris and in Istanbul that wounded 27 people. "We vow to turn the monstrous (Turkish Republic) into hell ... with our warriors who have pledged revenge," TAK said in a...

ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) - The European Union and the United Nations are pushing for Muslim participation in the expanded U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon, but a growing public chorus in Turkey opposes sending troops who could be seen as supporting Israel against fellow Muslims. Turkish legislators are expected to debate the U.N. peacekeeping mission at a Cabinet meeting Monday, though no decision is anticipated. Some officials say Turkey is likely to wait until U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's visit Sept. 6 before committing to the force. "There will be no rush," the Hurriyet newspaper quoted lawmaker Mehmet Elkatmis as saying. "It...

KAYSERI, Turkey — As the muezzin heralded the noon prayers on a recent Friday, a small army of workers fanned out from an industrial park to take their places on mats in a nearby mosque. Fifteen minutes later, the prayers were over and the teachings of the Koran gave way to the demands of the factory floor. “In European countries, workers take a 15-minute smoking break; here we take a 15-minute prayer break,” said Ahmet Herdem, the mayor of Hacilar, a town of 20,000 people in central Anatolia, a deeply religious and socially conservative region which has produced some of...

ANKARA, Turkey - Turkish officials signaled Tuesday they are prepared to send the army into northern Iraq if U.S. and Iraqi forces do not take steps to combat Turkish Kurdish guerrillas there — a move that could put Turkey on a collision course with the United States. Turkey is facing increasing domestic pressure to act after 15 soldiers, police and guards were killed fighting the guerrillas in southeastern Turkey in the past week. "The government is really in a bind," said Seyfi Tashan, director of the Foreign Policy Institute at Bilkent University in Ankara. "On the one hand, they don't...

Persecution and martyrdom of Christians under 20th century totalitarianism - mainly of Russian Orthodox Christians under Bolshevism - is by far the greatest crime in all of recorded history. It is several times greater than the Holocaust in terms of innocent lives brutally destroyed. It has killed more Christians in a few decades than all other causes put together in all ages, with Islam a distant second as the cause of their death and suffering. And yet it still remains a largely unknown, often minimized, or scandalously glossed over crime. According to the respected and reliable OUP World Christian...

Kurdish villagers are fleeing their homes in northern Iraq after shelling and incursions by Iranian forces and a massive build-up of Turkish troops as both countries move to crush separatist guerrillas. Government leaders in Iraqi Kurdistan say Iran has attacked Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas in Iraq three times in the past two weeks, and Turkey insists it has the right under military law to carry out cross-border operations if need be. The PKK, seeking a Kurdish homeland including southeastern Turkey, accuses Ankara and Tehran of mounting coordinated operations against the group and its Iranian wing, PJAK. About 60 of...

Some descendants of wartime foes can march on Anzac Day, the Victorian RSL has ruled for the first time. But the ruling applies only to descendants of World War I Turkish soldiers, because they were "a very honorable" enemy, according to the Victorian RSL president, Major-General David McLachlan. The endorsement does not extend to families of German, Japanese, Italian or North Vietnamese. "I could never ever see, in Victoria, Japanese veterans of the Second World War marching in an Anzac Day march," Major-General McLachlan said. "They were a dreaded enemy that was despised by the Australian veterans." Much had been...

WASHINGTON -- The Crusades may be causing more devastation today than they ever did in the three centuries when most of them were fought, according to one expert. Robert Spencer, author of "Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)" (Regnery), claims that the damage is not in terms of lives lost and property destroyed but is a more subtle destruction. Spencer shared with ZENIT how false ideas about the Crusades are being used by extremists to foment hostility to the West today. Q: The Crusades are often portrayed as a militarily offensive venture. Were they? Spencer: No. Pope Urban...

Ankara - While at least 30 000 protesters denounced the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad on Sunday in a peaceful rally in southeast Turkey, ultra-nationalists, chanting "vengeance", pelted the French consulate in Istanbul with eggs. In Turkey's largest rally yet, men and women in head-to-toe veils stood in segregated crowds in the predominantly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, as the crowd chanted "God is Great!" and loudly recited verses from the Qur'an. On the other end of the country, demonstrators in Istanbul hung a poster on the wall of a mosque showing a man symbolising the United States using...