Speech of Ataturk - January 27 - 1920

At the session of the Istanbul military Mustafa Kemal stated the following about the Young Turks:

“Those pashas committed unprecedented, unspeakable and incomprehensible crimes and for their personal interest they brought the country to its present state. They have committed all kinds of violence, they have organized deportations and massacres, they have burnt infants with petroleum, they have raped women and girls in front of their husbands and parents, they have stolen children from their parents, they have confiscated the real estate and property of Armenians, they have exiled Armenians to Mosul in deplorable conditions, they have drowned thousands of innocent people in the sea, they forced people to change their religion, they made starving old men walk for months and work, and they have forced young women to submit to dreadful brothels never encountered in the history of any other nation”.

Source: Britannica, Armenia Genocide Museum, USA Historical archives, and Turkish scholars

A question from Greece

Panagiotis VASSILIADIS - pv.linkedin@gmail.com
wrote:

Fires in Greece! -

What can be done to prevent this in the future with modern technology?
Dear all, I am a Greek national and deeply hurt from the actual situation of my home country. I am fed up just complaining about the situation and do nothing about it. This is why me and some other friends are forming a group of people who is interested in working as a consulting body to our public administration and influence the development of our country’s infrastructure in this domain.
Therefore, I would like to ask your opinion in terms of technological solutions for monitoring and preventing forest fires (from cameras, to water bombing etc...) Any expert in the topic who is willing to help on this is welcome to contact me. Thanks all for your help and I hope no other country suffers the same distraction that Greece is actually going through.

Regards,

Panos Vassiliadis

A Quote

“The first job of a true patriot is to question the Government”

Thomas Jefferson
(special for Idil)

Third time lucky: A new President: A new Turkey?

As voting started today at 3 PM EET, it's almost for sure that the current minister of Foreign Affairs, A. Gül, will be inaugurated as the new Turkish President.
I don't have any doubts about the qualifications and capacities of him, but with a President, a Prime-Minister and a speaker of the Parliament, all from the ruling government party the AKP, there is no balance in Turkish political spectrum anymore. 53% of the Turkish people are completely left out in any decision-making process. The winner-takes-it-all shows that this only will polarize a country, as you can see in the USA.
Because of the highly controversial opposition policy by the CHP in the last 5 years, putting Turkey in crisis all the time, this is the final result. Part of Turkey is happy, the other part not.
The Turkish military ousted 4 governments, but never a President...

Turkey in action

Turkey helps Greece 48 hours after disaster strikes

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

DUYGU GÜVENÇ, ANKARA – Turkish Daily News

Turkey announced yesterday that it is sending a firefighting plane to Greece to contribute to its neighbor's struggle against the raging forest fires, which have already killed more than 60 people.

The government's decision follows a series of criticisms leveled at Turkey's inaction to the raging fires in Greece despite the solidarity shown between the neighboring countries during the 1999 earthquakes that hit both countries.

“Turkey is ready to send a firefighting plane. We are waiting for your permission to take off,” said Forestry Minister Osman Pepe in a message to his Greek counterpart Evangelos Basiakos yesterday. In reply, Basiakos welcomed Turkey's offer to help and officially requested the aircraft. Minister Pepe then instructed that the four-and-a-half ton water carrying JL 215 firefighting aircraft, Turkey's top firefighting aircraft, to be sent to Greece.
Full article here.

Replica of Noah's Ark in Rotterdam, Netherlands

A half-sized replica of the biblical Noah's Ark has been built by a Dutch man, complete with model animals.
Dutch creationist Johan Huibers built the ark as testament to his literal belief in the Bible.
The ark, in the town of Schagen, is 150 cubits long - half the length of Noah's - and three storeys high. A cubit was about 45cm (18in) long. It will be transported through Amsterdam to Rotterdam where the World Port Days will be held between 7-9 September. During these days visitors can have a look at this Ark, made by one person.

Turkish army issues new warning

Turkey's powerful armed forces chief has warned that "centers of evil" are trying to undermine the secular state.
Gen. Yasar Buyukanit did not name those who were "trying to corrode the secular nature of the Turkish Republic".
His statement comes a day before MPs are expected to elect Abdullah Gül, a former Islamist, as president. His candidacy remains highly controversial.
The army sees itself as the guardian of Turkey's secularism. It has ousted four governments in the past 60 years.
This is the second warning issued by the army in recent months.
In April, it expressed its concern after Mr Gül - the ruling Islamist-rooted AK Party candidate - only marginally failed to gain enough support from MPs to become president in a first round.

Abdullah Gül has pledged to respect Turkey's institutions.

The following stand-off between the AKP and secularist parties in parliament sparked a political crisis that led to early elections in July.
The AKP won those polls convincingly, and again nominated Mr. Gül, currently the foreign minister, for the post of president.
Mr. Gül - who has failed to gather enough votes in the first two rounds - is expected to be elected in the third round on Tuesday.
Turkey's military and secular establishment have voiced their opposition to Mr. Gül, a devout Muslim who, they believe, has an Islamist agenda.
Mr. Gül denies that, and has vowed to remain loyal to the country's secular constitution.

Source: BBC

Two articles of Turkish journalists today

As I don't have energy to write something today, I put below two articles related to Armenia and Greece.
It shows that at least the Zaman and TDN are maturing. Open for all kinds of views.

Time to say new things on the ‘genocide’ issue

Time to say new things on the ‘genocide’ issue, by Ömer Taspinar

The Anti Defamation League’s recent decision to acknowledge that the Armenian “massacres” of 1915 were tantamount to “genocide” has created a political storm in Turkey. Seen from Washington, such Turkish resentment is counterproductive. It only confirms the fact that Turkey needs to come to terms with its own history. When you have prominent leaders of the Turkish Jewish community writing letters to the ADL reminding them that the Turkish Jewish community’s well-being is jeopardized, this does not exactly come across as a ringing endorsement of Turkey’s democratic maturity.

What the Turkish body politic and public opinion fail to understand is that the genocide issue is already a lost battle in the West. This battle is lost partly because of Turkey’s own behavior and stern, uncompromising image. The official Turkish narrative on the question of “genocide” displays all the symptoms of an authoritarian state that has created a taboo. The education system, nationalist press and bureaucratic reflex are all symptomatic of a totalitarian way of thinking where even a slight departure from the official line creates mayhem. How else can one explain efforts to undermine academic conferences on this issue, or the disgraceful treatment of Orhan Pamuk by most of the nationalist press after he was awarded the Nobel Prize?
Read the full story here.

A deafening Turkish silence as Greece burns

Looks like Turkish pride is again a big obstacle....

For a good update visit Vassilio's blog.

A deafening Turkish silence as Greece burns
Monday, August 27, 2007


DUYGU GÜVENÇ
ANKARA – Turkish Daily News

As nearby Greece continued yesterday to face walls of flame killing scores in the country's worst series of forest fires in history, aid from across the Aegean was largely symbolic despite a legacy of mutual assistance borne of the 1999 Turkish earthquake to which Athens was the first responder.
“Turkey is missing the chance of solidarity with Greece due to internal politics. They are all busy with the presidential elections,” said yesterday retired ambassador, Özdem Sanberk to the Turkish Daily News.

The only direct assistance and help was offered by Turkish Red Crescent to the Hellenic Red Cross, through a phone call late Saturday. Tekin Küçükali, president of the Turkish Red Crescent called his counterpart and said they were ready to extend any means of help.
Küçükali, in an interview with the TDN yesterday, said they have already sent two trucks full of tents, blankets, food and medical supplies to İpsala border gate adding “But we need a permission to enter Greece. The Hellenic Red Cross should make a call to Geneva where the international Red Crescent and Red Cross organizations headquarters is, to declare the need of international help. When this call is made our trucks will enter Greece”.
Asked why Greek institutions seem not very much willing to get help from its neighbor Küçükali replied that two countries shared even bread during World War II. After World II, the then-governor of Istanbul, Lütfi Kırdar, organized a campaign of assistance of food and other aid to help Greece during widespread famine. “I would condemn them if they are suspicious of our help” said Küçükali.

Scene was different in 1999

But the case in 1999 was far from this. After the deadly earthquakes in both countries, not only the governments but the nongovernmental organizations of the two countries moved to help before any officials appeals were even made. This solidarity resulted in a rapprochement between two countries and introduced a new term to the lexicon of international relations: “seismic diplomacy”.

Things are different now today: What Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and probable-president-to-be Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül have done so far has been limited to written messages of sorrow and condolences to their counterparts, Kostas Karamanlis and Dora Bakoyannis. But their messages were lack any offers of help.

Greece should demand help
The Foreign Ministry officials who were trying to explain this unmoving stance of the government to the TDN yesterday said that the Greek government did only ask the European Union countries help. “We cannot offer any help since there is not any call from Athens for an international help, they have to make a call,” said foreign ministry officials.
But Israel, which is not a member of 27-member union, did not neglect Greece and has dispatched three helicopters to fight with fires.

Some explained the lack of robust action with the fact that Turkey has its hands full on many fronts of its own. “We are dealing with the disastrous flood in Samsun, the earthquake in Bingöl and the four forest fires in Turkey now. We don't have enough equipment to send Greece,” argued a source in the Prime Ministry Crisis Management Center sources contacted yesterday by the TDN.

“The priority should of course be internal fires and flood but Turkey cannot stand still in the face of the fires in its neighbor” said Sanberk, whose last diplomatic post was as Turkey's ambassador the United Kingdom..

Where are the NGO's?

Not only the government and official institutions but the nongovernmental organizations also performed badly in helping to Turkey's neighbor in its fight against the fires. Even the well-respected Turkish search and rescue team (AKUT) didn't make any preparations, said the General Secretary Saydun Gökşin to the TDN.
Gökşin told that they talked to the Greece Special Forces and Hellenic Red Cross but they did not ask for a rescue team.
“Greece only requests aircrafts and helicopters and we can only go there if there is a request. And furthermore we need to go there by a military plane just like in the 1999 earthquake” noted Gökşin. He added, however, that AKUT has rescue teams at the ready in Bursa and Marmaris experienced in fighting forest fires and that Turkey has nearly 50 firefighting aircrafts and helicopters.
"We have teams," Gökşin said."And we can mobilize them."

Ancient Olympia in Flames - Update

As fires threaten the ancient site of the ancient olympic stadium and its museums the government is casting aspersions that the fires were the result of 'political extremists'. Without specifying WHAT he means by this theories regarding the 'culprits' of the fires are spreading like the fires themselves. The latest is that a new American Laser is causing these fires.
Thank God for America, if it wasn't for them, we might have to look for the real culprits.

Going to Armenia

Today, my wife and I made a decision: we will spend our first Bayram of this year in Armenia.

We are looking forward to meet Myrthe and do some sightseeing as well.
As my wife is Turkish, she really wants to talk about what happened in Anatolia between 1890-1923.
As a foreign Turkish student in the USA, she often was harassed by Armenian people only because she was Turkish. In my opinion we call this: racism.

But she and I are looking forward to talk with other human beings, in Armenia.
My only concern is a visa: I, as a Dutch, can go there without any problems, but it looks like that Turks need a visa.
Anyway, we made our decision, so we will go.

Islamic Fundamentalism

The Taliban, 2007


A conference about women and Islam, London 2007.


Children trained for the Unholy war.

Below a posting of me....a year ago.


Islamic fundamentalism
In the Dark fundamentalist scheme the world constantly decays and has constantly to be re-created. The only function of the intellect is to assist that re-creation.

It reinterprets the texts; it re-establishes the divine precedent.So history has to serve theology, law is separated from the idea of equity, and teaching is separated from learning.

This doctrine has its attractions; To a student from the University of Karachi, from perhaps a provincial or peasant background, the old faith comes more easily and is more simple to swallow than any new-fangled academic discipline.

Fundamentalism these days takes root in the universities; and ironically 'deny education' can become the approved educated act for men against women.

How different this was in the days of Muslim glory; Islam opened itself to the learning of the world. Now fundamentalism provides an intellectual thermostat, set low. It equalizes, comforts, shelters, and preserves. Independent thinking can become a crime.

In this way the faith pervades everything, and it is possible to understand what the fundamentalists mean when they say that Islam is a 'complete way of life'; their Life!

But what is said about Islam is true, and perhaps truer, of other religions--like Hinduism or Buddhism or lesser tribal faiths--that at an early stage in their history were also complete cultures, self-contained and more or less isolated, with institutions, manners, and beliefs making a whole.

But the Islamic fundamentalist nowadays wish is to work back to such a whole, for them a God-given whole, but with the tool of faith alone--belief, religious practices and rituals!

It is like a wish--with intellect suppressed or limited, the historical sense falsified--to work back from the abstract to the concrete, and to set up the tribal walls again!

It is to seek to re-create something like a tribal ora city-state that--except in theological fantasy--never was.

The Koran is not the statute book of a settled golden age; it is the mystical or oracular record of an extended upheaval, widening out from the Prophet to his tribe in Arabia!!

Arabia was full of movement; Islam, with all its Jewish and Christian elements, was always mixed, eclectic, developing. ...The West, or the universal civilization it leads, is emotionally rejected. It undermines; it threatens. But at the same time it is needed, for its machines, goods, medicines, warplanes, the remittances from the emigrants, the hospitals that might have a cure for calcium deficiency, the universities that will provide master's degrees in mass media.

All the rejection of the West is contained within the assumption that there will always exist out there a living, creative civilization, oddly neutral, open to all to appeal to.

Rejection, therefore, is not absolute rejection. It is also, for the community as a whole, a way of ceasing to strive intellectually. It is to be parasitic; parasitism is one of the unacknowledged traits of Islamic fundamentalism.

As Turkey is obsessed by a headscarf...

...Greece is burning.
France and the Netherlands sent this morning planes and helicopters to help extinguish the fires.
No 'official' statement made by the 'de missionair' Government of Turkey.


This picture is made by a British tourist in Athens. In the background the Acropolis. The picture above shows the fury which threatens NE Athens.
In the meanwhile, Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis, claims that political extremists set the fires.

Greek Tragedy (by Metin of Talk Turkey)

Metin wrote an excellent post, read it here.

And from BBCworld.

Adnan Oktar, Intelligent Design and Wordpress

Charismatic? Yes.
Lust for Money and Power? Yes.



Adnan Oktar, the Turkish cult leader, thinks that he knows what Intelligent Design means, or 'Creationism'.

Through the ages many of these cult leaders appeared and disappeared, over and over again. You can recognize these fake 'prophets' by 3 things:
'Their Lust for sex';
'Their Lust for Money';
and 'Their Lust for Power'.

Always they turned out to be fake. Go to the Southern Belt of the USA, the Amazon in Brazil, Haiti, Philippines and so on.

Besides this, they always change history according to their own interpretations and are using religions for their benefits. In this case Adnan Oktar is using Islam in his fight with all kinds of religions: and with a little knowledge he explains the whole world.

For him and his followers, Intelligent Design (ID) is something new...but it is as old as Rome. Only it had a different name...as the Greeks already made a link between the Universe and Mankind...

Following these cults for 30 years, I am astonished how many of them can freely operate in countries like the USA, Brazil, and in Turkey. But more astonishing is how they can influence the legal systems. See how wordpress was shut down.

First of all: ID is dealing with 'conscience science', introduced a long, long time ago.
Adnan Oktar and his followers need first some lessons in philology.

Regarding the law ban on wordpress: it's only the defendant who can do something.

Regarding A.O. and anti-Semitism; there is the ECHR ...

A.O. acts in a grey area of the law...but I would like to face him in a live debate!

New writer on this blog

As I wrote in my post of beginning of August, Vassilios, an Australian / Greek, living now in Athens will contribute regularly to this blog like Yasemin, our Turkish writer in Florence.
Today his first excellent posting here! See the post below this one.

Blogs - to be feared or abused

While access to wordpress sites have been banned in Turkey, across the Hellespont in Greece, blogs are increasingly being seen as a political tool by the major parties. Numerous leaks to the media have revealed that political parties will use blogs to circumvent laws banning the publishing of Opinion Polls two weeks prior to election day, and this way publish polls showing how 'popular' they are and thereby influence public opinion. Since blogs are based... well where ARE they based, wherever its servers are, they can publish outside local restrictions and anonymously.

If this subversive co-opting of blogs does go ahead this will drastically change the perception of blogs. No longer will they be seen as individual expressions of thought but rather people will have to judge them more critically, the same way the other media is scrutinised. It may also turn people off blogs altogether.

It does illustrate a difference in attitudes in the two different countries. Turkey is following old school methods by restricting access to them, a method which ultimately draws more attention to them and raises their importance to the public and people will always find ways around restrictions making it a futile gesture.

Whereas Greece's co-option brings blogs to the same level as government propoganda, disenchants the public and ultimately turns people away.
The question then is, which is worse?

Toastmaster? What the heck is this..

Today, I found in my inbox an invitation to join Toastmasters online. Since I have never heard about the word, the meaning of 'toastmaster', I checked some sites.
Basically, it's all about arts of speaking, listening, and thinking--vital skills that promote self-actualization, enhance leadership potential, foster human understanding, and contribute to the general betterment of humankind. And it's all about "learning-by-doing". This sounds good or not?! But I know a club of 550 here in Turkey to whom I pass this invitation....

An example

Jimiyu, (left) the newest member of Australia's Taronga Zoo giraffe family, makes friends in Sydney after being transported from Western Plains Zoo in New South Wales.

Source: BBC