Will Constantinople, er, Istanbul get the works?

Sat, 04/14/2007 - 7:47am — vastleft

200,000 Turks, God bless 'em, marched against the pending threat of a de-secularized government.

Like that jerkwater country situated between Canada and Mexico, Turkey is increasingly in the thrall of creationism.

I guess in place of "American exceptionalism" we can take pride in being a cautionary tale.

For example, even though faith-based STD and pregnancy prevention programs don't work (see also: Lambert's post), we've committed to them at the peril of our own citizens and everyone else's:

60 Minutes video showing a teacher spreading false information about condom "failures" (and by extension spreading AIDS and other STDs as well as unwanted pregnancies)
BBC video showing how America's anti-condom gambit is endangering people abroad

With theocracy seemingly on everyone's doorstep — if not already in the bedroom and everywhere else — I wish the world's greatest authority on terror were still with us to sound the clarion call:

Driving through a Swiss city one day, Sir Alfred Hitchcock, the British filmmaker famous for suspense and thriller movies, suddenly pointed out of the car window and said, "That is the most frightening sight I have ever seen." His companion was surprised to see nothing more alarming that a priest in conversation with a little boy, his hand on the child's shoulder. "Run, little boy," cried Hitchcock, leaning out of the car. "Run for your life!"

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Vasty, you see Juan Cole today?

By xan (not verified) on Sat, 04/14/2007 - 12:06pm

I dunno enough about Turkish politics to know if this is even (directly) related to the Creeping Theocracy subject or not, but has a story from a Turkish historian which suggests an awful lot of the same influences are at work there as here:

Taner Akçam

For many who challenge their government’s official version of events, slander, e-mailed threats, and other forms of harassment are all too familiar. As a former Amnesty International prisoner of conscience in Turkey, I should not have been surprised. But my recent detention at the Montreal airport—apparently on the basis of anonymous insertions in my Wikipedia biography—signals a disturbing new phase in a Turkish campaign of intimidation that has intensified since the November 2006 publication of my book, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility..

I know the subject of the Armenian Late Unpleasantness is about as popular with a non-Armenian Turk as slavery is at a Sons of Confederate Veterans meeting, but the depth of the campaign against this professor is breathtaking. The fact that a collegue of similar views was recently murdered gives some idea of the bravery it takes for him to continue to travel, speak and otherwise work on the subject:

Taner Akçam – Turkish intellectual, professor at the University of Minnesota, and the author of A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility – recently became the subject of a formal complaint under Turkey’s Penal Code Article 301: the same “crime” of “insulting Turkishness” for which Hrant Dink was tried and found guilty by the Turkish judiciary.