In this story on the Hrant Dink murder, "Suspects in Journalist’s Killing Came From a Hotbed of Turkish Ultranationalist Sentiment," by Sebnem Arsu, the New Duranty Times, aka the New York Times, zeroes in on a culprit: ultranationalism. Of course the Times doesn't deem fit to print the fact that Dink's murderer yelled, "I shot the infidel" after the murder.
TRABZON, Turkey — With fishing boats pouring in and out of a busy harbor, white minibuses crisscrossing in all directions and shopping streets bustling, this regional capital nestled on the Black Sea appears to be a vibrant city.But beneath the colorful shopping malls filled with trendy clothes and chic cafes, the poverty, unemployment and lack of opportunity that afflicts many of Turkey’s cities is crushing here — especially for young people.
And we all know that poverty, unemployment and lack of opportunity cause jihad. Why, Osama bin Laden was a Bowery bum before he went into the jihad business.
All eight suspects in the plot to kill Hrant Dink, a nationally prominent editor, came from nearby, and links to other ultranationalist crimes here are beginning to emerge.Mr. Dink, an Armenian Turk who was an outspoken commentator on the country’s handling of minority rights and was once convicted of insulting the Turkish identity for an article he wrote, was killed on Jan. 19 in Istanbul. Ogun Samast, 17, a high school dropout who has confessed to the killing, was arrested with seven others in connection with the crime....
Other prominent crimes here have had a common motivation of extremism in upholding nationalist values. A local McDonald’s restaurant was bombed in 2004, chosen as a Western target, and there was an attempted lynching of a group of leftist protesters and killings of two professors from the local university and of a Roman Catholic priest, the Rev. Andreas Santaro.
Yes, I can see how killing a Roman Catholic priest would be an act of "nationalism," given the Vatican's tireless efforts to seize control of the Turkish government.
But it was not until the police found personal links between Mr. Samast, the confessed killer of Mr. Dink, and Yasin Hayal, an ultranationalist convicted of the McDonald’s bombing, that a web of connections between various crimes came to light. Mr. Hayal is being charged with inciting the Dink killing....In addition, the fact that Mr. Samast and the killer of Father Santaro, a 16-year-old high school dropout, were both under age at the times of their crimes suggests that someone may have been urging young people to commit crimes, knowing that they would escape harsher penalties if caught.
Ah. Shadowy nationalist inciters.
But so far the police have not arrested any older or more established figures in these crimes.For some of the city’s youth, the region’s culture of bravado and machismo seems to make a breeding ground for anger.
“Black Sea people are dynamic, restless, energetic and have strong heroic feelings,” said Adem Solak, a prison therapist who works with the youth who killed Father Santaro. “Their environment, built on a single culture without interaction with diverse ethnicities, creates a greater potential for reaction to social issues.”
There used to be quite a few diverse ethnicities in the Black Sea area. What happened to them?
Expressions of anger are easy to come by, as are defenses of Mr. Samast and the killing of Mr. Dink.“I don’t think brother Ogun did wrong,” said Murat, 19, a university dropout who, like many interviewed, refused to give his last name, saying he feared police harassment. “We heard that the Armenian cursed our blood, which we cannot accept.” He and his friend Hasan, 18, chain-smoking at a cafe near the town center, said they had known Mr. Samast for years in Pelitli, the suburb where all three grew up. They praised nationalism with a religious undertone....
What kind of religious undertone, O Times? Do tell.
The city was populated by Greeks, Armenians and Abkhazians when it was a trading center, but after Turkish independence in the 1920s, the Greeks left, and Trabzon became overwhelmingly Muslim and Turkish. Since then the people here have been seen as having strong nationalist and religious values. Use of weapons adds another dimension to the pride of individual bravery.
The Greeks left, did they? In fact, they left at the point of a bayonet. They left because they were exiled, unless they were willing to convert to Islam. And note that the Times says nothing at all about what happened to the Armenians who had been in Trebizond.
“We cannot do without weapons,” Asim Aykan, a member of Parliament from Trabzon, said on NTV. “They are a special part of the culture of our society. We cannot express our joy without firing guns. That is the culture, which is beautiful but can also turn bad.”On a cold and windy Sunday after Mr. Dink was killed, crowds attending a game at the soccer stadium here waved Turkish flags. One group opened a huge banner saying: “We’re from Trabzon. We’re Turks. We’re all Mustafa Kemals” — a reference to the founder of the modern Turkish state.
That was a rebuttal to the many thousands of Turks in Istanbul who attended Hrant Dink’s funeral carrying signs that read: “We’re all Hrant Dinks. We’re all Armenians.”
Nationalism of the former sort “embraces intolerance towards the other, superiority over minorities and not only fear but also hatred toward the foreigner,” said Professor Ali Carkoglu of Sabanci University in Istanbul.
Hmmm. Intolerance toward the other and superiority over minorities. Where have I heard that before?
The feeling is stirred up by global events like the war in Iraq, the Danish cartoons satirizing Muhammad and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Then there is Turkey’s ambition to join the European Union, which has brought many changes.
Wait a minute. I thought this was all about Turkish nationalism. What do Danish cartoons and Israel have to do with Turkish nationalism? The Times has brought Islamic solidarity in here through the back door, without telling anyone.
That long process has its ups and downs, said Melek Goregenli, a professor of political psychology at Ege University in Izmir. She said that it “helped bring unspoken thoughts to the fore, made them more visible, but at the same time made those who spoke out as targets for those who couldn’t tolerate free expression of thought and equal rights for everyone.”
Hmmm. And who might it be who can't tolerate free expression of thought and equal rights for everyone? "Nationalists," eh?
Trying to find the Muslim terrorists is akin to trying to find grains of fine sand at the beach..where oh where do you begin?
The piece can be used in journalism classes as an example of how to deliberately (and even, in parts, undeliberately) mislead the audience, and oneself, and yet to include, almost unwittingly, other material that does not fit the agreed-upon narrative (in this case, that the guilty party is a "nationalist" motivated by "nationalism" and that "nationalism" has no substratum of Islam, when Turkish nationalism is in fact a deliberately cultivated calque and variant upon Islam, with the non-Muslims in Turkey still discriminated against (or, as they were during World War II, made subject to special, Jizyah-like taxes) as they were under pre-Keamlist Islam.
The Christian Armenians were not killed in 1894-96, nor in 1909, nor in the final and largest massacres of 1915-1920, by Muslim Turks only, but also in places by Muslim Kurds, and even later, as the survivors, mostly women and children, made it to fellow Christians in Haleb (Aleppo) and Beirut, also set upon by Muslim Arabs. They were killed because they were Christians who dared to behave, were feared for behaving, not as dhimmis but as free men. And this many of the Turks agreed, and it was also the "reformers" or Young Turks, like Talaat Pasha, who were as murderous, and then some, as any Turks during the 1894-96 Hamidian (under Abdul Hamid II) massacres.
Kemalism, or Turkish nationalism, does not make a clean break with Islam. It is based on a mimicking of Islam. There is the total system. There is the Maximum Leader, the one must one worship in thought, word, and deed, only that Maximum Leader presented for adoration and worship is not Muhammad, but Kemal Pasha. And the new belief-system, which was an atttempt to replace one primitive and Total System by another less primitve and more open to the modern world and therefore, Ataturk believed, more likely to be able to handle, and survive, in that world, was the Cult of the Turk, started under Ataturk but then expanded under Inonu and other successors.
The cult of the Turk does a number of things. It backdates the arrival of both the Seljuk and the Osmanli Turks, so that "the Turk" is seen as having always been the inhabitant of Anatolia, right back through the time of Byzantium, all the way to the Hittites. How history in its "Turkish" version is taught is something that should be presented by intelligent Turks abroad, who at least -- unlike those brought up strictly on Islam -- are able, or some of them are, to regard the whole business with the skeptical eye of a true Westerner. Not many, but certainly more than there are Arabs -- there are practically none -- who can admit to themselves, much less to the world, what societies suffused with Islam must necessarily produce.
The "nationalism" that this Turkish reporter keeps attempting to fix our attention on is not only nationalism but nationalism-cum-religion. The killing of the priest, the hints of "nationalism plus religion" -- it's there, but only for those who already know enough, to know where to look. And very few of the readers of The Times will know enough, and know what is wrong with that report, and what -- malgre the journalist's best efforts -- is nonetheless smuggled in.
It's still there. It didn't go away, and just when you think it might have succumbed, it keeps coming back.
It is the secular class in Turkey that is going to have to admit this to itself. It is going to have to rediscover, and then to go much beyond, far beyond, Kemalism and the Cult or Myth of the Turk. Those Westernized istambullis, perhaps dining out with one or more of the Freeleys tonight, or who have a signed copy of one of Orhan Pamuk's books in their library, had better get cracking if they don't want the Turkey they allow themselves to believe exists and dominates (but it doesn't, they've got it wrong) to disappear altogether.
The Kemalist "revolution" was not that much of a "revolution." The real and necessary ideological revolution in Turkey, in which neither Islam, nor a substitute cult with a substitute Perfect Man, will do, has yet to come.
Alexandre Del Valle, the French analyst who has been studying the Turkish situation, came up with a useful term to describe those in Turkey who marry their Islam and their Turkish nationalism:
Islamonationalist.
Analytical problem solved.
http://www.alexandredelvalle.com/
Why I do believe Arsu must have made straight A's in his Josef Goebbel's class on obfuscation and deception. Well done Arsu. A+. The Times is truly a pathetic rag. When you live in a world of lies and denials, the truth becomes impossible to find. The Times: Destroying America one muddled mind at a time.
NB: Armenian Canadian maker of weird films Atom Agoyan recently reviewed a few books that dealt with the Armenian Holocaust in the Globe & Mail. A caption under an accompanying picture noted that back in the early 20th century the Turks were also in the habit of deporting Armenians to two Ottoman Empire outposts -- Syria and Palestine.
“Black Sea people ...their environment, built on a single culture without interaction with diverse ethnicities, creates a greater potential for reaction to social issues.”
.........................
This reminds me of that famous bit of dark humor, where the teen is on trial for brutally murdering his parents. He throws himself on the mercy of the court, telling the judge he's "a poor orphan".
The poor "Black Sea people", unable to interact with diverse ethnicities. Yes, of course, this is because they massacred or drove out the Armenians, Greeks and Jews who lived alongside them until the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries.
Funny, too, how Danes (for example) also went without interaction with diverse ethnicities until quite recently, and yet had a quite peaceful society. Their reaction to "social issues" rarely involved outbursts of irrational violence.
Nationalism yes just like national socialism or the religion of Nazism was nationalistic so is Turkish Islam and likewise murderous to minorities in its path.