The 1 percent and their employees are masters of word play. They turned the estate tax into the “death tax,” life-saving health and environmental rules became “job-killing” regulations, and of course when it comes to taxes, the richest of the rich are now “job creators” who are supposed to be exempt from paying taxes.

Given this track record, it is hardly surprising that a bill that would require every website in the country to become unpaid copyright enforcement officers for Time Warner, Disney, and the Washington Post comes packaged as the “Stop Online Piracy Act.” While the name may lead the public to believe that Congress is trying to keep our email pure and our computer screens safe, the real story is that the 1 percent are again trying to rig the rules so that they get as many dollars as possible from the rest of us.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would place an enormous burden not just on Internet giants like Google and Facebook, but any website that allows people to post content or includes links to other sites. An owner of copyrighted material would be able to go the Justice Department and claim infringement and request that the whole site be taken down.

While sites are already required to remove material that is determined to be infringing under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the SOPA requires that sites in effect preemptively screen material for potential infringements. If they fail, they risk having their whole site taken down for a period of time, in addition to paying damages to copyright holders.

The question that serious people would ask is what problem is the SOPA intended to address? There is still plenty of money being made by online distributors of music, movies, books and software. The problem seen by the top executives at Disney and the other promoters of the SOPA is that they want to make more.

A substantial amount of copyright-protected material does slip through the system, as does an even larger amount of material with ambiguous copyright status such as a home-made video with parts of a copyrighted song or material whose copyright may have expired. The big entertainment companies want to impose large costs on web intermediaries (which will be passed on to consumers) and make it more difficult for people to gain access to totally open material, in order to make them pay more money for their copyright-protected material.

Although the SOPA strategy of reducing access while raising prices could fit the dictionary definition of “job-killing regulation,” its advocates have the incredible audacity to be touting the 19 million jobs at stake. People really should take a moment to look at the industry’s website to see what might well rank as the most outrageous misrepresentation of economic reality ever to appear in a Washington policy debate.

The basic story is that if an industry is in any way directly or indirectly dependent on the output of a copyright-protected industry, then the jobs in that industry will be put at risk if Congress doesn’t approve the SOPA. By this methodology, all the jobs in the shipping industry will be at risk if we end the tax credit for solar power, since some of the materials used in solar panels is imported. This is patently absurd, but if you work for the 1 percent, you can get such arguments taken seriously in Washington policy circles.

In reality, the higher costs that the SOPA will impose on consumers both directly, and indirectly by raising costs to intermediaries, are money out of their pocket. The additional money that will be collected by the entertainment industry is money that will not be spent in local stores or restaurants.

It’s true that some of the money earned by entertainment industry will get back to writers, musicians and other creative workers, but this will be a very small amount compared with the additional cost to consumers. If we had forward thinking politicians in Washington, or economists who didn’t sell their services to the highest bidder, policy would be focused on devising more efficient mechanisms for supporting creative work.

Copyright is an incredibly inefficient mechanism dating back from the 16th century. The costs of enforcement are soaring as the Internet makes it ever more difficult. This is a situation where we are relying on toll booths to pay for our roads, but it is becoming ever easier for travelers to evade the toll booths. Rather looking for alternative ways to finance road construction, we are building bigger more expensive toll booths and increasing the penalties for not paying tolls.

Of course the point is to have money going to the road builders, not the people who run toll booths. There are alternative mechanisms for financing creative work. There is already a vast amount of creative and intellectual work that is not supported by copyrights. This includes work done by university faculty, work supported by non-profit organizations, and even to some extent work supported by the government.

We should be looking to expand and improve these alternative mechanisms rather than turn cyberspace into a copyright protected police state. The SOPA is big government at its worst: an intrusion into the market to help the 1 percent at the expense of everyone else.

www.huffingtonpost.com, 12/5/11

Florida Pastor: Muslim Leader Lied About Ground Zero Mosque, Koran Burning Only Suspended

By: David A. Patten

The anti-Muslim leader of a tiny Florida church says he was lied to and is rethinking his decision to cancel burning Korans to mark 9/11.

Pastor Terry Jones earlier Thursday had backed off his threat to burn the Koran after he said he was promised that a planned Islamic center and mosque would be moved away from New York’s ground zero. Muslim leaders denied there was such a deal.

Later outside his church he said that the imam he thought he made the deal with “clearly, clearly lied to us” about moving the mosque.

Jones and Imam Muhammad Musri stood side by side in a news conference where the pastor said he would cancel Saturday’s event.

Musri later told The Associated Press there was only an agreement for him and Jones to travel to New York and meet Saturday with the imam overseeing plans to build a mosque near ground zero.

After meeting with a Florida imam, Jones had agreed to cancel plans to burn the Koran on Saturday, and instead announced plans to fly to New York City, where he wants to protest against the Islamic center being built near ground zero.

Jones and Imam Muhammad Musri announced that the Koran-burning protest had been canceled shortly after 5 p.m. Thursday.

“If they were willing to either cancel the mosque at the ground zero location, or if they were willing to move that location, if they were willing to move it away from that location, we would consider that a sign from God,” Jones said.

Jones said Imam Musri had been in contact with Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf.

But Rauf, the controversial imam at the center of the ground zero mosque controversy, quickly denied he had reached any deal to cancel the planned Islamic center or had even discussed it with Musri.

“I am glad that Pastor Jones has decided not to burn any Korans,” Rauf said in a statement to CNN. “However, I have not spoken to Pastor Jones or Imam Musri. I am surprised by their announcement. We are not going to toy with our religion or any other, nor are we going to barter. We are here to extend our hands to build peace and harmony.”

Jones appeared to indicate that Rauf had agreed to move the ground zero mosque location. However, Musri did not speak to the imam, but spoke instead to the imam’s staff, who agreed to meet with Jones and Imam Musri on Saturday.

Slideshow: Prominent Voices Speak Out Against Koran Burning

The network also reports that Rauf’s staff said merely that the imam “was open” to selecting a new location, not that he promised to do so.

Nevertheless, Jones declared: “He has agreed to move the location. That cannot of course happen overnight. We felt that that would be a sign that God would want us to do it.

“The American people do not want the mosque there,” he said, “and of course Moslems do not want us to burn the Koran. The Imam has agreed to move the mosque.”

Jones also said he received a telephone call from Defense Secretary Robert Gates asking him not to proceed with the Koran-burning protest which had inflamed Islamic tensions throughout the world.

Interpol and the State Departments had issued alerts warning Americans that a backlash of violence abroad could result.

Imam Musri appeared to side with Jones on the question of the location of the ground zero mosque, saying it is unnecessary to place it that close to the site of the tragic terrorist attack of 9/11. He called on Muslims throughout the world to remain peaceful exemplars of the Muslim faith.

President Obama warned Thursday burning the Koran would be a “recruitment bonanza” for al-Qaida.

A few hours before the announcement of the burning cancellation, Obama told ABC that he hoped Jones “understands that what he’s proposing to do is completely contrary to our values. I just want him to understand that this stunt that he is talking about pulling could greatly endanger our young men and women in uniform who are in Iraq, who are in Afghanistan.”

The proposed event triggered flag-burning demonstrations abroad and sharp debates domestically over whether the same political correctness now flowing from the highest levels of the Obama administration also should apply to proposals to build a mosque two blocks from ground zero in New York City.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin commented: “People have a constitutional right to burn a Koran if they want to, but doing so is insensitive and an unnecessary provocation — much like building a mosque at ground zero. It will feed the fire of caustic rhetoric and appear as nothing more than mean-spirited religious intolerance. Don’t feed that fire.”

The State Department had advised U.S. embassies around the world to reassess their security measures.

The Rev. Franklin Graham, son of famed evangelist Dr. Billy Graham, had sent a personal letter to Jones, urging him not to burn the book that Muslims consider holy.

Graham, who professes love for Muslim people but has been outspoken in his view that Islam does not lead to salvation, said, “It’s never right to deface or destroy sacred texts or writings of other religions even if you don’t agree with them.”

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the Catholic archbishop emeritus of Washington, D.C., went even further Wednesday during a news conference at the National Press Club sponsored by the Islamic Society of North America.

If “someone sees the Gospel as the truth of God’s presence in our world, that person should embrace the Gospel,” McCarrick told CNSNews.com. “If a person sees the Koran as proof of God’s presence in the world, then I cannot say, ‘Don’t embrace the Koran.’”

Jones, whose church has just 50 members, ignited international protests with his plan to burn Korans to protest Shariah and acts of violence he contends are linked to the Islamic faith. Demonstrations included the following

• Thousands of Afghans burned the U.S. flag and chanted “death to the Christians” on Thursday.
• About 200 Pakistanis marched in Multan and burned a U.S. flag at the rally.
• A Muslim cleric in Afghanistan said Muslims would have a religious duty to react if the Koran were burned, heightening fears that Americans could be attacked.
• Gen. David Petraeus, who met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai Wednesday to discuss the controversy, said in an e-mail to The Associated Press that extremists would use images of the Koran in flames “to inflame public opinion and incite violence.”
• Declaring “shame on you,” evangelical Richard Cizik lectured Christians who openly reject Muslims because of their religious faith. “As an evangelical, I say, to those who do this, I say, ‘you bring dishonor to the name of Jesus Christ. You directly disobey his commandment to love our neighbor,” Cizik said at the National Press Club event.
• The nations of Pakistan and Bahrain issued official denunciations of the planned burning of the Koran.
• The president of Indonesia sent a letter to Obama, asking that the book-burning be halted.

Several U.S. leaders and organizations, including New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, have condemned the Koran burning while at the same time defending the church’s First Amendment right to express its views.

“We defend his right to the speech,” said Brandon Hensler, a spokesman for the Florida ACLU, “and we absolutely, simultaneously condemn the things that he’s saying, because they’re not tolerant of different religious viewpoints. The reverend himself has admittedly not read the Koran, and he’s simply using this as a jumping stone to get on the world stage, which he’s clearly achieved.”

The debates over the appropriate exercise of First Amendment rights in the case of the mosque and the burning of the Koran is triggering a broader discussion of the uneasy relationship between Islam and Christianity in America.

The Koran-burning protest comes in the context of the controversial decision to build a Muslim community center and mosque a few blocks away from ground zero in New York.

The imam behind the Park51 facility, formerly known as the Cordoba initiative, warned that relocating the facility could also spark Muslim violence against Americans.

“The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack,” said Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf in an exclusive CNN interview, adding that, “if you don’t do this right, anger will explode in the Muslim world.”

Rauf also suggested that, if he had it all to do over again, he would have selected a different location.

“If I knew this would happen, if it would cause this kind of pain, I wouldn’t have done it,” he said.

The recent controversies over the coexistence of Islam and Christianity appear to be creating cultural ripples nationwide.

Muslim, Christian, and Jewish groups are planning rallies to celebrate unity and tolerance on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks Saturday. It is not known if any of those observances will be held in Hartford, Conn., however, where the town council is embroiled in controversy after city leaders announced they would allow imams, as well as rabbis and Christian pastors, to provide the invocation before council meetings.

“If they check their history, we’re a Christian nation,” Pat McEwen of the evangelical group Operation Save America told Fox News. “For years, prayers just referred to God. I think breaking with that tradition is a bad idea.”

© Newsmax. All rights reserved.

By SCOTT SHANE, MARK MAZZETTI and ROBERT F. WORTH

Published: August 14, 2010

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Khaled Abdullah/Reuters

White House officials worked to win support for their efforts in Yemen from President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Expanding Battlefield

Articles in this series will examine the secret expansion of the war against Al Qaeda and its allies.

Series Page and Related Articles »

Multimedia

Graphic

Attacking Al Qaeda in Yemen

Graphic

Counterterrorism Geography

Related

• U.S. Is Said to Expand Secret Actions in Mideast (May 25, 2010)

• U.S. Is Still Using Private Spy Ring, Despite Doubts (May 16, 2010)

• Imam’s Path From Condemning Terror to Preaching Jihad (May 9, 2010)

• Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants (March 15, 2010)

• Times Topic: Al Qaeda

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Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Yemeni tribesmen blew up a pipeline in June in Marib Province in retaliation for an attack.

WASHINGTON — At first, the news from Yemen on May 25 sounded like a modest victory in the campaign against terrorists: an airstrike had hit a group suspected of being operatives for Al Qaeda in the remote desert of Marib Province, birthplace of the legendary queen of Sheba.

But the strike, it turned out, had also killed the province’s deputy governor, a respected local leader who Yemeni officials said had been trying to talk Qaeda members into giving up their fight. Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, accepted responsibility for the death and paid blood money to the offended tribes.

The strike, though, was not the work of Mr. Saleh’s decrepit Soviet-era air force. It was a secret mission by the United States military, according to American officials, at least the fourth such assault on Al Qaeda in the arid mountains and deserts of Yemen since December.

The attack offered a glimpse of the Obama administration’s shadow war against Al Qaeda and its allies. In roughly a dozen countries — from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife — the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.

The White House has intensified the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone missile campaign in Pakistan, approved raids against Qaeda operatives in Somalia and launched clandestine operations from Kenya. The administration has worked with European allies to dismantle terrorist groups in North Africa, efforts that include a recent French strike in Algeria. And the Pentagon tapped a network of private contractors to gather intelligence about things like militant hide-outs in Pakistan and the location of an American soldier currently in Taliban hands.

While the stealth war began in the Bush administration, it has expanded under President Obama, who rose to prominence in part for his early opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Virtually none of the newly aggressive steps undertaken by the United States government have been publicly acknowledged. In contrast with the troop buildup in Afghanistan, which came after months of robust debate, for example, the American military campaign in Yemen began without notice in December and has never been officially confirmed.

Obama administration officials point to the benefits of bringing the fight against Al Qaeda and other militants into the shadows. Afghanistan and Iraq, they said, have sobered American politicians and voters about the staggering costs of big wars that topple governments, require years of occupation and can be a catalyst for further radicalization throughout the Muslim world.

Instead of “the hammer,” in the words of John O. Brennan, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, America will rely on the “scalpel.” In a speech in May, Mr. Brennan, an architect of the White House strategy, used this analogy while pledging a “multigenerational” campaign against Al Qaeda and its extremist affiliates.

Yet such wars come with many risks: the potential for botched operations that fuel anti-American rage; a blurring of the lines between soldiers and spies that could put troops at risk of being denied Geneva Convention protections; a weakening of the Congressional oversight system put in place to prevent abuses by America’s secret operatives; and a reliance on authoritarian foreign leaders and surrogates with sometimes murky loyalties.

The May strike in Yemen, for example, provoked a revenge attack on an oil pipeline by local tribesmen and produced a propaganda bonanza for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. It also left President Saleh privately furious about the death of the provincial official, Jabir al-Shabwani, and scrambling to prevent an anti-American backlash, according to Yemeni officials.

The administration’s demands have accelerated a transformation of the C.I.A. into a paramilitary organization as much as a spying agency, which some critics worry could lower the threshold for future quasi-military operations. In Pakistan’s mountains, the agency had broadened its drone campaign beyond selective strikes against Qaeda leaders and now regularly obliterates suspected enemy compounds and logistics convoys, just as the military would grind down an enemy force.

For its part, the Pentagon is becoming more like the C.I.A. Across the Middle East and elsewhere, Special Operations troops under secret “Execute Orders” have conducted spying missions that were once the preserve of civilian intelligence agencies. With code names like Eager Pawn and Indigo Spade, such programs typically operate with even less transparency and Congressional oversight than traditional covert actions by the C.I.A.

And, as American counterterrorism operations spread beyond war zones into territory hostile to the military, private contractors have taken on a prominent role, raising concerns that the United States has outsourced some of its most important missions to a sometimes unaccountable private army.

A Proving Ground

Yemen is a testing ground for the “scalpel” approach Mr. Brennan endorses. Administration officials warn of the growing strength of Al Qaeda’s affiliate there, citing as evidence its attempt on Dec. 25 to blow up a trans-Atlantic jetliner using a young Nigerian operative. Some American officials believe that militants in Yemen could now pose an even greater threat than Al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan.

The puppet theater features Karagz (“black-eyed” in Turkish), a hunchbacked trickster who tries to make a living by hoodwinking Turkish officials and generally avoids all manner of honest work.

The setting is loosely placed during the Ottoman rule of Greece, from the mid-15th to the early 19th century. The Greek version of the puppet theater features Karagiozis (Greek for Karagz).

Infused with a cast of Ottoman-era social cliches – including a Turkish enforcer, a Zante dandy, a Jew and a rough-hewn Greek shepherd – it was a popular form of folk entertainment in Greece until a few decades ago.

“The UNESCO convention on intangible cultural heritage enables neighboring countries to also access the same commodity,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Grigoris Delavekouras told a news briefing. “Greece has tabled a statement that the same practice exists in our country and a discussion … regarding this issue will take place in Nairobi in October.”

He added that the Karagiozis shadow theater is an “inseparable” part of Greek culture.

UNESCO last year placed Karagz on its list of intangible cultural elements, associating it with Turkey where the character was originally born.

In Greece, however, the character remains a powerful icon of resistance to authority even though Karagiozis performances are now only practiced by a few enthusiasts. Karagiozis is also a common byword for “fool” in Greek.

The origins of Turkish Karagz theater and its hide-crafted puppets are lost to history, though it is assumed that it was introduced to Turkey from Egypt.

Shadow theater is believed to have first surfaced in India over 2,000 years ago. –AFP, with The Daily Star

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=4&Article_id=117124#axzz0tzwCuBMX

We’ve been had, boys and girls: the international community, the world press, Israeli intelligence, the United Nations, the lot of us. The existential drama off the Gaza coast turns out to be a Turkish farce, the kind of low comedy that in 1782 Wolfgang Mozart set to music in the opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan playing the buffo-villain Osmin and Turkish self-exiled preacher and author Fethullah Gulen as the wise Pasha Selim.

In the post-American world, where every wannabe and used-to-be power makes momentary deals with other powers it plans to kill later, one makes inferences with caution. But I’ve seen this opera before.

Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania in the United States, was silent as a jinn in a bottle about politics until last Friday, when he told

the Wall Street Journal that the Free Gaza flotilla’s attempt to run the Israeli blockage of Gaza “is a sign of defying authority, and will not lead to fruitful matters”.

Erdogan’s Islamists have run a two-year campaign of judicial activism against secular politicians, journalists and army officers, and secular critics long have alleged that Gulen is the clerical power behind the prime minister.

For the secretive Gulen to criticize the Turkish government in the midst of its public rage against Israel is an imam-bites-dog story. Gulen appears to have positioned himself as a mediator with Israel. Turkey does not want to end its longstanding relationship with Israel; it wants Israel to become a Turkish vassal-state in emulation of the old Ottoman model.

The killing last week by Israeli commandos of nine activists on board the Mavi Marmara served numerous goals, and Gulen’s grand return to Turkish politics appears to be one of them. The question that every commentator in the Turkish press asked over the weekend, in one form or other, was: When will this voice of Muslim moderation re-emerge as an open force in the ruling Islamist party?

There is every indication that the Turkish government dispatched the Gaza flotilla in order to stage a violent confrontation. The Erdogan government announced that it had carefully vetted the passenger list on the Mavi Marmara, which is to say that it knew that many of the passengers boarded with the intention of achieving “martyrdom” in a clash with the Israelis. They must have known this, for both the Turkish as well as the Palestinian press ran interviews with family members of some of the nine dead passengers explaining this intent.

The passengers’ plans for martyrdom have been celebrated in the Arab press, and translated on the website of the Middle East Media Research Institute. The Turkish government also knew that the Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH), the Islamic charity behind the Gaza flotilla, had ties to Hamas, for it had banned the IHH from charitable activity in Turkey a decade ago due to its connection to an organization that the previous secular government regarded as terrorist.

What explains Israel’s apparent intelligence failure? Israel fields a small service tasked with operations in Iran, southern Lebanon, Gaza and Syria among other prospective enemies. The Mossad probably relied on counterparts in Turkish intelligence – with whom it has a long history of collaboration – to cover the passenger list on the Mavi Marmara. The often-unreliable Debka claims that “Turkish intelligence duped Israel”, which in this case is likely. By stealth or by sloth, Israel was roped into the comedy.

The star of the comedy, at least for the Turkish media, is Gulen. The 78-year-old imam has lived in self-imposed exile for two decades, due to charges by Turkish prosecutors that he led a conspiracy to subvert the secular state. He presides over Turkey’s largest religious movement, commanding the loyalty of two-thirds of the Turkish police, according to some reports. His movement – a transnational civic society movement inspired by Gulen’s teachings - also controls a network of elite schools that educate a tenth of the high school students in the Turkic world from Baku to Kyrgyzstan. And it reportedly controls businesses with tens of billions of dollars in assets.

His movement has been expelled from the Russian Federation and his followers arrested in Uzbekistan by local authorities who believe his goal is a pan-Turkic union from the Bosporus to China’s western Xinjiang province (“East Turkestan” to Gulen’s movement).

In Mozart’s Abduction, Belmonte and Pedrillo descend into the pasha’s harem to rescue Kostanze; in last week’s version, Israeli commandos descended onto the Mavi Marmara. And there is the stock villain of Viennese comedy, the Turk Osmin, played by Erdogan. The predictable occurs, and the prospective Shahidi become actual corpses. And Erdogan threatens Israel with terrible things, in emulation of Mozart’s Osmin, who sings:

“First you’ll be beheaded!
Then hanged!
Then spitted on hot stakes!
Then bound, and burned, and drowned, and finally skinned!”

This, one supposes, is supposed to frighten the children in the audience, who then will smile and clap when the Wise Old Man enters to urge moderation, caution and respect for authority, in the person of Gulen.

The Islamic shift in Turkey has been underway for years. As Rachel Sharon-Krespin wrote in the Middle East Quarterly (Winter 2009):

As Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) begins its seventh year in leadership, Turkey is no longer the secular and democratic country that it was when the party took over. The AKP has conquered the bureaucracy and changed Turkey’s fundamental identity. Prior to the AKP’s rise, Ankara oriented itself toward the United States and Europe. Today, despite the rhetoric of European Union accession, Prime Minister Erdogan has turned Turkey away from Europe and toward Russia and Iran and re-oriented Turkish policy in the Middle East away from sympathy toward Israel and much more toward friendship with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria.

We are now in a post-American world, at least where the Barack Obama administration is concerned, and Turkey like its neighbors is scrambling for position. What does Turkey want in a post-American world?

The question itself seems stupid, for the obvious answer is: “Whatever it can get.” It wants to become the dominant regional power rather than Iran, casting a wolfish glance at Iran’s Azeri population, who speak Turkish rather than Persian. It wants to “mediate” the Israeli-Palestinian issue and is not squeamish about its prospective partners. It wants Palestine to be an Ottoman province once again. It wants to be the energy hub for the Middle East and the outlet for Russian and Azerbaijani pipelines.

But it is a bit more complex than that. Modern Turkey is an artificial construct, rather than a nation-state in the Western sense. Since the Turks completed the conquest of Byzantine Anatolia in the middle of the 14th century, a relatively thin crust of ethnic Turks has ruled over subject peoples. The Ottoman Empire at various points in its history had a Christian majority; its civil service at different points was more Venetian, Armenian and Jewish then Turkish; its self-understanding was global and religious, that is, as the caliphate of Islam, rather than as a national entity.

When World War I reduced Turkey to an Anatolian rump, Kemal Ataturk attempted to impose “Turkishness” as a secular, national ideology on the European model. To make the country “Turkish”, several million Orthodox Christians were estimated to have been killed. The hollowness of Ataturk’s secular construct, modeled on the nastier European national movements, made it vulnerable from the beginning. The army was the only institution that could hold Turkish society together.

What will replace Ataturk’s secularism? I wrote two years ago:

If political Islam prevails in Turkey, what will emerge is not the same country in different coloration, but a changeling, an entirely different nation. In a 1997 speech that earned him a prison term, Erdogan warned of two fundamentally different camps, the secularists who followed Kemal, and Muslims who followed sharia. These are not simply different camps, however, but different configurations of Turkish society at the molecular level. Like a hologram, Turkey offers two radically different images when viewed from different angles. Turkish Islam, the ordering of the Anatolian villages and the Istanbul slums, represents a nation radically different than the secularism of the army, the civil service, the universities and the Western-leaning elite of Istanbul. If the Islamic side of Turkey rises, the result will be unrecognizable. Turkey in the throes of Islamic revolution? Asia Times Online, July 22, 2008.

Gulen’s pan-Turkic mysticism views Turkey as the center of a new caliphate uniting the Muslim world. He preaches a “Turkish renaissance” with a modern spin “to ensure that religion and science go together and that science penetrates not only individual lives, but also social life”. His schools educate the elite of the Turkic world across Asia. Gulen’s interest, to be sure, focuses on the Turkish state, whose bureaucracy is now filled with his acolytes. But unlike Ataturk’s secular nationalism, which tried to redefine Turkey on a European model, Gulen’s Islamism is inherently expansionist.

What Gulen means by science is of an entirely different order than the Western understanding. This “imam from rural Anatolia”, as his website describes him, inhabits the magical world of jinns and sorcery. Science is just a powerful form of magic of which Turks should avail themselves to enhance their power, as he writes in his 2005 book, The Essentials of the Islamic Faith:

Jinn are conscious beings charged with divine obligations. Recent discoveries in biology make it clear that God created beings particular to each realm. They were created before Adam and Eve, and were responsible for cultivating and improving the world. Although God superseded them with us, he did not exempt them from religious obligations.

As nothing is difficult for God almighty, he has provided human beings, angels and jinns with the strength appropriate for their functions and duties. As he uses angels to supervise the movements of celestial bodies, he allows to humans to rule the Earth, dominate matter, build civilizations and produce technology.

Power and strength are not limited to the physical world, nor are they proportional to bodily size … Our eyes can travel long distances in an instant. Our imagination can transcend time and space all at once … winds can uproot trees and demolish large buildings. A young, thin plant shoot can split rocks and reach the sunlight. The power of energy, whose existence is known through its effect, is apparent to everybody. All of this shows that something’s power is not proportional to its physical size; rather the immaterial world dominates the physical world, and immaterial entities are far more powerful than material ones.

He goes on to warn about sorcery and the danger of spells; he allows that it is meritorious to break spells (for evil witches are everywhere casting spells), although a good Muslim should not make a profession of this, for then he might be mistaken for a sorcerer himself. The notion that “wind” and “energy” are “immaterial” forces exudes the magical world view of an Anatolian peasant; the miracles of technology are the secret actions of jinn, just as the planetary movements are the actions of angels. When Gulen talks about the union of religion and science, what he means quite concretely is that the magical view of jinns in the Koran aids the believer in enlisting these “immaterial” forces to enhance the power of Islam. Science for Gulen means the management of jinn.

Gulen, in short, is a shaman, a relic of pre-history preserved in the cultural amber of eastern Anatolia. Kemalism was sterile, brutal, secular and rational; the “moderate Islam” of Gulen is magical, a mystic’s vision of Ottoman restoration and a pan-Turkic caliphate.

The Erdogan government crafted the Mavi Marmara affair as a piece of theater, preparing the deus ex machina (god from the machine) entrance of Gulen himself, more Pagliaccio than Apollo, to be sure. The trouble is that the Turkish Islamists live in a world of magical realism in which theater and reality, human and jinn, desire and achievement blend into a mystical blur. Gulen explains in his The Essentials of the Islamic Faith that Allah created the jinn out of fire. And that is what the apologists for Turkish Islamism are playing with.

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman, senior editor of First Things (www.firstthings.com).

Over the past few months, the PKK has relied on arms from Mediterranean countries, intelligence reports indicate. The roadside bomb that exploded in Halkalı on Tuesday was of Portuguese origin, intelligence sources said, adding this country to the list of countries that supply arms to the terrorist organization. That attack was carried out by the PKK’s urban offshoot, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK).

The most crucial question is how the PKK is able to bring these arms supplies it obtains from Mediterranean countries to northern Iraq. US journalist Seymour Hersh claimed in 2007 that this was done via Israel.

The General Staff has seized PKK arms and ammunition originating from
31 different countries.However, NATO-member countries have been the biggest suppliers. Most of the arms and ammunition seized are of Russian, Italian, Spanish, German and Chinese origin.

EARLIER REPORTS

May 22, 2007

C4 plastic explosive

Explosion rocks Ankara, the Turkish capital

Five people have been killed and at least 60 hurt in an explosion during evening rush hour at the entrance to a shopping centre in the district of Ulus. A Pakistan national was among the dead. The area has been cordoned off and an investigation has begun. Unconfirmed reports suggest an explosive device may have been left at a nearby bus stop and is PKK related. It is suspected that the explosive is C4 which was supplied (as Block demolition charge M112, which may also be cut and/or removed from the mylar wrapper and hand formed as desired to suit the target) to US forces in Iraq and is more that a few tons are missing . PKK routinely uses Italian sourced plastic land mines and Armenian made remote detonation (cell phone type) equipment. In recent months huge weapons caches were discovered in many parts of Turkey such as Muğla, Van, İzmir, Ağrı and Şırnak.

C-4 is the standard-issue plastic explosive used by the US military.
C-4 or (Composition C-4) is used for any stable explosive, and “Composition A” and “Composition B” are other known variants. Made up of explosive, plastic binder, plasticizer and, usually, marker or taggant chemicals such as 2,3-dimethyl-2,3-dinitrobutane (DMDNB) to help detect the explosive and identify its source C-4 is 1.34 times as explosive as trinitrotoluene (TNT).

C-4 is made by combining RDX slurry with binder dissolved in a solvent. The solvent is then evaporated away and the mixture is dried and filtered. The final material is an off-white solid with a feel similar to modelling clay. A major advantage of C-4 is that it can easily be moulded into any desired shape. C-4 can be pressed into gaps/voids in buildings, bridges, equipment or machinery. C-4 is also well known for its durability, reliability, and safety. It will not explode even if hit by a bullet, punched, cut, or thrown into a fire.

The only reliable method for detonation is via both heat and pressure, i.e a detonator or blasting cap.

İlgi cekici bir analiz
asagida sunulmakta
Pulat Tacar

21 June 2010

Photo: AFP

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad flashes the V-sign for victory as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan looks on after the Islamic republic inked a nuclear fuel swap deal in Tehran (File Photo – 17 May 2010)

This month, Turkey voted against the United Nations Security Council’s fourth round of sanctions against Iran. With Turkey’s Islamic rooted government increasing its economic ties with Iran in the past few years, fears are arising that the pivotal Western ally is in danger of swinging eastward because of resistance in Europe to its bid for membership of the European Union.

Despite growing international tensions over Iran’s nuclear energy program, the Turkish government has forged ahead with energy deals with Iran, expanding its dependency on energy with the nation.

These deals put Turkey in a precarious situation: to enforce or not to enforce the UN sanctions imposed on its neighbor Iran.

Turkey has long been seen as a bridge between East and West. But its belief that sanctions are ineffective and that there are dangers in pushing the Islamic republic into a corner is likely to change its relationship with Western nations.

Earlier this month Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu expressed concern over the existing sanctions against Iran.

“Turkey and Iran’s trade volume is around $10 billion,” he says. “And it can rise to $30 billion if sanctions are lifted.”

Iran’s energy resources are seen as important by Ankara to break its dependency on Russian energy.

Iran expert Gokhan Cetinsayar of Sehir University says that in addition to its dependency on gas, there are other trade initiatives with Iran that are economically key to Turkey.

“75,000 trucks going on between Turkey and Iran every year,” said Cetinsayar. “Now there are energy deals. You know how important the Iranian natural gas and all other agreements and initiatives are economically important for Turkey.

With large families usually depending for their livelihoods on cargo trucks, its estimated as many a million Turkish people depend on Iranian trade.

With its increasing economic ties with Iran, there are growing fears that Turkey will balk at enforcing the UN sanctions against Iran.

Turkish foreign minister spokesman Burak Ozugergin says Turkey has already paid a heavy economic price for UN policies with another of its neighbors, Iraq.

“At the beginning of the 90′s, the Turkish volume of trade with Iraq was around the 15 to 20 percent mark of our total volume of trade. The next year, after the imposition of sanctions, this trickled down to almost zero,” said Ozugergin. “Money is not everything. But at least if it did work then we might be able to say to our public, ‘look it was for a good a cause.’ But can we really honestly say that looking back? For Iran again we don’t think it will help to solve the nuclear issue and perhaps may work against it.”

The new sanctions on Iran are expected to cut into the present $10 billion trade volume. It could possibly undermine its energy policy as well. But political scientist Nuray Mert of Istanbul University say some western nations may now not be able to depend on Turkey.

“I was inclined to think that at the end of the day Turkey will join the club when it comes to realization of these sanctions,” she said. “But nowadays I can see the government is planning to avoid these sanctions. Because now we have Turkey signing a lot of economic agreements, against the policy of sanctions.”

For now Turkey has remained circumspect over enforcing new sanctions. One foreign ministry official said “you will have to wait and see.” Analysts say Iran would probably reward any breaking of sanctions with lucrative energy deals. But the political cost could be high because of Turkey’s aspirations for joining the EU. The coming weeks will see Ankara facing a difficult a choice.