Post by alex221166 on Aug 16, 2004 10:56:48 GMT -5
www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/002867.php
August 16, 2004
How many legions has the Pope?
From the Times of Malta, with thanks to Ali Dashti:
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has rebuffed comments by a top Vatican official that Muslim Turkey should drop its quest to join the European Union on cultural grounds, saying the papal state has no say in the matter.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, doctrinal head of the Roman Catholic Church, said in a magazine interview this week that Turkey should seek its future in a grouping of Islamic nations rather than try to join a European bloc with Christian roots.
"The Vatican is a religious state. It is not an EU member. We discuss and assess (our EU bid) with EU member countries," Turkish newspapers quoted Mr Erdogan yesterday as saying....
Mr Ratzinger's comments, in which he said Turkey had always been "in permanent contrast to Europe" and noted that the Ottoman Empire once threatened Vienna and fought wars in the Balkans, have caused anger in the Turkish press.
Anger? Why? What part of that paragraph is untrue? They just don't want the dhimmis to remind them of the facts of the matter.
Posted at August 16, 2004 09:27 AM
Comments
(Note: Comments on articles are unmoderated, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Dhimmi Watch or Robert Spencer. Comments that are off-topic, offensive, slanderous, or otherwise annoying may be summarily deleted. However, the fact that particular comments remain on the site IN NO WAY constitutes an endorsement by Robert Spencer of the views expressed therein.)
Yesterday, August 15, in the New York Times Book Review, Margaret Atwood reviewed "Snow" by the best-known writer in Turkey, Orest Pamuk. The review itself left much to be desired, including the bullying of an imaginary collective (being told that some book is "essential reading for our times" is not the way to get this reader's attention); the book is further described as an "in-depth tour of the divided, hopeful, desolate, mystifying Turkish soul" (apparently the word "in-depth" is not confined to being dropped before every damn "study" that is ever conducted; as for the "Turkish soul" -- this seems to have replaced the mystic "Slavic soul" that used to entrance Hogarth Press readers of Dostoyevsky; Russian exiles always mocked this "amslavstvo" (from "ame slave") that received so much Western attention and gush. The review is written badly, with many adjectives crying out for elimiation: "playful farce" -- is there another kind? -- is followed by "gruesome tragedy" and then there are "sudden eruptions of violence" as opposed to all those slow-motion "eruptions" with which we are so familiar.
But this is not meant to be a review of a review.It is, instead, to point to the interview with Pamuk, conducted bgy Alexander Star. Pamuk is no doubt an attractive fellow, but he leaves the impression that there is a kind of equal threat, to him and to those who support him, from "Muslim fundamentalists" and from the Turksih army. He turns away a question about the Erdogan government's attempt "to assist the graduates of relgious schools" by saying "I'm a writer. I try to focus on these issues not from the point of view of a statesman but from the point of view of a person who tries to understand the pain and suffering of others. I don't think there is any set formula to solve these problems." Later on he talks about how the "turksih state was damaging democracy, human rights, and the country." He further claims that "George Bush...made the whole Islamic community unnecessarily angry with the United States, and in fact with the West. This will pave the way to lots of horrors and inflcut cruel adn unnecessary pain on lots of people. It will raise the tension between East and West."
Pamuk,uttering these phrases -- in which he takes no note either of the hysterical delight expressed in much of the Muslim world about Bin Laden's attack, nor seems to care at all about the possibilities for an improvement in Iraqi lives now that Saddam Hussein has, at great American cost (with little help from sullen Iraqis, who of course exhibit not the slightest gratitude for that, or all the other material benefits, being brought by Infidels -- because they are Infidels). But above all, he shows very little appreciation for the threat of Erdogan, and the slow and cunning undoing of Kemalism.
If this interview is fair, then it can only make one think of those Iranian leftists, great critics of the Shah, his corruption, Savak, the waste of money at Persepolois, etc. etc., who did not foresee what Khomeini, and Islam in its full, and pure form, would do to Iran. Pamuk might reflect a bit more on the fact that he owes his own existence as a free writer, to Kemal Ataturk, and to those -- including those in the Turkish Army whose stern measures he equates with the threat of "Islamists." Should Kemalism ever be thoroughly undone, he will, in the end, do what the leftist critics of the Shah, who were used by Khomeini, and then discarded, and even murdered abroad(Shahpour Bakhtiar comes to mind). His seeming unawareness of how much is owed to Ataturk -- for the survival precisely of the very people who manage to create, or who support those who do, in Turkey -- is astounding. If he thinks it is "George Bush" who created a rift between what he tellingly describes as "the Islamic community" (Is he part of that "community"? Does he wish to be?) and not the eruption of the Jihadist impulse which is deeply embedded in Qur'an and hadith -- Pamuk may not actually know what is in the Qur'an and hadith, or may refuse to believe that hundreds of millions of others take it all seriously.
Meanwhile, if he wants to be really daring, why does he not take on the subject of the Muslim Turkish massacres of non-Muslims, especially the genocide, rooted in hatred of the "giavour" in which Turks and Kurds and even Arabs in the Syrian Desert (not the Christians of Haleb and Beirut) participated. Or study the devshirme in Ottoman Europe, instead of accepting the sanitized views of the Ottoman behavior that not only many Turkish historians, but that their favorites, such as Lewis and Shaw, at times echo. The secularist, advanced, tolerant Pamuk-reading Turks indulge in a bit of mental nunc pro tunc backdating, believing that the Kemalist Turkey of today, and the present quite tolerable condition of the few non-Muslims left in Turkey, somehow can tell us what it must have been like for dhimmis in 1915, or 1890, or 1850, or 1820, or 1750. Not at all.
Everything that makes Pamuk possible comes from the constraints put on Islam by Ataturk and his followers -- and that includes that "Turkish army" he apparently regards as such a threat. One does not wish Turkey to have to undergo what Iran has undergone, for its own secularist elite to learn again what the Iranian intellectual class (see Ali Sina, Azam Kamguian, and a million others in exile and still in Iran) has learned with a vengeance: the problem remains the immutable doctrines of Islam.
A little gratitude to Ataturk, please, Mr. Pamuk. A little more awareness of what has permitted you to write freely, and without the threat of assassination.
Posted by: Hugh at August 16, 2004 10:20 AM
August 16, 2004
How many legions has the Pope?
From the Times of Malta, with thanks to Ali Dashti:
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has rebuffed comments by a top Vatican official that Muslim Turkey should drop its quest to join the European Union on cultural grounds, saying the papal state has no say in the matter.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, doctrinal head of the Roman Catholic Church, said in a magazine interview this week that Turkey should seek its future in a grouping of Islamic nations rather than try to join a European bloc with Christian roots.
"The Vatican is a religious state. It is not an EU member. We discuss and assess (our EU bid) with EU member countries," Turkish newspapers quoted Mr Erdogan yesterday as saying....
Mr Ratzinger's comments, in which he said Turkey had always been "in permanent contrast to Europe" and noted that the Ottoman Empire once threatened Vienna and fought wars in the Balkans, have caused anger in the Turkish press.
Anger? Why? What part of that paragraph is untrue? They just don't want the dhimmis to remind them of the facts of the matter.
Posted at August 16, 2004 09:27 AM
Comments
(Note: Comments on articles are unmoderated, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Dhimmi Watch or Robert Spencer. Comments that are off-topic, offensive, slanderous, or otherwise annoying may be summarily deleted. However, the fact that particular comments remain on the site IN NO WAY constitutes an endorsement by Robert Spencer of the views expressed therein.)
Yesterday, August 15, in the New York Times Book Review, Margaret Atwood reviewed "Snow" by the best-known writer in Turkey, Orest Pamuk. The review itself left much to be desired, including the bullying of an imaginary collective (being told that some book is "essential reading for our times" is not the way to get this reader's attention); the book is further described as an "in-depth tour of the divided, hopeful, desolate, mystifying Turkish soul" (apparently the word "in-depth" is not confined to being dropped before every damn "study" that is ever conducted; as for the "Turkish soul" -- this seems to have replaced the mystic "Slavic soul" that used to entrance Hogarth Press readers of Dostoyevsky; Russian exiles always mocked this "amslavstvo" (from "ame slave") that received so much Western attention and gush. The review is written badly, with many adjectives crying out for elimiation: "playful farce" -- is there another kind? -- is followed by "gruesome tragedy" and then there are "sudden eruptions of violence" as opposed to all those slow-motion "eruptions" with which we are so familiar.
But this is not meant to be a review of a review.It is, instead, to point to the interview with Pamuk, conducted bgy Alexander Star. Pamuk is no doubt an attractive fellow, but he leaves the impression that there is a kind of equal threat, to him and to those who support him, from "Muslim fundamentalists" and from the Turksih army. He turns away a question about the Erdogan government's attempt "to assist the graduates of relgious schools" by saying "I'm a writer. I try to focus on these issues not from the point of view of a statesman but from the point of view of a person who tries to understand the pain and suffering of others. I don't think there is any set formula to solve these problems." Later on he talks about how the "turksih state was damaging democracy, human rights, and the country." He further claims that "George Bush...made the whole Islamic community unnecessarily angry with the United States, and in fact with the West. This will pave the way to lots of horrors and inflcut cruel adn unnecessary pain on lots of people. It will raise the tension between East and West."
Pamuk,uttering these phrases -- in which he takes no note either of the hysterical delight expressed in much of the Muslim world about Bin Laden's attack, nor seems to care at all about the possibilities for an improvement in Iraqi lives now that Saddam Hussein has, at great American cost (with little help from sullen Iraqis, who of course exhibit not the slightest gratitude for that, or all the other material benefits, being brought by Infidels -- because they are Infidels). But above all, he shows very little appreciation for the threat of Erdogan, and the slow and cunning undoing of Kemalism.
If this interview is fair, then it can only make one think of those Iranian leftists, great critics of the Shah, his corruption, Savak, the waste of money at Persepolois, etc. etc., who did not foresee what Khomeini, and Islam in its full, and pure form, would do to Iran. Pamuk might reflect a bit more on the fact that he owes his own existence as a free writer, to Kemal Ataturk, and to those -- including those in the Turkish Army whose stern measures he equates with the threat of "Islamists." Should Kemalism ever be thoroughly undone, he will, in the end, do what the leftist critics of the Shah, who were used by Khomeini, and then discarded, and even murdered abroad(Shahpour Bakhtiar comes to mind). His seeming unawareness of how much is owed to Ataturk -- for the survival precisely of the very people who manage to create, or who support those who do, in Turkey -- is astounding. If he thinks it is "George Bush" who created a rift between what he tellingly describes as "the Islamic community" (Is he part of that "community"? Does he wish to be?) and not the eruption of the Jihadist impulse which is deeply embedded in Qur'an and hadith -- Pamuk may not actually know what is in the Qur'an and hadith, or may refuse to believe that hundreds of millions of others take it all seriously.
Meanwhile, if he wants to be really daring, why does he not take on the subject of the Muslim Turkish massacres of non-Muslims, especially the genocide, rooted in hatred of the "giavour" in which Turks and Kurds and even Arabs in the Syrian Desert (not the Christians of Haleb and Beirut) participated. Or study the devshirme in Ottoman Europe, instead of accepting the sanitized views of the Ottoman behavior that not only many Turkish historians, but that their favorites, such as Lewis and Shaw, at times echo. The secularist, advanced, tolerant Pamuk-reading Turks indulge in a bit of mental nunc pro tunc backdating, believing that the Kemalist Turkey of today, and the present quite tolerable condition of the few non-Muslims left in Turkey, somehow can tell us what it must have been like for dhimmis in 1915, or 1890, or 1850, or 1820, or 1750. Not at all.
Everything that makes Pamuk possible comes from the constraints put on Islam by Ataturk and his followers -- and that includes that "Turkish army" he apparently regards as such a threat. One does not wish Turkey to have to undergo what Iran has undergone, for its own secularist elite to learn again what the Iranian intellectual class (see Ali Sina, Azam Kamguian, and a million others in exile and still in Iran) has learned with a vengeance: the problem remains the immutable doctrines of Islam.
A little gratitude to Ataturk, please, Mr. Pamuk. A little more awareness of what has permitted you to write freely, and without the threat of assassination.
Posted by: Hugh at August 16, 2004 10:20 AM
