In this mailing:
- Claire Berlinski: Turkey's Sex, Lies and Videotapes
- Christine Williams: Birthplace of Christ Used in Bid for Palestinian Statehood
Turkey's Sex, Lies and Videotapes
by Claire Berlinski
June 26, 2012 at 8:30 am
June 26, 2012 at 8:30 am
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If you are
not allowed to keep these tapes on your computer, how can you threaten your
enemies with them? The issue people should have been concerned about was not
porn at all, but the implementation of a system that allows the government at
will to to shut off channels of political dissent – a feat it managed quite
successfully.
Turkey's Supreme Court of Appeals did not
criminalize all porn recently—it just ruled that anyone in
possession of videos depicting oral or anal sex may be sentenced to prison.
This followed a recent
ruling identifying videos of gay and group sex as
"unnatural"—that is, in the same legal category as videos depicting
sex with animals, children and corpses, all of which are forbidden by Article
262.2 of the Turkish Penal Code. This article stipulates that owning, trafficking,
distributing or publishing such videos will earn you one-to-four. The ruling
followed the sentencing by a local court of a suspect to six months in prison
for selling CDs that depicted what we in the decadent West might call
"sending your husband off to the office happy."
The case went up to the Supreme Court of
Appeals, which not only ruled that the defendant's sentence was too low, but
declared that the activity in question was also "unnatural"— on a par
with necrophilia. The court thus overruled the original sentence and replaced
it with one consistent with Article 262.2.
As if this were not enough to chill the
country's libido, the new ruling applies both to videos downloaded from the
Internet or stored on a personal computer— in other words, it probably applies
to every male with a computer in Turkey: according to Google, Turkey leads the
world in searches for the word "porn" (followed, if you are curious,
by Romania and Peru). As one Turkish friend put it, "Who wants to watch
porn without oral sex?"
Bans on porn in Turkey are nothing new—after
the 1980 coup, for example, the military imposed a desultory ban; but what
really happened was that newspapers unable to report about anything else
started competing on skin, until, by the end of the decade, porn was a growth
industry. A Turkish friend recently nostalgically reminisced about the kids who
sold Kleenex outside his favorite Beyoğlu cinema when he was growing up.
By the late 1990s, the porn industry here was
apparently in its Golden Age. I don't know much about it and don't really want
to do the research; I'll just take everyone's word for it. Then the AKP came to
power and began cracking down. In 2004, members of the government passed
legislation making it illegal to distribute "obscene" images, words,
or texts through any means of communication – pretty much criminalizing the
entire country. In 2005, they banned the four erotic television channels
available on Turkey's sole satellite provider: Digiturk. Playboy TV, Exotica
TV, Adult Channel, and Rouge TV all disappeared, to little outcry. No one
watched porn on satellite TV anyway—it had long since entered the Internet age.
But then they went too far: They announced
plans to filter the stuff off the Internet. Delicacy prevents me from listing
the banned words, but their move prompted the kind of outrage usually not seen
in Turkey: people who had never before expressed the faintest interest in
attending a protest said they planned to attend one.
There were massive campaigns against the
legislation on Facebook and Twitter, some of them quite sophisticated,
defending the right to unfettered Internet access. The government was forced to
back down: it would introduce a filtering system, it said, but adults could opt
out.
The issue people should have been
concerned about, of course, was not porn at all, but the technical
implementation of a system that allows the government at will to shut off
channels of political dissent – a feat it managed quite successfully.
The government has not given up the dream of
banning porn, or books, for that matter. Last year, the Board for Protection of
Minors from Obscene Publications brought a case against both the publisher and
the Turkish translator of The Soft Machine by William Burroughs,
pronouncing the book "incompatible with the morals of society and the
people's honor," "injurious to sexuality" and "generally
repugnant." The owner of the publishing house, Irfan Sanci, had been tried
on similar charges the year prior, and was acquitted for publishing a Turkish translation
of Apollinaire's The Adventures of a Young Don Juan. Now, however, the
translator of The Soft Machine, Suha Sertabiboglu, faces up to three
years in prison if convicted. The Board for the Protection of Minors also
brought the publisher and translator of Chuck Palahniuk's Snuff to trial
on charges of obscenity. Snuff is a satire of the porn industry, not an
example of it, but the level of English language comprehension and literary
sophistication one would need to appreciate this is far beyond that of the
Board. The Board, by the way, has existed since 1921, but has been so somnolent
that no one I know can even remember hearing about it until the AKP won its
third term.
Given the number of politicians, generals,
journalists and other figures who have been blackmailed with illegally filmed
videotapes of their sexual activity, this new ruling puts blackmailers, in
particular, in a legal conundrum: If you aren't allowed to keep these tapes on
your computer, how can you threaten your enemies with them?
Illicit sex tapes were a major feature of the
last general election campaign that brought the AKP back to power for its third
and arguably least glorious term. One well-timed sex-tape scandal after another
held the opposition parties hostage, and may have contributed to the AKP's
capture of 326 votes in the 550 seat parliament—almost enough to put its
proposals for constitutional reform to a referendum without the support of any
other party. (Or perhaps it lost seats instead: Quite a bit of the country was just
disgusted by the whole business.) Released just a month before the June 12
election, one tape appeared to show two (married) senior opposition party
members engaged in a bit of rumpy-pumpy with female university students. The
anonymous cinematographers warned the leader of the minority Nationalist
Movement Party, or MHP, that if he did not want to see more sex and audio tapes
of his closest aides released, he might like to step aside.
It's possible that the wave of tape-scandals
was an inside job: Some believed they were the work of a dissenting faction of
the MHP. But they were also widely rumored to be the handiwork of the AKP or
its supporters, and designed to push the MHP below the 10% election threshold.
This would have barred the MHP from entering parliament and reassigned its
seats to the parties that passed, giving the AKP the supermajority its members
so badly wanted to be able to pass a new constitution without a
referendum. It almost worked, too—the MHP squeaked in with just 53 seats.
While the technique of ridding oneself of
political rivals by means of a well-timed sex-tape leak is hardly unknown to
the West, in Turkey the ritual has certain unique
cultural adaptations: In the pre-election videotape scandal, a group that
called itself "Different Idealism" began systematically
releasing videotapes of MHP leaders in indecorous poses with, as one
columnist here chastely put it, "women who do that sort of thing for a
living." Two video clips depicted Bülent Didinmez, a deputy chairman and
former MHP İstanbul provincial branch leader and parliamentary candidate İhsan
Barutçu involved in acts that definitely did not involve the women to whom they
were married. The clips were released shortly after a videotape displaying
deputy chairmen and Adana Deputy Recai Yıldırım and Kırşehir Deputy Metin
Çobanoğlu in an "intimate" conversation with two women to whom they,
too, were not wed. When MHP leader Bahçeli publicly demanded the errant party
leaders' resignation, they stepped down.
Up to this point we are still in familiar
territory—all of this could have happened in the West. But then Didinmez and
Barutçu defended themselves by saying that they had taken the women in the
videos as their second wives—so it was all in fact quite legitimate, you
see. The men claimed that many of the ruling AKP members had second or third
wives outside their civil marriages, so they were only doing the same thing.
Not even John Edwards could come up with a defense like that.
Of course, no scandal in Turkey is complete
without the accusation of a foreign conspiracy: Deputy MHP Chairman Faruk Bal
indignantly announced that "this is a product of a plan by domestic and
foreign circles, and those who wish to see parliament without the MHP in it are
actors of this plan."
His explanation, however, did not fly. Ten
high-ranking party leaders were forced to resign after videos were released of
them engaged in various shades of sociability with women definitely not their
wives in a house the MHP apparently maintained for these secret liaisons. Worst
of all, one of these men was caught on film bitching to his mistress about
Devlet Bahçeli, the MHP party leader. There is stupid, then there is really
stupid. This is Turkey: Take a second wife, okay, but do not criticize
the party leader.
It is customary, in Turkey, to blame Fethullah
Gülen for these cinematographic feats. The aged preacher, who lives in
self-imposed exile in the Poconos, is widely believed (not without reason) to
control everything in Turkey, although most likely even he does not control
these recreational partialities. State prosecutor Nuh Mete Yüksel, famous for
indicting and imprisoning then-mayor and now prime minister Erdoğan for reading,
at a party rally, a poem with a putatively anti-secular interpretation, filed
for the arrest of Gülen on August 3, 2000, at the Ankara State Court of
Security on the charge that his sympathizers and he had sought to overthrow the
secular state. A mere year later, a secretly-taped video of Yüksel engaged in
hanky-panky (rumpy-pumpy, indecorous activities, whatever you like ...) with a
subordinate was released to the public. We can extend this list. If, for
example, you want to know the fate of the journalist Ali Kirca, who broadcast
the videotape of the Gülen sermon that prompted Yüksel to file those charges,
try this
Google search.
In fairness, it must be noted, that in Turkey
there is a long secular tradition of videotape shenanigans. The main opposition
CHP leader, Deniz Baykal was filmed in happy bonhomie with one of his party's
female MPs, forcing him to resign -- a CHP inside job, most believe; and while
few could approve of the method, everyone approved of the outcome. Baykal was a
fossilized old bore with no hope whatsoever of winning an election—not that his
mouse-like successor, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, has been the improvement everyone had
hoped for.
Incidentally, they—whoever "they"
are—have not been confining themselves to blackmailing opposition politicians,
generals and dissidents of all stripes. They have also been filming their kids.
Turning people's kids into unintentional porn stars is about as dirty as it
gets. Sadly, journalists who viewed the harassment of the family of the blind
Chinese rights activist Chen Guangchen as beyond the unspeakable have not once
suggested, as far as I know, that the humiliation and harassment of the families
of dissidents in Turkey might be worthy of some moral outrage, as well.
Shortly before the Turkish police arrested the
former 1st Army Corps commander General Hasan Iğsız on charges of "making
propaganda campaigns against civilian groups and the government," photos
of his son's bobbling and naked rear end were splashed across the tabloid
press. The term "civilian groups" is a euphemism here—the group in
question is the Gülen movement—and Hakan Iğsız, whose anatomy became mildly
famous, is not in much doubt that Gülen's supporters were the cinematographers.
Hakan, by the way, a sound technician, mentioned that he was in awe of the
exceptionally high quality of their audio equipment—he said he had seen nothing
like it in the industry before.
The really huge news for blackmailers, though,
is the government's proposal to ban the publication in digital newspapers and
the press of illegally-acquired sound recordings. Some believe that the purpose
of this legislation is to protect prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan from the
kind of embarrassment to which he was exposed when it was revealed that his
intelligence chief and personal confidant, Hakan Fidan, had been
surreptitiously negotiating with the PKK—this despite Erdoğan's recent campaign
bluster that had he been in charge when PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan was
captured, he would have had him hanged.
Erdoğan is now trying to arrange a deal to
release the imprisoned military officers, who for years have been languishing
in prison without a conviction. Why, you might wonder, does he want to do that?
Well, we would all like to know, but the best we can do is guess. Perhaps he is
worried that more officers will be hit, leaving in tatters what is left of the
military. Perhaps he is worried that the Gülenist infiltration of the military
has gone too far and is becoming a danger to him. Erdoğan may be many things; a
fool is not one of them: The situation in Syria may have reminded him that he
might actually need his military, and in particular the generals who
know how to use it—the best of whom are all in jail.
This, of course, has the Gülen movement in a
panic. There is no greater nightmare scenario for Gülen's supporters than the
combined and considerable wrath of Erdoğan and the military. So in Turkey, as in
the US, leaking season is here. The proposal to ban the publication of such
recordings has the newspapers that plumped for the imprisonment of Turkey's top
military brass, and who are sympathetic to Gülen—who is no longer sympathetic
to Erdoğan—panic-stricken. Of late, Gülen's supporters have been releasing
illegally-taped recordings almost every day, mostly from jailed military
leaders in Hasdal prison. These recordings—unsurprisingly—reveal that the men
in jail are furious and wish ill upon the people who put them there—many of
whom happen to be, in their eyes, the journalists frantically leaking these
tapes. Tapes are surfacing from their archives almost every day now, killing
two birds with one stone: first, the tapes hint that if the officers are released,
the military will take bloody revenge; second, the journalists need to empty
their pockets before their recordings are banned.
It is rumored that Gülen's supporters have
quite the collection of recordings of Erdoğan and his intimates (political or otherwise).
It is also rumored -- and pretty obvious -- that they are threatening Erdoğan
with the release of recordings by means of unsubtle messages conveyed by
sympathetic journalists such as Emre Uslu and Mehmet Baransu, who hint darkly
on Twitter of their knowledge of "iğrenç" information— a word
Turkish for "disgusting," and precious for its onomatopoeic aptness.
I could not with certainty say this is what is happening—I'm not
the one putting hidden cameras under people's beds—but if I were a betting woman,
I would place every penny I had on it.
Turkey is one of the world's most opaque
countries, so it is hard to discern which snake is biting which tail in this
story, which broke the other week:
Police and specially authorized prosecutors
raided several homes and military buildings across the country yesterday as
part of an ongoing probe into an alleged espionage ring. ...
The locations searched included secure military
buildings, including the General Command of the Turkish Gendarmerie Forces, the
Navy, the Special Forces Command top secret room and the Military Hospital
(GATA) in Ankara.
The latest raids were part of an investigation
launched in İzmir last month into allegations that secret military documents
were acquired through blackmail. According to the probe, nine active-duty
members of the military allegedly used a prostitution ring to blackmail
high-ranking officers and obtain confidential information about the Turkish
military.
The members of the prostitution ring allegedly
recorded secret footage of high-ranking officers as they had sexual intercourse
with escorts and later used the footage to blackmail them. The active-duty
soldiers police arrested had been blackmailed themselves and later participated
in ensnaring their colleagues. They also allegedly profited financially from
the ring's activities.
There is almost certainly more to this than
what you just read. And this is the model democracy we are promoting to the
Middle East?
Birthplace of Christ Used in Bid for Palestinian Statehood
by Christine
Williams
June 26, 2012 at 8:00 am
June 26, 2012 at 8:00 am
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The issue
is not genuinely about a two-state solution – as many are fooled into
believing. Lethal opposition to the State of Israel remains fierce. This tiny
democracy, Israel, which lives by individual freedoms, equal justice under law
and respect for universal human rights, is an affront to these autocratic
regimes.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO), will soon
decide whether to honor the Palestinian application to award The Church of
the Nativity the designation of a World Heritage Site—a title reserved for
locations considered to have outstanding Universal Value.
The World Heritage Committee is now meeting in
Saint Petersburg, Russia, presumably to decide to whom to award the Church of
the Nativity, said to be the birthplace of Christ, as well as the Pilgrimage
Route in Bethlehem.
Here is where it gets problematic: although
only applicants recognized as having an independent state are eligible for
consideration, the Palestinians are being considered even though they do not
meet that qualification.
This ambitious move by the Palestinian
Authority [PA] started in February 2011; Palestinian Tourism Minister Khulud
Daibes was explicit
about the motive: "The timing is crucial for us; it is part and
parcel of our plan to end the (Israeli) occupation and build the institutions
of the state of Palestine."
The drive to have the Church of the Nativity
recognized as a global heritage site is nothing short of offensive. Christians
have been driven out of their ancestral lands; Palestinians have shown nothing
but hostility to both Christians and Jews. Moreover, Christ himself was a Jew.
Upon the birth of the State of Israel in 1948,
Bethlehem had a Christian
population of over 80 percent. With the rise of the Muslim population,
Christians dwindled in numbers. Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority
took over the town in 1995, thanks to the Oslo Accords. Along with the PA, came
a tribal political system which caused Bethlehem's Christian population,
already at 15%, to further sink to 2% today. Under this
political system Christians are targeted, seen as inferiors, and subjected
to threats, violence, discrimination and acts of terrorism.
Upon entering Bethlehem Yasser Arafat was
strategic in overtaking the Christian populace. He first expanded municipal
boundaries to include 30,000 Muslims living in refugee camps, as well as Muslim
Bedouins who lived east of the town.
The first and second intifadas further drove
Christians out of their ancestral town as they became trapped in the crossfire
between the Palestinians and Israelis. The violent struggle predictably drew
international attention, and created the ideal platform for Palestinian
sympathizers to levy blame
on the so-called Israeli "occupation."
Israel's so-called "occupation" and
"aggression" were solely based on self defense: both the Palestinian
and Hamas Charters call for Israel's obliteration; Israel's southern cities is
still live under nearly daily attack by hostile Arab States and forces seeking
its destruction.
The Muslim aggression on the other hand is
based on a conditioned, generational hatred against the Jews (and Christians)
evidently determined to see the Jews of the State of Israel, a country the size
of Vancouver Island, pushed into the sea, while an Islamic Caliphate is formed
to rule the Middle East.
This tiny democracy, Israel, which lives by
individual freedoms. equal justice under law, and respect for universal human
rights, is an affront to these autocratic regimes.
In mid-June, Palestinian Media Watch identified
a program in which children
are being indoctrinated to hate Jews and Christians.
Given the plight of beleaguered Christians in Bethlehem,
the Palestinian delegation to UNESCO still brazenly included duplicitous high
praises for the Christian heritage in its application,
while Islamicizing the Christian tradition: "Jesus' role as Issa,,"
it stated,"the divinely inspired prophet in Islamic belief, is equally
significant and underscores the sanctity of the place;" and further, that
"there is no other site in the world that bears such an exceptional
outstanding religious value for more than 2 billion Christians. There is only
one site in the world that has the honor of being the birthplace of
Jesus."
As one step closer to the Arab vision of
Palestinian statehood, the U.N. General Assembly voted to allow Palestine
admission as a full member into UNESCO last October after President Mahmoud
Abbas—whose PhD featured Holocaust denial-- unilaterally made a case for Palestinian statehood and full
U.N. membership.
Many Western nations condemned this unilateral
maneuver, and protested that it would be best to allow negotiations between
Israel and the Palestinians to continue -- yet even to begin negotiations,
Palestinians should first recognize the fundamental right of Israel to exist as
a Jewish state, and change the contents of their charters to reflect this
change. How can anyone negotiate anything with people who state that you have
no right to exist?
The issue is not genuinely about a two-state
solution -- as many are fooled into believing. In 1947 the United Nations
already came up with a two-state solution when it recommended partitioning
Palestine into two states, one Jewish, one Arab; so there would have been a
Palestinian state in 1948. But instead five Arab counties went to war against
the new Jewish state to try to obliterate it at birth.
Today, sadly, nothing has changed. Lethal
opposition to the existence of Israel remains fierce, including this current,
more subtle provocation from a territory now using a Christian holy site -- the
Church of the Nativity -- to try to advance a most un-Christian agenda.
Related Topics: Christine
Williams
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