The Spectator 13 April 2013

The blows Margaret Thatcher struck against socialism at home and the Soviet empire abroad are her most noted achievements. But an even greater legacy was bequeathed to her sex.

Margaret Thatcher made her own political way, from beginning to end.

8 April 2013
CITY JOURNAL

NATIONAL REVIEW
by Kathryn Jean Lopez
April 8, 2013

There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters is the title of a book by Claire Berlinski. Berlinski talks to National Review Online about why, in fact, she does!

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Why does Margaret Thatcher “matter,” as your book’s subtitle puts it?

CITY JOURNAL

Turkey’s Marxist terrorists strike again—this time, against America.

4 February 2013

Americans seem surprised that the February 1 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, Turkey, was carried out not by Islamists but by a Marxist—specifically, by a member of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front, or DHKP/C. But no one in Turkey was remotely surprised.

THE JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS
December 19, 2012

While Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan needs no introduction, the Turkish imam Fethullah Gülen is probably the most important person you’ve never heard about. He is an immensely powerful figure in Turkey, and—to put it mildly—a controversial one. He is also an increasingly powerful figure globally. Today, there are between three and six million Gülen followers. Gülen leads the cemaat, an Islamic civil society movement, that has until now been critical to the electoral success of Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AKP). The cemaat is often described as Turkey’s Third Force—the other two being the AKP and the military.

CITY JOURNAL
AUTUMN 2012

Controversial Muslim preacher, feared Turkish intriguer—and “inspirer” of the largest charter school network in America.

With the American economy in shambles, Europe imploding, and the Middle East in chaos, convincing Americans that they should pay attention to a Turkish preacher named Fethullah Gülen is an exceedingly hard sell. Many Americans have never heard of him, and if they have, he sounds like the least of their worries. According to his website, he is an “authoritative mainstream Turkish Muslim scholar, thinker, author, poet, opinion leader and educational activist who supports interfaith and intercultural dialogue, science, democracy and spirituality and opposes violence and turning religion into a political ideology.” The website adds that “by some estimates, several hundred educational organizations such as K–12 schools, universities, and language schools have been established around the world inspired by Fethullah Gülen.” The site notes, too, that Gülen was “the first Muslim scholar to publicly condemn the attacks of 9/11.” It also celebrates his modesty.

Yet there is a bit more to the story.

GATESTONE INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL
August 20, 2012

An unshocking admission: I've made some ungodly-embarrassing retraction-worthy journalistic mistakes over the course of my career. Almost every journalist does. It's hard to write about complex events at once quickly, without boring your readers witless, and without making mistakes. One example in particular embarrasses me; I'll share it with you at the end of this piece. For now, I point this out to set the stage: When I criticize my colleagues, as I am about to do, I hardly mean to suggest that I do so from a platform of unblemished faultlessness.

But criticize I must. Something has gone very wrong in American coverage of news from abroad. It is shoddy, lazy, riddled with mistakes, and excessively simplistic.

Above all, it is absent.

Why we should worry about Turkey's missing jet

GATESTONE INTERNATIONAL POLICY COUNCIL
August 11, 2012

It is apparently lore at the Economist that foreign correspondents have a shelf life of three years. After this, they know too much. They become too involved in the minutiae of local politics to explain a story to their domestic audience. Then, of course, there is the famous State Department "clientitis" problem—diplomats, it is said, need to be rotated out in roughly the same amount of time lest they begin to understand the host country's point of view a bit too well.

Having lived in Turkey for seven years, I can confirm the folklore. It seems impossible to me that the whole world isn't following the drama of escalating Turkish-Syrian tensions with the same avidity as I am, waking early to parse the statement of every concerned minister and official, studying maps, attempting to read between the lines of the Turkish press, weighing what these omens might portend. But to judge from the commentary emanating from the United State, it's not.

It's now easier to get news from Mars than Hakkari

August 9, 2012
GATESTONE INTERNATIONAL POLICY COUNCIL

I confess freely that I'm finding it difficult to make sense of recent events in Turkey, and I submit that anyone offering a confident analysis is exaggerating either his access or his analytic acumen. There is obviously a great deal happening; but the people who understand it aren't talking, and the people who are talking don't understand it.

Here is what we do know: This morning, there was a terrorist attack in Izmir that claimed the life of a Turkish soldier and injured eleven more. A remotely-controlled land mine exploded as a military bus was passing on a road in the Aegean town of Foça. The attack is believed to be the work of the PKK, and has many of the PKK's signature hallmarks. To judge from reports on Twitter, Izmir citizens were--predictably--appalled, enraged and terrified.

Gatestone Institute
June 26, 2012

TURKEY’S SUPREME COURT PUTS BLACKMAILERS IN AWKWARD POSITION

The news from Turkey, journalists here always complain, comes so hard and fast that they just can’t keep up with it. The Supreme Court obviously decided to take pity on them last week by declaring war on porn. Now, they didn’t criminalize all porn—let’s not exaggerate here—but the Supreme Court of Appeals 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 category, legally speaking, as videos depicting sex with animals, children and corpses, all of which are forbidden by Article 262.2 of the Turkish Penal Code. That article stipulates that owning, trafficking, distributing or publishing such videos will earn you one-to-four. The “no-blowjobs” ruling came—so to speak—after a suspect was sentenced to six months in prison by a local court for selling CDs depicting what we in the decadent West might call “sending your husband off to the office happy.”