Anatomy Of A Power Struggle

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.

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Prisoner of Conspiracy

Ahmet Sik and Turkey’s increasingly paranoid politics

15 April 2011

CITY JOURNAL

Zaytung is the Turkish equivalent of The Onion, and like The Onion, it tends to parody reality so well that for a moment you aren’t sure whether you’re reading fact or fiction.

A recent item:

“YOUNG COUPLE, STRANDED ON MOUNTAIN, RESCUED THANKS TO CEMAAT BOOK

The couple was stranded on Amanos Mountain yesterday evening owing to a vehicle failure. Although the police and gendarmerie searched for them for hours in heavy snowfall, they were unable to locate them.

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First Freedoms

Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide, by Paul Marshall and Nina Shea

Claremont Review of Books
September 10, 2012

In their new book, Paul Marshall and Nina Shea, a senior fellow and the director, respectively, of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, argue that the West has been slow to appreciate the devastating effects of blasphemy and apostasy laws in the Islamic world, even as these laws are the source of countless outrages against human rights, freedom, and dignity.

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Is the Enemy Us?

CITY JOURNAL 23 November 2012

Embracing—and challenging—Bruce Bawer’s powerful new book

The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind, by Bruce Bawer (Harper Collins, 400 pp., $25.99)

In his new book, Bruce Bawer has proposed an answer to vexing questions: Why has our culture become degraded? Why have our politics become polarized? And why has our public debate coarsened? Bawer locates the source of these misfortunes in the changes that have taken place in American higher education over the last generation—above all, the emergence of multicultural “identity studies.”

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The Hunt for the Imam’s Army

POWERLINE
March 27, 2011

Here in Turkey, we’re consumed by the hunt for the forbidden manuscripts of The Imam’s Army. The police have arrested the author, Ahmet ??k, on suspicion of membership in the Ergenekon conspiracy, and they’re hunting down every copy of the draft of his book.

What’s in that book? Who knows? Supposedly it blows the lid on Fethullah Gülen’s control of the Turkish police, or supposedly it contains the organizational blueprint for overthrowing Turkey’s democratically-elected government. I stress supposedly: I haven’t read it, and Turkey is conspiracy-theory central.

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Bless the Beasts

National Review
October 3, 2011

Some virtues are by accidents of history associated with utopianism, hostility to private property, anti-clericalism, and other core beliefs of the Left. I can scandalize a yoga instructor anywhere in the world by declaring myself an avid admirer of Margaret Thatcher, though I challenge you to read the yoga sutras and conclude from them that devotees must favor an overregulated financial sector.

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Agents of Influence

Book Review: The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance that Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East, by Mitchell Bard

National Review, January, 2011

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy in 2007. Its arguments are by now familiar; actually, they were always familiar: powerful, disloyal Jews; too many of them; bad for America. The book was, predictably and drearily, a best-seller.

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Gone at Last

Bin Laden perpetrated or inspired a long list of horrors.

3 May 2011

CITY JOURNAL

We should not forget that Osama bin Laden’s evil extended far beyond the outrages of September 11, 2001. The list of terrorist acts he committed and inspired extends, literally, for pages. “At last, the mastermind of the bombing of the 1998 American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania—which together killed and wounded more than 5,000 people—is dead. At last, the leader of a group that planned to assassinate Pope John Paul II and President Clinton, and to bomb a dozen trans-Pacific airline flights, is dead. At last, the author of the 1996 truck bombing at Khobar Towers and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole is dead.

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Fruits from the Tree of Malice

Newly translated documents show how far Soviet wickedness extended.

WINTER 2011
CITY JOURNAL

In the Spring 2010 issue of City Journal, I described an archive of documents from Soviet government agencies smuggled to the West by the Russian researcher Pavel Stroilov and the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. These documents, I noted, were available to anyone who wanted to consult them. But nobody did. Publishers were indifferent. Only a fraction of the documents had been translated into English. This was, I argued, a symptom of the world’s dangerous indifference to the enormity of Communist crimes.

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Why I’m Like GM

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love my debt

CITY JOURNAL
24 November 2010

I used to wake up in the middle of the night, here in Istanbul, wondering how I’d pay my bills. As I’ve noted in City Journal, the demand for foreign news is shrinking. The wire services provide coverage from Turkey at low operating costs. To be honest, I also spend a lot of money on things I can’t afford, like my cleaning lady. She’s been working for me for five years and has three kids, so I can’t fire her. If I go down, she’ll go down, and so will my landlord, the guy who sells cleaning supplies to my cleaning lady, and the Iranian refugee who does my odd jobs. The ripple effect on the local economy, in other words, would be calamitous.

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