"Freedom of expression is important, but more important is what is holy for me" - Part 2

These famous words were uttered by the Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan after cartoons of Mohammed were published in a Danish newspaper in 2005. Here we see, what else is holy to RTE ...

Turkish Leader Erdogan Is the Litigious Sort;

to Him, Booing's a Tort

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is one of the most powerful leaders Turkey has known since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk banned men from wearing fez hats. But he doesn't like being called names.

As he tours the nation promising to deliver "advanced democracy" ahead of the Sunday elections he's expected to win handsomely, Mr. Erdogan is at the same time suing perhaps hundreds of private individuals for insulting him.

The alleged offenders include a student theater troupe that does skits wearing long black hippie wigs; unemployed siblings who posted a song about Mr. Erdogan on the Internet; and a British teacher-cum-anti-Iraq war activist-cum-fortune teller, who made a collage showing Mr. Erdogan's head on a dog.

"This is about the honor of the prime minister," said Abdullah Guler, the lawyer representing Mr. Erdogan in the theater troupe case, after a brief hearing last month.

Mr. Guler had just accused the students, who couldn't all fit into the tiny courtroom, of "booing" the prime minister and calling him a "street vendor." Some of the students giggled.

The hearing was adjourned until June 8.

"Wouldn't it be a problem [in the U.S.] if I was always criticizing just President Obama?" Mr. Guler said in an interview after the hearing. Mr. Guler doesn't watch much American TV. He hasn't heard of Rush Limbaugh.

In a country where court records aren't generally made public, no one is willing to disclose exactly how many people Mr. Erdogan has sued for lobbing insults at him. In 2005, two years after Mr. Erdogan took office, the tally was 57, according to Turkey's then-justice minister. Mr. Erdogan had won 21 of the cases, netting a total 700,000 Turkish Lira, or about $440,000, in compensation.

Since then, the government has refused to answer further questions on the matter. It said that whomever Mr. Erdogan sues—under article 125 of the Turkish penal code—is a private affair. The law criminalizes insults against a person's honor, differentiating such barbs from other protected free speech. Guilty parties face a maximum penalty of two years in jail.

Mr. Erdogan's spokesman didn't respond to several phone and email requests for comment.

Fikret Ilkiz, a prominent Turkish press freedom lawyer, says the frequency with which the prime minister's lawyers launch insult suits on his behalf has increased since 2005. By now the tally is "in the hundreds," he estimates, and has triggered a boom in lawsuits launched by cabinet ministers and legislators. Mr. Ilkiz added that previous prime ministers rarely used article 125.

Ataol Behramoglu, a Russian professor at Istanbul's Beykent University who is also a published poet and ardent secularist, thinks Mr. Erdogan sues as a matter of cold policy. "They want to discourage us from speaking out. It's ridiculous, but it sows fear," he says.

Last year on a TV show called "Neutral Zone" the professor said that he believed Mr. Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party, known as AKP, would use every means, including "illegal and antidemocratic ones" to win the election. Both Mr. Erdogan and the party sued. A judge dismissed the case at a hearing May 25, citing freedom of expression.

The prime minister doesn't spend his time combing the media for affronts, defense lawyers say. Rather, loyal followers around the country bring word of insults to him. That's what happened in Catalca, a town about an hour's drive from Istanbul, where the Beyoglu Kumpanya theater troupe's Emre Yalcin sang "Tayyip Blues" in the street at a local festival.

"Privatizations, all the pressure…Always hand in hand with the USA…You are a street vendor Tayyip," the song went. Some people in the crowd got upset. The local AKP chief ran backstage, looking for Mr. Yalcin. But the troupe had already donned wigs, making its members tough to recognize.

"Who sang that song?" The branch chief kept shouting, recalls Merve Umutlu, the troupe's 24-year-old organizer. "Who is the one who sang that song?"

Famously, Mr. Erdogan once sued a newspaper cartoonist for portraying him as a cat that got itself tangled up in yarn. He lost that case; the judge said a prime minister should "tolerate this type of criticism, as well as applause."

Mr. Erdogan had more luck in 2006, when he sued a British teacher of English. Michael Dickinson, an Istanbul resident of 24 years, had made a collage that put Mr. Erdogan's head on a dog's body, as U.S. President George W. Bush pinned a rosette on him. The picture was called "Best in Show." Mr. Erdogan didn't agree. A court dismissed the case, but four years of litigation later, the prime minister won a final judgment.

"He ruined my life," Mr. Dickinson said of the prime minister. Sitting at a restaurant recently, he pulled the collage of Mr. Erdogan as a dog out of his bag. Waiters at the restaurant grabbed it to show their friends. They thought the dog picture was hilarious.

Mr. Dickinson was sentenced not to make pictures of Mr. Erdogan for five years, or face jail time. Having spent three days in a jail cell with two accused murderers after his arrest in the case, he decided not to go back. But he lost his job and now makes a living telling fortunes.

In 2009, Kubilay Duman and his brother and sister posted a song about unemployment on the Internet. They were angry about their own jobless plight. "The hand of a thief robbed my country/The crisis barely touched him, praise be to God," the siblings sang. The song got 300,000 hits in the first week, Mr. Duman says. So the siblings made an album. Mr. Erdogan sued and in February they each got 10-month jail sentences. They are appealing, and Mr. Duman is depressed. He says the album was never distributed and that no one will give him gigs.

Meanwhile, the litigation boom seems to be spreading to the campaign trail. Mr. Erdogan has called the main opposition leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu "a walking lie machine," as well as "shameless, immoral and low-down."

On Thursday, Mr. Kilicdaroglu said at a rally he would sue Mr. Erdogan. "Let him give an account in court."

Article from wsj.com June 7 2011

The Rosenbergs were Soviet spies

By Ronald Radosh September 17, 2008, L.A Times

Julius and ethel Rosenberg were executed 55 years ago, on June 19, 1953. But last week, they were back in the headlines when Morton Sobell, the co-defendant in their famous espionage trial, finally admitted that he and his friend, Julius, had both been Soviet agents.

It was a stunning admission; Sobell, now 91 years old, had adamantly maintained his innocence for more than half a century. After his comments were published, even the Rosenbergs' children, Robert and Michael Meeropol, were left with little hope to hang on to -- and this week, in comments unlike any they've made previously, the brothers acknowledged having reached the difficult conclusion that their father was, indeed, a spy. "I don't have any reason to doubt Morty," Michael Meeropol told Sam Roberts of the New York Times.

With these latest events, the end has arrived for the legions of the American left wing that have argued relentlessly for more than half a century that the Rosenbergs were victims, framed by a hostile, fear-mongering U.S. government. Since the couple's trial, the left has portrayed them as martyrs for civil liberties, righteous dissenters whose chief crime was to express their constitutionally protected political beliefs. In the end, the left has argued, the two communists were put to death not for spying but for their unpopular opinions, at a time when the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were seeking to stem opposition to their anti-Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War.

To this day, this received wisdom permeates our educational system. A recent study by historian Larry Schweikart of the University of Dayton has found that very few college history textbooks say simply that the Rosenbergs were guilty; according to Schweikart, most either state that the couple were innocent or that the trial was "controversial," or they "excuse what [the Rosenbergs] did by saying, 'It wasn't that bad. What they provided wasn't important.' "

Indeed, Columbia University professor Eric Foner once wrote that the Rosenbergs were prosecuted out of a "determined effort to root out dissent," part of a broader pattern of "shattered careers and suppressed civil liberties." In other words, it was part of the postwar McCarthyite "witch hunt."

But, in fact, Schweikart is right, and Foner is wrong. The Rosenbergs were Soviet spies, and not minor ones either. Not only did they try their best to give the Soviets top atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project, they succeeded in handing over top military data on sonar and on radar that was used by the Russians to shoot down American planes in the Korean and Vietnam wars. That's long been known, and Sobell confirmed it again last week.

To many Americans, Cold War espionage cases like the Rosenberg and Alger Hiss cases that once riveted the country seem irrelevant today, something out of the distant past. But they're not irrelevant. They're a crucial part of the ongoing dispute between right and left in this country. For the left, it has long been an article of faith that these prosecutions showed the essentially repressive nature of the U.S. government. Even as the guilt of the accused has become more and more clear (especially since the fall of the Soviet Union and the release of reams of historical Cold War documents), these "anti anti-communists" of the intellectual left have continued to argue that the prosecutions were overzealous, or that the crimes were minor, or that the punishments were disproportionate.

The left has consistently defended spies such as Hiss, the Rosenbergs and Sobell as victims of contrived frame-ups. Because a demagogue like Sen. Joseph McCarthy cast a wide swath with indiscriminate attacks on genuine liberals as "reds" (and even though McCarthy made some charges that were accurate), the anti anti-communists came to argue that anyone accused by McCarthy or Richard Nixon or J. Edgar Hoover should be assumed to be entirely innocent. People like Hiss (a former State Department official who was accused of spying) cleverly hid their true espionage work by gaining sympathy as just another victim of a smear attack.

But now, with Sobell's confession of guilt, that worldview has been demolished.

In the 1990s, when it was more than clear that the Rosenbergs had been real Soviet spies -- not simply a pair of idealistic left-wingers working innocently for peace with the Russians -- one of the Rosenberg's sons, Michael, expressed the view that the reason his parents stayed firm and did not cooperate with the government was because they wanted to keep the government from creating "a massive spy show trial," thereby earning "the thanks of generations of resisters to government repression."

Today, he and his brother Robert run a fund giving grants to the children of those they deem "political prisoners," such as convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. Ironically, if there was any government that staged show trials for political ends, it was the government for which the Rosenbergs gave up their lives, that of the former Soviet Union.

This week, the Meeropols made it clear to the New York Times that they still believe the information their father passed to the Russians was not terribly significant, that the judge and the prosecutors in their parents' case were guilty of misconduct, and that neither Julius nor Ethel should have been given the death penalty for their crimes.

On the subject of their mother, the Meeropols have a point. In another development last week, a federal court judge in New York released previously sealed grand jury testimony of key witnesses in the case, including that of Ruth Greenglass, Julius' sister-in-law. It turns out that a key part of her testimony for the prosecution -- that Ethel had typed up notes for her husband to hand to the Soviets -- was most likely concocted.

That doesn't mean that Ethel was innocent -- indeed, the preponderance of the evidence suggests she was not. But what is clear is that in seeking to get the defendants to confess to Soviet espionage, the prosecutors overstepped bounds and enhanced testimony to guarantee a conviction. Americans should have no problem acknowledging when such judicial transgressions take place, and in concluding that the execution of Ethel was a miscarriage of justice.

Nevertheless, after Sobell's confession of guilt, all other conspiracy theories about the Rosenberg case should come to an end. A pillar of the left-wing culture of grievance has been finally shattered. The Rosenbergs were actual and dangerous Soviet spies. It is time the ranks of the left acknowledge that the United States had (and has) real enemies and that finding and prosecuting them is not evidence of repression.

Ronald Radosh, an emeritus professor of history at City University of New York and an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is the coauthor of "The Rosenberg File."

Latitude & Attitude - Iranian miscalculations

(Originally posted March 30, 2007)


It never ceases to amaze me how some governments have a complete end utter lack of understanding of what is clever and what is definitely not, when it comes to dealing with the western civilisation.

It is often, but not always, regimes with cultural roots in Islam that make the biggest blunders and this time around is no different. Iran has taken hostage 15 British service men/women in the Persian Gulf.

Let there be no mistake: this is an act of hostage taking. It is not a matter of taking prisoners of war, as there are no hostilities between the two countries. The act has been conducted purely as a means of extracting concessions of one kind or another on the part of Britain, this is clear for all to see.

What those concessions might be is a matter of pure speculation, but the fact that the US has a number of Iranian prisoners in Iraq, supposedly intelligence staff from the Revolutionary Guard aiding insurgents in the war torn country is as good a guess as any other.

Why is it doubtlessly an act of hostage taking? Because if - hypothetically - the service men had for any reason ventured into Iranian waters, lets say as a result of poor navigation skills, it would be the simplest matter in the world to order them out of the waters. There is absolutely no reason why the men and one woman should be sequestered and kept isolated from diplomats of the UK. But the Iranians decided to create a diplomatic crisis on purpose.

Doing that is bad enough. But to add further stupidity to an already unnecessary act, the Iranian government has decided to use the service men as a propaganda tool, parading them on national TV. And continuing down the path of stupidity, they present the world with a letter from one of the captives, apologising for the intrusion into Iranian waters and urging the UK to withdraw its troops from Iraq. Of course we are all to believe that the letter is a spontaneous production by a remorseful soldier. To make matters even worse, the government then decides not to release the female hostage as previously promised. This, of course, further strengthens our trust in their words.

Every single act described here is head-shakingly stupid and what the Iranian regime does not understand is that those acts just fills westerners with disgust. Not fear, not awe, not admiration, but utter disgust.

It was exactly the same mistake Saddam Hussein made, when he held Westerners hostage in Iraq prior to the first Gulf War, parading little children in front of the cameras, patting them on their heads.

By every political act whether supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, Muqtada el Sadr, or refusing to comply with the UN on the matter of uranium enrichment, the Iranian government establishes itself as an enemy of the West and indeed of the most of the civilized world. If not exactly respected, at least that type of stance can be reluctantly understood as political positioning. It does not attract disgust.

Creating disgust is much more dangerous for the Iranians. The feeling of disgust feeds the feeling of worthlessness towards all Iranians. This is especially true as the regime does not allow voices of dissent to remind us that the Iranian people are not its government.

But by filling our minds with disgust for them, the Iranians have without realising it created a mental space in our brains that will much easier tolerate an eventual act of war against them.

Only the future will show if a Third Gulf War will take place as the result of the Iranian government's insistence on developing uranium enrichment. I hope not. But one thing is sure, if it does take place, I will feel less bad about it because the Iranian government has given me the mental space to despise them and be disgusted with them.

That is the true miscalculation by Iran.

"Freedom of expression is important, but more important is what is holy for me"

(Originally posted November 18, 2005)

Now there is truly a statement that can feed your thoughts ...These were the words used by the Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and they were caused by cartoonists' impressions of the profet Muhammed in a Danish newspaper.

Denmark - represented by it's prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen - one of the countries achieving the highest scores in the world on press freedom is currently under verbal and diplomatic attack from most major muslim nations in the world, those amongst the lowest scorers in this category, exactly on the issue of press freedom. The problem? There is simply too much of it in Denmark.

According to muslims it is a sacrilege to depict the profet and the Turkish Prime Minister is very upset that the "Danish government did not express solidarity. If someone had said, that this was not the official position [what exactly "this" refers to is unclear - N.M.] then we would have felt that the newspaper was isolated. When you don't say anything it is either because you are ashamed [sic] or because you agree. [again, exactly with what one agrees is unclear N.M.] If you had been opposed to the cartoons, you would have said it."

The problem is, of course, that there is nothing to oppose. You may like the cartoons or not or maybe just be indifferent, just as with any other cartoon, but what is there to oppose? If the Danish Prime Minister were to officially oppose the fact that they appeared in a newspaper it would constitute an attempt to gag the press or require it to impose self censorship.

It seems as if the part of the muslim community, which has spoken out against Mr. Rasmussen has not understood this, or simply refuses to acknowledge this as a problem. The latter reason would be less surprising than the former.

Freedom of Expression is perhaps the crux of the culture clash which is becoming increasingly more evident between democracies (not the ones that just pay lipservice to the term) and the world, currently the muslim part, in which faith matters more than free thinking people.

Lack of this basic freedom is arguably the main cause for individual suffering imposed by governments on their citizens in the Middle East and Africa but also in Russia and even more so in China.

On a much smaller scale look at the suffering of Valerie Plame and her husband. It is based on the fact that Mr. Wilson used his freedom of speach against his own government. To that government their version of the story of Iraq is holy... I want to mention that case, but let us be careful not to let anybody use it as a cover excuse for much worse suffering in other places around the world.

I would really like to ask Mr. Erdogan what should happen to freedom of expression when confronted with a ruler to whom power is holy, or to whom his fortunes aquired through criminal activities are holy, or to whom the one-party state is holy. I could go on.

The thing is Mr. Erdogan, I would explain politely, there is no conjugation for the term "freedom of expression".

"Freedom of expression is important, but more important is freedom of expression" I would say.

But hey, that's just me talking.

The rising danger of high oil prices

By Henry A. Kissinger and Martin Feldstein Published on www.iht.com: September 15, 2008

The tripling in the price of oil from $30 a barrel in 2001 to more than $100 today represents the largest transfer of wealth in human history. The 13 OPEC members alone are expected to earn more than $1 trillion.

Inevitably, this must bring with it major political consequences. Not the least significant aspect of this political and economic earthquake is that it is exacted from the world's most powerful nations by some of the world's weakest. Yet the victims stand by impotently as if the price of oil were some natural event determined by a competitive economic market that is uninfluenced and uninfluencable by political forces.

But the price of oil is not determined in a traditional competitive market. Major producers can and do raise or lower the price of oil by reducing or increasing their rate of production. And since today's oil price also reflects expectations of future supply and demand, these monopolistic suppliers are able to manipulate and compound the volatility of the market by statements about their future intentions.

The monopoly suppliers will continue to have strong market power until the consuming nations sharply reduce their dependence on imported oil and develop a political strategy to counter political manipulation of the oil market or the use of the vast OPEC surpluses to blackmail the economies or individual industries of the consuming nations. Failing such efforts, the high and rising price of oil will produce profound political and economic consequences:
In the advanced industrial countries, the high price of energy will reduce the standard of living, sustain an unfavorable balance of payments and lead to increasing inflationary pressures.

The impact of rising oil prices on the standard of living is even greater in developing countries. Because fuel and food costs are a larger part of households' spending, and food production requires inputs of oil in petrochemical fertilizer and for transportation, higher oil prices lead to political instability.
Even with the drop in oil prices to around $100 a barrel, the Middle East oil exporters will receive over $800 billion in 2008.

Much of that revenue goes to a handful of countries with small populations. For example, the Abu Dhabi Emirate, with a population of 850,000 but only about 400,000 citizens, has proven oil reserves of 92 billion barrels and financial wealth derived from previous energy sales of more than $1 trillion. This concentration of oil income and wealth makes these wealthy but strategically weak states targets of radical neighbors.

It also gives them a disproportionate political influence on world affairs, in two ways.

First, a portion of these vast oil revenues are passed on to radical groups throughout the Islamic world, such as Hezbollah, through public and private so-called foundations. The madrassas that preach jihad are largely financed by oil money.

Second, revenues from high oil prices are recycled into the rapidly growing sovereign wealth funds of the OPEC countries, which invest these surpluses in the economies of the developed countries. Abu Dhabi has more than $1 trillion of investable funds.

The explosive rise in oil prices has tempted more assertive policies. Resources are being shifted from passive investments in U.S. and European government bonds to corporate equities and to the outright purchase of American and European businesses. As these new investments multiply, they may tempt the creditors into a growing influence over Western economies.

This state of affairs is intolerable in the long run. The foreign policy of industrialized nations must not become a hostage to the oil producers. The industrial nations must find ways to discourage the creditors from threatening to sell, or actually to sell, large quantities of U.S. bonds, driving up long-term American interest rates to levels precipitating an economic downturn, or to target particular firms or industries by selling shares acquired by sovereign funds.

So long as consuming countries sit by passively or deal with the challenge on a largely national basis while hoping to benefit from the efforts of others, the present dangers will continue, if not increase.
Ultimately, all consumer nations are in the same boat. A global recession will respect no national frontiers. No single nation is able to establish a permanently preferred position among the producers. No single nation can alter the supply situation entirely by its own efforts.

The oil-consuming nations are in a position, however, to shape both the economic and political global balance provided they coordinate and, to some extent, pool their efforts.

America should play a major role in this effort. Rather than wait passively for the next blow to fall, the major consuming nations - the Group of 7, together with India, China and Brazil - should establish a coordinating group to shift the long-term trends of supply and demand in their favor and to end the blackmail of the strong by the weak. Russia should be invited to participate in this effort.

Coordinated actions could bring down the price of oil by reducing and, in the long term, eliminating the speculative pressures behind recent price rises and by establishing a coherent supply policy.

Many of the measures recommended to achieve this - such as conservation, the development of domestic oil supplies and alternative sources of renewable energy - will take some years to become effective. However, even before the balance of market power has been transformed, the expectation of change will reduce the price of oil.
A cooperative policy should also include emergency sharing arrangements to counter selective boycotts or interruption of supplies.

The 2008 price rise was driven by changes in the expected long-term demand for oil while supplies remained largely static. By the same token, actions that will cause a slower growth of future demand and a more rapid rise in supply will translate relatively quickly into a lower current price.

A change in U.S. national energy policies is essential. But that will be much more effective as part of a coordinated international effort.

In the United States, oil is used primarily as gasoline for vehicles. Outside the U.S., oil is primarily used for heating and electricity generation. Coordinated policies should therefore focus on reducing U.S. gasoline use, while foreign countries could contribute by shifting from oil to hydro, clean coal technology or nuclear power to generate electricity.

Increasing the supply of oil deserves high priority. American policies to increase supply by expanding drilling and by developing oil shale need to be matched by policies to increase supply abroad. That requires more investment by state-owned oil providers, the primary sources of oil today. The oil consumers are in a position to use diplomatic measures to establish a new balance between producers and consumers.

Some of the policies to reduce the price of oil would also reduce U.S. dependence on imported oil without eliminating it. The United States will remain an oil importer until gasoline for vehicles is replaced by batteries or hydrogen. At the same time, for an interim period, efforts to increase the supply of oil and of other carbon fuels may make it more difficult to reduce total carbon emissions.

But because of the profound political consequences of a high oil price, reducing the price of oil must be the immediate, paramount objective.

Henry A. Kissinger heads the consulting firm Kissinger & Associates. Martin Feldstein is a professor of economics at Harvard University and was President Ronald Reagan's chief economic adviser.