the bold and the beautiful

When the U.S. president or secretary of state make remarks, there is almost always a team of people behind them who took great pains to make the right arguments and choose the right terms. The Turkish prime minister, on the other hand, can simply wake up, read something in the paper, feel annoyed about it, and then comment on it directly to the media without much calculation. … It is just not a very meticulous country in terms of its political language.

ok now seriously

Haaretz just published yet another article in the series of “Turkish-Israeli relations going to shit.”

Israel should immediately hire me for actually useful analysis. These people are doing more damage then actually explain things because they omit context, mix and match everything in the most inaccurate ways and insist on branding criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism, which is doing the biggest damage of all to the country.

Just about every paragraph from this report has me wondering if they’re kidding, so I’m just gonna put it out there in the outset: Are you serious?

Regarding Ayalon’s humiliation of the ambassador, the report said that while this seriously offended the Turks for many years to come, “at the same time, the manner in which senior Turkish officials, including Erdogan, ended the crisis may indicate that Turkey recognizes that it entered the red-line zone and [reached] the outer limits of the Israeli government’s patience, and that this was liable to lead to it losing Israel, which would damage Turkey’s international legitimacy.”

So giving Israel a deadline for an apology, which Israel obliged to with not one but many apologies, is an indicator that Turkey now knows Israel is getting impatient? And since when losing Israel damages a country’s international legitimacy? What countries do you actually mean when you say “international”? The only country that stands by Israel the way Israel wants it to is the US, and as far as I know they’ve been pretty silent throughout this shitstorm.

“In our estimate, ever since his party took power, Erdogan has conducted an ongoing process of … fashioning a negative view of Israel in Turkish public opinion,” via endless talk of Palestinian suffering, repeatedly accusing Israel of war crimes and even “anti-Semitic expressions and incitement,” it read.

Thank you for once again saying that “endless talk of Palestinian suffering and repeatedly accusing Israel of war crimes” is anti-Semitic.

Though in international forums Erdogan always stresses that anti-Semitism is “a crime against humanity,” the report continued, in reality, he “indirectly incites and encourages” anti-Semitism in Turkey.

This part is more accurate, but not really. He did cause much irritation when he referred to Turkish Jews as “our guests“, and had to correct himself later (after uproar from the very Turkish press). Here is President Gül saying explicitly “A reaction to our Jewish citizens is out of the question. Israel and our Jewish citizens are seperate from each other. There has been criticism of Israel’s policies in Palestine, in Gaza. This is what the Prime Minister did, and he explained what he meant. It is important to seperate these issues. There might be people making this mistake (of equating the two), they need to be corrected.” Here is a story about the Ministry of Religious Affairs working on a hutbe (preaching by imams in mosques) to warn people against anti-Semitisim following the Gaza War after a talk with the head of the Turkish Jewish Community. There are many more stories but I’m done making my point (which is simply that, this report is not very good).

In some cases, it added, Erdogan simply does not understand the anti-Semitic nature of his remarks – such as “Jews are good with money,” which “he sees as a compliment.”

This is, sadly, very much possible. Now I’m curious as to when and where (namely, context) he said this (not because it would matter, I’m just curious to know what kind of a setting might have prompted him to come up with this little observation.)

That thing about Vakit: it’s a horribly anti-Semitic publication. However, I would love to know how exactly Erdoğan “backs” Vakit. Journalists from all major and sometimes non-major news outlets are invited on trips overseas. Anyone who browses Vakit for more than 5 minutes can see that they, being of the Milli Görüş front, actually criticize the government for being sell-outs all the time. In fact it is a hobby of mine to find paralels in the rhetoric of Milli Görüş and CHP.

Erdogan also “grants legitimacy” or “turns a blind eye” to anti-Israeli television programs “of an inflammatory, anti-Semitic nature,” such as “Valley of the Wolves” – the series that prompted Ayalon’s rebuke of the ambassador.

To expect a Prime Minister to deal with the content of a TV show on a private channel is simply ridiculous. Not to mention Kurtlar Vadisi is a lot of other disturbing things before it is an “anti-Israeli TV show.” Get a grip people.

…reports from Turkish journalists who say this freedom has been sharply curtailed in recent months: they say that “editorial policy is dictated by government bodies, journalists’ phones and offices have been wiretapped, pressure has been applied to owners of mainstream media outlets, and there is tight supervision of Internet sites.”

Again, begs for context and has nothing to do with Erdoğan’s alleged anti-Semitism. Journalists’ phones are being tapped because there is fricking investigation going on about repeated attempts to overthrow the elected government, in which complicity by journalists is very well documented.

“For Erdogan, Israel-bashing is a way of bolstering his status with Islamic and Middle Eastern states, which Turkey would like to lead, and against the Turkish opposition, as well as with his own party’s target audience and nationalist elements of the Turkish public,” the report argued. Moreover, its cost is low.

This I agree with. Doesn’t translate into anti-Semitism though, which is my whole point. I often go to great lengths to make points.

maybe home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition*

The guy forgot about Armenia, but I will take that as a comment unto itself.

and despite all my efforts to not essentialize (is that still not a word?) I cant help but admire how the only negative comment there on the guy’s page is from Turkey: you don’t know anything about my country, so don’t comment please. pretty appropriate for No YouTube Land, no?

*that’s what I’m afraid of, James Baldwin

Outside of Popeyes eating chicken and fries

Part 1

SJF writes about my favorite rapper of the moment in The New Yorker

Part 2

Das Racist responds. No Bullshit.

Part 3

Of course.

Didn’t we create QDN to deal with situations like this? Hipster blogs are killing us at our own shit.

That’s why they call me the Wizard

 

Props to Pitchfork for doing what should have been done a long time ago and having a sit down with one of the geniuses who is using photoshop to craft the perfect visuals for hip hop’s capitalism’s dying years. The interview with the guy who made this one is here.

and by shitstorm I meant this

see Haaretz or Reuters

oh my oh my.

awaiting the real shitstorm? israeli-turkish relations as of late

Prof. Walt argues here that the chain of events that are causing Israeli-Turkish relations to rapidly deteriorate is the price of the occupation. I think he might be giving the Turkish government too much moral credit here. Are they sincerely upset about Gaza on an individual basis? Sure. Any decent human being should be. Is that really why they cancelled the joint airforce exercise? It’s probably more of a conjunctional matter.

I think what is going on here is that Israel’s political behavior, which is incredibly irritating in the way it’s so unashamed and self-righteous, is making it easier and easier for the Turks (AKP people, to be precise) to become inwilling to cooperate with Israel, making them uneasy about being Israel’s “closest ally in the Muslim world.” Israel “warning” Davutoğlu not to go to Gaza and the latest remarks concerning the Goldstone Report probably only added to this irritation.

That being said, the occupation is only one of the factors, and not the determining one. Much has changed for Turkey since the days when cooperation with Israel was at its height. Until not long ago (ie. before the AKP came to power), Turkey was psychologically buying&playing into the same paradigm that established Israel as “the West’s buffer on its Eastern border.” Turkey was trying hard to immerse itself in the idea that it was -and if not, had to be- a European country, and clung tightly to the kind of highly militarized modernity (many aspects of which it shares with Israel) to create and keep an identity based on that idea (a distorted idea of what is really “European” and a perverse self-perception too, to be sure). It was proud of having left the Arabs and the hard-core Iranians behind and wanted nothing to do with them. Obviously this wasn’t just a psychological condition; from trade to strategy it had ramifications in every aspect of foreign policy.

Well, no more. I don’t need to go into details, but Turkey for the past 5 years have been more active in its foreign policy than any other time in its history. Concerning the Middle East, as part of what some analysts have called “neo-Ottomanism,” there has been an effort to engage in the problems of the region. Not just as a side actor either, Turkey has been bracing for a leadership position. And you can’t assume a leadership position in the Middle East if you’re Israel’s closest ally there. Part of the reason Operation Cast Lead was so bothersome to Turkey was because it was also embarassing in light of this new assumption, since at the time Turkey was engaging in semi-secret talks between Syria, Israel and Hamas (as Walt also points out). Then again, part of the reason Erdoğan was so furious at Peres was because Peres was given more time to talk then himself. There is a pattern here. The fact that Israel was also engaged in child murdering gave the already irritated Erdoğan reason enough assume the moral highground, rant in fury and leave the stage.

To go back to the military exercise being cancelled, Turkey cannot be expected to let Israel use its airspace to train for a possible airstrike when for the past few months all we’ve been hearing is how Israel “might” hit Iran from the air if the world (US and Russia) don’t do something quickly to alleviate its fears. Not when FM Davutoğlu has said explicitly that Turkey categorically opposes any military action against Iran. What’s more, increasingly good relations with Syria mean that Israeli airplanes cannot be allowed to fly that close to the Syrian airzone (as they have done in the past), especially not after Israel actually attacked Syria two years ago.

So yes, Israel’s actions in Palestine do put the strategic relationship at risk. But they are only one of the reasons why the sweet old days are gone for good.

Scramble up in your Projects

Bonus:

 

These are so much better than the original versions that I downloaded to your computer so long ago. Remember how bad ‘American Gangster’ the film was? Yeah, I kind of blocked that out of my memory as well.

Yeah, now, well

The thing about the old days-they’re the old days

 

QTDN is happy to report that DMX is now a mixed martial arts fighter. Live.

Looks like you got out just in time

 

Sure enough, the Double Down quickly attained the status of an urban legend. As its reputation grew, rumors spread that it was a chicken sandwich that stuck a chicken breast in between two chicken-breast “buns” for the gastronomic grease-orgy to end all gastronomic grease-orgies. Amazingly, the actual Double Down is even more disgusting and less healthy than the fried-chicken ménage a trois of the public imagination. 

[...]

Taste: Like grief, the Double Down is experienced in stages. First comes the deceptive sense of relief that the Double Down isn’t as terrible as it initially appears. As I devoured my first bite, I embarked on a Proustian reverie that ushered me back to all the happy moments I’ve shared at various KFCs. Have I mentioned that I fucking love KFC’s white-meat chicken? 

This is from The Onion. But not in the way you are thinking.