Thursday, January 29, 2009

Turks:

"
no room in the mind for
the exercise of reason,
or even the capacity to doubt
" (B. Spinoza)

Harry's Place has the goods:

Haaretz
reports:

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday stormed off the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, red-faced after verbally sparring with President Shimon Peres over the recent fighting in Gaza.

Erdogan was angry after being cut off by a panel moderator after listening to an impassioned monologue by Peres defending Israel’s recent 22-day offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Erdogan told Peres: “You are killing people.”

Ben Dror Yemini had something to say, sometime ago, about the profoundly hypocritical and crazy audacity of the Turkish PM, here:

Shameless Erdogan

Even the shameless Turkish leader Erdogan, joined the critics of Israel. Shameless, because it behooves him to keep his mouth shut. His country legislated laws that forbid mentioning the crimes perpetrated against the Armenians. If Israel had adopted the Turkish model, a third of all lecturers in the faculties of social sciences and humanities in Israeli universities would be imprisoned, because in Israel inflating the "Nakba" and other anti-Israel rhetoric actually lead to academic promotions...

Let's remind Erdogan of the tens of thousands of Kurds killed or slaughtered in the campaign to keep them quiet and subdued. Let us remind him of Leyla Zana and the short speech she made when elected to the Turkish Parliament. She didn't support terrorism. She didn't praise the lobbing of rockets from Kurdish to Turkish villages. She didn't call the Kurds "Shahids." Nothing like that. All she did was conclude her short speech with the words: "I take this oath for the brotherhood between the Turkish people and the Kurdish people." Her crime? She had made that "terrible" statement, only that final statement, in Kurdish. According to Turkish law, speaking that language is a crime. She lost her parliamentary immunity and was sentenced to 10 years of incarceration. When she wrote something from inside her jail, a further two years were added to her sentence.

Tell this to the Arab members of the Israeli Knesset. If judged according to your own laws, Mr Erdogan, they would all be rotting in jail. Now you are the object of their admiration. Hypocrisy has always been a quality some of them admire most. Now it's your turn, as well.

The shameless Turk quoted Gilad Atzmon. Who is Atzmon? Some answers, here.

Gilad Atzmon once compared himself (humble guy that he is) to Baruch Spinoza. I thought I might remind people what Spinoza thought of Turks:



“In this the Turks have achieved the greatest measure of success. They hold even discussion of religion to be sinful, and with their mass of dogma they gain such a thorough hold on the individual’s judgment that they leave no room in the mind for the exercise of reason, or even the capacity to doubt.”

I would think they are well-matched, the quoter and the quotee.

1 Comments:

At 10:31 AM EST, Blogger SnoopyTheGoon said...

Yuck indeed.

 

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