Legislating Cyber-Censorship in Turkey

Turkey has already enshrined censorship as part of its legal code, courtesy of Article 301. Now, the Turkish parliament is considering extending this writ to cyberspace:

A parliamentary commission approved a proposal Thursday allowing Turkey to block Web sites that are deemed insulting to the founder of modern Turkey, weeks after a Turkish court temporarily barred access to YouTube.

Parliament plans to vote on the proposal, though a date was not announced. The proposal indicates the discomfort that many Turks feel about Western-style freedom of expression, even though Turkey has been implementing widespread reforms in its bid to join the European Union.

On Thursday, lawmakers in the commission also debated whether the proposal should be widened to allow the Turkish Telecommunications Board to block access to any sites that question the principles of the Turkish secular system or the unity of the Turkish state -- a reference to Web sites with information on Kurdish rebels in Turkey.

It is illegal in Turkey to talk of breaking up the state or to insult Ataturk, the revered founder of modern Turkey whose image graces every denomination of currency and whose portrait hangs in nearly all government offices.


With Turkey already under pressure to drop Article 301 as a condition of EU membership, adopting this measure would send exactly the wrong signal.

Wordpress Banned in Turkey at Behest of Islamic Creationist

When I first blogged about Islamic creationism, I thought the topic merely offered a different twist on the whole creationism debate here in the US. Unfortunately, it turns out that Islamic creationism is anything but harmless. Ali Eteraz, in an August 20 web commentary for the Guardian, explains why:

The San Francisco based million-blogger strong blogging platform Wordpress was recently informed by the legal representative of Turkish writer Harun Yahya that under orders from a Turkish court "access to Wordpress.com has been blocked in Turkey." The letter listed a number of "defamation" blogs - "all" of which make allegedly "slanderous" remarks against Harun Yahya. This ban is significant for the larger ripple it casts in Turkey's new Islamist democracy.


Harun Yahya is the author of the glossy Islamic creationist volume mentioned in my previous posts. In his column, Eteraz provides some disturbing details about Yahya's earlier writings:

Harun Yahya, which is the pen-name of Adnan Oktar, is a sort of spiritual head of a vast Islamic apologist outfit in Turkey, which has reached Islamic publishers in London, Canada and the US. Though Harun Yahya is described as a "charlatan", he has made inroads with Muslims all the way from Indonesia to America.

His books cover topics including refutations of atheism and Darwinism, romanticism as a weapon of Satan, anti-evolution pseudo-science, affirmation of miracles, and attacks on Freemasonry, Zionists, Buddhists, and terrorism (Darwin's fault). In 1996, Harun Yahya published a book called Holocaust Lies (also called Holocaust Deception), which claimed that "what is presented as Holocaust is the death of some Jews due to the typhus plague during the war and the famine towards the end of the war caused by the defeat of the German." Oddly, a few years later, he pinned anti-semitism on "neo-paganism" and "Darwinism" while putting himself forward as a denouncer of anti-semitism. Additionally, Yahya denies writing Holocaust Lies, but that is hard to believe.


According to Eteraz, Yahya is trying a silence a Wordpress-hosted blog run by one of his critics. The Turkish courts obliged him by blocking access to all of Wordpress and its more than one million blogs. Unfortunately, this is not Yahya's first attempt at censorship. Eteraz points out on his blog that Yahya has tried at least once before to have a web site that criticized him banned.

Even more worryingly, Yahya's efforts at censorship are the continuation of a longstanding effort by Islamic creationists in Turkey to silence their critics. An article in the May 5, 2005 issue of an independent Kansas City newspaper called The Pitch details this campaign by Yahya's organization, the BAV:

Turkey is a secular country that aspires to join the European Union and boasts several institutions of higher learning on a par with good Western universities. But beginning in 1998, BAV spearheaded an effort to attack Turkish academics who taught Darwinian theory. Professors there say they were harassed and threatened, and some of them were slandered in fliers that labeled them "Maoists" for teaching evolution. In 1999, six of the professors won a civil court case against BAV for defamation and were awarded $4,000 each.

But seven years after BAV's offensive began, says Istanbul University forensics professor Umit Sayin (one of the slandered faculty members), the battle is over.

"There is no fight against the creationists now. They have won the war," Sayin tells the Pitch from his home in Istanbul. "In 1998, I was able to motivate six members of the Turkish Academy of Sciences to speak out against the creationist movement. Today, it's impossible to motivate anyone. They're afraid they'll be attacked by the radical Islamists and the BAV."

(Emphasis added-DD; link via Eteraz's article)


The most disturbing thing about this case is not Yahya's desire to silence his critics; it is that the Turkish government is willing to act as his personal web censor. Combined with Turkey's recent election of an Islamist president, and other troubling incidents, the banning of Wordpress could potentially be the harbinger of a dangerous period for free expression in that country.

An Editor Murdered in Turkey

Yesterday, a Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor named Hrant Dink was murdered in Istanbul. As the Guardian reports, Dink was an outspoken advocate of free expression:

Dink had gone on trial numerous times for speaking out about the mass killings of Armenians by Turks. He had received threats from nationalists who viewed him as a traitor. He was a public figure in Turkey and, as the editor of Agos, one of its most prominent Armenian voices.

In his last newspaper column, Dink said he had become famous as an enemy of Turks and that he had received threats against him. He said he had received no protection from authorities despite his complaints. "My computer's memory is loaded with sentences full of hatred and threats," Dink wrote. "I am just like a pigeon ... I look around to my left and right, in front and behind me as much as it does. My head is just as active."

One email threatening his children worried him particularly, he wrote, adding that police had taken no action after he complained.


As the article notes, Dink was one of numerous Turkish writers to have been charged under Turkey's infamous Article 301:

That was the same charge that had been levelled at the Nobel prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk. Dink, however, was the only Turk to be convicted. Like Pamuk, Dink was taken to court by ultra-nationalists last year, and many believe they were behind his killing.

"This was an organised attempt by those who want to destroy Turkey's European Union aspirations and cast Turkey into darkness," said Akin Birdal, the former head of Turkey's Human Rights Association, who was himself shot and severely wounded in 1998 by suspected nationalists.


Whether it was committed by extreme nationalists or radical Islamists, Dink's murder was clearly intended as an attack on free expression. In the words of Turkey's Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, "(a) bullet was fired at freedom of thought and democratic life".

Article 301 Strikes Again

The BBC reported recently that four members of the Turkish publishing industry were acquitted of the charge that they violated Turkey's infamous Article 301:

Publisher Fatih Tas was found not guilty, along with a translator and two editors, of contravening article 301 of the penal code.

The European Union has pressed Turkey to reform the code, which it views as a bar on freedom of expression.

It followed the acquittal of another author, Ipek Calislar, on Tuesday.

Ms Calislar had been accused of insulting modern Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, by writing that he had once fled disguised as a woman.

The law has also been used against dozens of writers and journalists, including acclaimed novelists Orhan Pamuk - this year's Nobel laureate for literature - and Elif Shafak.

Most have been acquitted.

(Emphasis added-DD)


The text of Article 301, according to Amnesty International, is as follows:

"1. Public denigration of Turkishness, the Republic or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months and three years.

2. Public denigration of the Government of the Republic of Turkey, the judicial institutions of the State, the military or security structures shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months and two years.

3. In cases where denigration of Turkishness is committed by a Turkish citizen in another country the punishment shall be increased by one third.

4. Expressions of thought intended to criticize shall not constitute a crime."


Turkey needs to repeal Article 301 if it wants to be taken seriously as a free society.

Turkey, The EU, and Intellectual Freedom

Writing in the Times of London, Salman Rushdie notes the plight of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk:

On September 1, 2005, Pamuk was indicted by a district prosecutor for having “blatantly belittled Turkishness” by his remarks. If convicted, he faces up to three years in jail. Article 301/1 of the Turkish penal code, under which Pamuk is to be tried, states that “a person who explicitly insults being a Turk, the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly, shall be sentenced to a penalty of imprisonment for a term of six months to three years . . . Where insulting being a Turk is committed by a Turkish citizen in a foreign country, the penalty shall be increased by one third.” So, if Pamuk is found guilty, he faces an additional penalty for having made the statement abroad.

You would think that the Turkish authorities might have avoided so blatant an assault on their most celebrated writer’s fundamental freedoms at the very moment that their application for full membership of the European Union — an extremely unpopular application in many EU countries — was being considered at the EU summit. However, in spite of being a state that has ratified both the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the European Convention on Human Rights, both of which see freedom of expression as central, Turkey continues to have and to enforce a penal code that is clearly contrary to these very same principles, and, in spite of widespread global protests, has set the date for Pamuk’s trial. It will begin, unless there is a change of heart, on December 16.

That Pamuk is criticised by Turkish Islamists and radical nationalists is no surprise. That the attackers frequently disparage his works as obscure and self-absorbed, accusing him of having sold out to the West, is no surprise either. It is, however, disappointing to read intellectuals such as Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations and a newspaper columnist, criticising “those, especially in the West, who would use the indictment against Pamuk to denigrate Turkey’s progress toward greater civil rights — and toward European Union membership”.

Ozel wants the charges against Pamuk thrown out at the trial in December, and accepts that they represent an “affront” to free speech, but prefers to stress “the distance that the country has covered in the past decade”. This seems altogether too weak. The number of convictions and prison sentences under the laws that penalise free speech in Turkey has indeed declined in the past decade, but International PEN’s records show that more than 50 writers, journalists and publishers currently face trials. Turkish journalists continue to protest against the (revised) penal code. The International Publishers Association, in a deposition to the UN, has described this revised code as being “deeply flawed”.


As Rushdie correctly points out, allowing Turkey to join the EU under these circumstances would make a mockery of the European Union's commitment to free speech and expression. It is time for Turkey to amend its laws and respect intellectual freedom.

The Sivas Massacre: 15 Years Later

Today marks the 15th anniversary of one of the most horrific atrocities in Islamism's war on intellectual freedom. The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet describes what happened in the city of Sivas on that terrible day:

On July 2, 1993, a group of Islamic fundamentalists surrounded the Madimak Hotel in which many intellectuals were staying for the Pir Sultan Abdal Festival in Sivas, known as a stronghold of Islamist movements.

The demonstrations to protest novelist, Aziz Nesin, who translated and published Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and who criticized Islam, turned violent and the fundamentalist crowd set fire to the Madimak Hotel.

Nesin was saved by security forces, but 37 other intellectuals and participants of the festival, who stayed inside the hotel, were killed. Security forces and officials were criticized for not stopping the massacre.

(Emphasis added-DD)


The Sivas massacre was by far the worst act of violence carried out in response to the publication of The Satanic Verses. Incredibly, many of the perpetrators of this atrocity have yet to be brought to justice. The Turkish paper Today's Zaman explains:

The killers were arrested and tried, and after some 13 years of trials, convicted. However some were later released under a law known as the “rehabilitation project,” which gave partial amnesty for terrorist crimes committed in 2003. Some perpetrators are still at large. The city’s inhabitants claim that some of the perpetrators were even not from the city and that some passersby were wrongly convicted.


To mark today's anniversary, supporters of free expression, many from Turkey's minority Alevi sect of Islam, staged a demonstration in honor of those murdered. Among their demands are that a museum be erected on the site of the Madimak Hotel and that all of the perpetrators finally be brought to justice.

The Sivas massacre was not only directed at Aziz Nesin and The Satanic Verses; it was also one of a number of attacks directed at Turkey's Alevi minority. According to the Hurriyet article cited above, "Alevis are the second largest religious community in Turkey, although no official statistics are available. The Alevis' interpretation of Islam differs from Sunnis, and represents a more liberal wing of Islam." It is no coincidence that the Pir Sultan Abdal festival was named after a 16th century Alevi poet who was hanged by the Ottoman authorities for his outspoken and heterodox views. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Alevis should be willing to defend to defend free expression and that they would find themselves targeted by Islamists.

In June, a number of Turkish Alevi leaders published an appeal regarding the commemoration of the Sivas massacre. It is they who should have the last word:

Turkey must remove this shame from its past and also illuminate its future. In our opinion the solution is to convert the Madımak Hotel into a museum, to identify the real, hidden perpetrators, and to apologize to the Alevi Community. To prevent new Madımak massacres, therefore, it is of great importance to stop initiatives and efforts to forget July 2 and to ensure that the Turkish state and society confront it. Thus commemorations to be held on July 2 in Sivas are critically important.

Alevi organizations have been waging a determined struggle for fifteen years to expose the Madımak Massacre, and not only Madımak, but all massacres which devastate the culture of tolerance and reinforce darkness. And we consider it important to stand shoulder to shoulder with those who defend secularism, emancipation of the individual and labor, and democratization of the State. We call on our friends to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the Madımak Hotel on July 2.

As we do every year, to commemorate our loss, we will leave carnations in front of the Madımak Hotel on 2nd July in this year too. Once more we shall demonstrate our commitment to make the Madımak Hotel a museum. We strongly appeal to others to join us in these commemorations. We believe that your support will contribute to realizing the dream of a Turkey where different cultures and beliefs can live in tolerance and that your support will constitute an effective response to those who try the cause the Madımak Massacre to be forgotten.

Islamic Creationism Update

The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article on the Islamic creationism phenomenon. The Monitor's analysis makes it clear that the campaign I referenced earlier involves far more than just publishing a single glossy book:

On a recent afternoon inside Istanbul's busiest subway station, a young man beckoned commuters into a subterranean "fossil exhibit" full of skulls and insects dating back millions of years.

But this was no mainstream scientific display. One colorful poster advertised the "myth" of the evolution of the horse. Another, displaying a flying pterodactyl, denounced the evolution of birds as "fake."

The display is one of many traveling shows put on by the Foundation for Scientific Research, an Islamic creationist group that has become a household name in Turkey. Now, the groups says it is distributing its books – published in 59 languages including Arabic, Chinese, Swahili, and Polish – to 80 countries.

"Turkey is now the headquarters of creationism in the Islamic World. This is no longer only Turkey's problem, it is now the problem of the whole civilized world," says Haluk Ertan, a professor of molecular biology at Istanbul University. He's one of a handful of Turkish scientists who have been working to counter creationism's spread in the country.

Emboldened by its success at home over the past decade, the foundation, known by its Turkish acronym BAV (for Bilim Arastirma Vakfi), is now aggressively trying to export its unique brand of Islamic creationism well beyond the borders of Turkey to the Middle East, Europe, and even the United States.

No YouTube in Turkey

A Turkish court has issued a ruling banning access to YouTube in that country. This article from Wednesday's Times of London has the details:

A court in Istanbul has issued an order denying access to the video-sharing website YouTube. The state owned Turk Telecom implemented the ban today after an escalating dispute between Greek and Turkish users of the site.

The court order was issued yesterday and most internet users logging onto the site in Turkey are met with a holding page with a Turkish message, which translates as: “Access to this site has been denied by court order ! ...”.

Greek and Turkish YouTube users have been trading video insults over the past few months, attracting much coverage in the Turkish press. Greek videos reportedly accused the founding president of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, of homosexuality; a Turkish user responded by calling Greece the birthplace of homosexuality.

It is illegal to criticise either Ataturk or Turkishness in Turkey and the prosecutor’s office in Istanbul acted despite YouTube’s agreement to take down the offending videos.


On Thursday, Reporters Sans Frontieres released this update:

An Istanbul court yesterday ordered Internet Service Providers to block access to the US video-sharing website Youtube because of content deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish state. After the site agreed to remove the offending videos, the same court lifted the order (but it was still blocked at 1515 GMT today).


It will be interesting to see if the ban is, in fact, lifted. Even if it is, this incident raises yet more questions about the status of intellectual freedom in Turkey.

Defending Free Expression in Turkey

Earlier this week, the International Herald Tribune published a must read essay from Turkish professor Atilla Yayla. Professor Yayla had the temerity to criticize the founder of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, during a recent panel session. In his article, he discusses the consequences of his remarks:

What is the defining line between a civilized and uncivilized country? In my own experience in Turkey since Nov. 19, it is freedom of expression: I have been accused of treason in the press and suspended from my university for defending the common values of civilization and re-evaluating Turkey's history.


Please read the read:

Freedom of Expression in Turkey

Christian Publishing House Attacked in Turkey

The Associated Press has the details, via the International Herald Tribune:

Three employees of a publishing house that distributes Bibles were slain Wednesday in the latest attack apparently targeting Turkey's Christian minority.

The attack added to concerns in Europe about whether this predominantly Muslim country — which is bidding for EU membership — could protect its religious minorities. It also underlined concerns about rising Turkish nationalism and hostility toward non-Muslims.

The three victims — a German and two Turkish citizens — were found with their hands and legs bound and their throats slit at the Zirve publishing house in the central city of Malatya.

Police detained four youths, aged 19-20, and also suspect a fifth, who underwent surgery for head injuries sustained apparently in trying to escape by jumping from a window at Zirve, authorities said.

The five suspects had each had been carrying copies of a letter that read "We five are brothers. "We are going to our deaths. We may not return," according to the state-run Anatolia news agency.

The AP notes that this atrocity is part of a pattern:

It was the latest in a string of attacks on Turkey's Christian community — which comprises less than 1 percent of the 70-million population.

In February 2006, a Turkish teenager shot a Catholic priest dead as he prayed in his church, and two other Catholic priests were attacked later that year. A November visit by Pope Benedict XVI was greeted by several nonviolent protests. Earlier this year, a suspected nationalist killed Armenian Christian editor Hrant Dink.

Authorities had vowed to deal with extremist attacks after Dink's murder, but Wednesday's assault showed the violence was not slowing down.

(Link courtesy of the Counterrorism Blog)

Standing up Against Article 301

The BBC takes a look at those brave individuals in Turkey who risk prosecution under Article 301 or even worse for daring to publish books that "insult Turkishness":

It is a very difficult time to be a writer in Turkey.

Last year the prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist, Hrant Dink, was murdered. This year, an ultra-nationalist gang allegedly had the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk on its hit list.

Both men had been prosecuted for "insulting Turkishness".

Today, many writers once known for their forthright views have fallen silent. But one man is still putting himself on the line in a fight for free speech.


Fighting for free speech in Turkey

Murder in Malatya

The Associated Press has an update on Wednesday's horrific murder of three employees of a Christian publishing house in Turkey:

Police detained five more suspects Thursday in the deaths of three men who were found with their throats slit in a publishing house that prints Bibles, the latest in a string of attacks targeting Christians in the mostly Muslim country.

The arrests brought to 10 the number of suspects in custody, all people in their late teens or early 20s, said Halil Ibrahim Dasoz, governor of Malatya, the city in central Turkey where the killings took place.

Malatya is known as hotbed of Turkish nationalism and as the hometown of Mehmet Ali Agca, the gunman who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981.

Local media said five suspects detained Wednesday were college students who were living at a residence that belongs to an Islamic foundation. Some of those suspects told investigators they carried out the killings to protect Islam, a Turkish newspaper reported.

"We didn't do this for ourselves, but for our religion," Hurriyet newspaper quoted one suspect as saying. "Our religion is being destroyed. Let this be a lesson to enemies of our religion."


(Emphasis added-DD)


Murdering people for printing Bibles; this is how radical Islamists "protect" their totalitarian version of Islam.

Reactions to Turkey's Wordpress Ban

Global Voices Online has put together a terrific roundup of Turkish blogger reactions to last week's banning of Wordpress in that country. It gives a lot of background on the history of censorship in Turkey, and on how Turkish bloggers are working to get around the ban.

YouTube Banned in Turkey (Again)

For the second time, a Turkish court has banned access to YouTube. Agence France Presse has the details:

The decision followed a complaint by a resident in the eastern city of Sivas that the site hosted videos containing insults against Turkey's founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, President Abdullah Gul, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the army, the Anatolia news agency reported.

The court ruling has been forwarded to the state regulatory body, the Telecommunications Board, to be put into effect, the agency said.

YouTube said in a written statement, carried by Anatolia, that it was ready to cooperate with Turkish authorities to resolve the dispute.


This decision comes on the heels of a court ruling last month blocking access to Wordpress and its one million blogs.

Turkish Publisher Under Investigation

Yet another absurd censorship story from Turkey, where, according to the Associated Press, the Turkish publisher of Richard Dawkins' atheist tract The God Delusion is under investigation for incitement to religious hatred.

Publisher Erol Karaaslan said yesterday that he would be questioned by an Istanbul prosecutor as part of an official investigation into The God Delusion, written by the British expert in evolutionary biology.

Karaaslan could go on trial if the prosecutor concludes the book incites religious hatred and insults religious values, and faces up to one year in prison if found guilty, Milliyet newspaper reported.

The prosecutor started the inquiry into the book after one reader complained that passages in the book were an assault on "sacred values", Karaaslan said.

The publisher said he would be questioned today and faces prosecution both as the book's publisher and translator. The book has sold 6,000 copies in Turkey since it was published by his Kuzey publishing house in June.

No one was available for comment at the prosecutor's office.

The Nobel Prize is for Traitors?

For an example of the xenophobic, anti-intellectual freedom worldview that Nonie Darwish and other moderate Muslims struggle against on a daily basis, see this recent interview with Iraqi researcher Samir 'Ubeid. During the interview, Mr. Ubeid expressed his rather bizarre views on the Nobel Prize. MEMRI has the transcript, here's just a sample:

Samir 'Ubeid: "I don’t call it the Nobel Prize - I call it the hubal [idol] prize."

Interviewer: "Hubal?"

Samir 'Ubeid: "Yes, because it often encourages heresy. It encourages attacks against the heritage, and encourages those who scorn their people and their culture. The proof is that it was awarded recently to Pamuk, who had encouraged civil strife, which might preoccupy Turkey and the Muslims in general. He held Turkey responsible for what the Ottoman state did, when he referred to the massacre of the Armenians."

[...]

Interviewer: "In other words, if you are a traitor to your country, you deserve this prize."

Samir 'Ubeid: "If you are a traitor to your country, and a heretic, who curses his Prophet, you deserve a Nobel Prize.


(Emphasis added-DD. The Pamuk in question is Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, recently awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.)


I'm going to go out on a limb and postulate that Mr. Ubeid is not a big supporter of intellectual freedom. It is this attitude, this belief that freethinkers are "heretics" and "traitors", that is the main source of danger to intellectual freedom in the Muslim world. It leads to the suppression of alternative viewpoints, and enables the rise of intolerant ideologies such as Islamism.

What "true religious bigotry" Looks Like

In a terrific article from the December 31 Weekly Standard, Terry Eastland discusses the surprisingly successful presidential campaign of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. The following paragraph illustrates the style of passive aggressive demagogy that Huckabee has used to appeal to many on the Religious Right:

As for his opponents, they include not just the Republican establishment but also evangelical leaders he regards as part of the establishment; the "chattering class" of both old and new media; and secularists hostile to expressions of faith in public life. In Cedar Rapids, before a gathering of the Iowa Christian Alliance, Huckabee defended the TV Christmas ad in which he mentions "the birth of Christ." He remarked on "the level of true religious bigotry that exists in our culture--that for those of us who are people of faith, it's okay to have it but please keep it to yourselves."


As I have stated previously, I consider the view that religion is under attack in America to be as absurd as claims that "our freedoms are under attack" from the Bush Administration. Criticism of evangelicals or Christianity in general is not an assault on religion any more than criticizing the Dixie Chicks was an effort to "crush dissent".

Ironically, the very same issue of the Standard contains a piece by Paul Marshall on the persecution of Christians worldwide. Governor Huckabee and his supporters would be well served to read it and see what the standard for "true religious bigotry" really is:

In purely numerical terms, Christianity is the world's fastest growing religion. Two-thirds of Christians and four-fifths of active Christians live outside the West, so Christianity now may well be the world's largest non-Western religion.

But for probably hundreds of millions, Christmas is shadowed by pain and fear, since this is usually the peak season for anti-Christian attacks in Pakistan, India, Sudan, Nigeria, and beyond. It is also a time when the Chinese and Vietnamese governments are prone to arrest their unregistered believers.

Violence continues in Nigeria, where tens of thousands have died in conflicts around the spread of Islamic law. Nigerian Christians are also often the victims when others produce allegedly blasphemous drawings. During the 2006 "Danish cartoon riots," Muslims rioting in Borno State killed 65 and destroyed 57 churches and 250 businesses. Persecution continues in Laos, India, Iraq, Turkey, Ethiopia, Sudan, Belarus, and elsewhere. Some Christian leaders in Gaza have been murdered while others have had to flee. Even in Britain, newspapers are reporting threats to Muslim converts to Christianity: Many remain in hiding, and one has had to move 45 times.

Other examples could be given, but two of the worst, Burma and Eritrea, receive scant attention because their repressions do not fit any wider international political agendas, hence their victims are among the world's most forgotten people.


Do They Know it's Christmas? Not in Burma or Eritrea.

Islamic Creationism

One of the dilemmas that is always mentioned in library school during collection development class is what to do with unsolicited gift books. Of particular interest are those items that are donated directly to libraries by advocacy groups or individuals with a strong point of view on a particular topic. As librarians, we have a responsibility to build collections that represent a wide variety of viewpoints. Still, when someone donates a book that represents an extreme, or shall I say reality challenged, position, this can create a difficult decision.

The July 17th New York Times had an interesting article on just such a book. A work that, among other things, offers a new spin on an old controversy:

In the United States, opposition to the teaching of evolution in public schools has largely been fueled by the religious right, particularly Protestant fundamentalism.

Now another voice is entering the debate, in dramatic fashion.

It is the voice of Adnan Oktar of Turkey, who, under the name Harun Yahya, has produced numerous books, videos and DVDs on science and faith, in particular what he calls the “deceit” inherent in the theory of evolution. One of his books, “Atlas of Creation,” is turning up, unsolicited, in mailboxes of scientists around the country and members of Congress, and at science museums in places like Queens and Bemidji, Minn.

At 11 x 17 inches and 12 pounds, with a bright red cover and almost 800 glossy pages, most of them lavishly illustrated, “Atlas of Creation” is probably the largest and most beautiful creationist challenge yet to Darwin’s theory, which Mr. Yahya calls a feeble and perverted ideology contradicted by the Koran.

In bowing to Scripture, Mr. Yahya resembles some fundamentalist creationists in the United States. But he is not among those who assert that Earth is only a few thousand years old. The principal argument of “Atlas of Creation,” advanced in page after page of stunning photographs of fossil plants, insects and animals, is that creatures living today are just like creatures that lived in the fossil past. Ergo, Mr. Yahya writes, evolution must be impossible, illusory, a lie, a deception or “a theory in crisis.”


Mr. Yahya, of course, has every right to produce and disseminate his work. If he started sending it to libraries, however, would we be obligated to accept it? If he sent one to my library, and I was asked to decide whether or not we keep it, I would almost say "yes", just to preserve the book as a curiosity piece if nothing else. I'm interested to hear what others might think about this.

YouTube Unbanned

YouTube is no longer blocked in Turkey. Of course, it should never have been banned in the first place.

A Magazine Banned in Tunisia

Also from Reporters Sans Frontieres comes word that Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey have banned the most recent issue of a French magazine called Historia Thématique. RSF's press release explains the reasoning for the ban, while also exposing its absurdity:

The Tunisian authorities announced their ban on 10 January, saying it was due to a picture showing the Prophet Mohammed, which is “formally forbidden in Islam and could offend the religious feelings of Tunisians.” The picture in fact comes from an illustrated copy of the Koran dating from 1583 that is in the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Istanbul.

The January issue of Historia, a monthly produced by the same publishing house, has been on sale without any problem although it has an illustration showing Mohammed in partially animal form (with feathers and the tail of a fish).

Historia editor Pierre Baron told Reporters Without Borders that the reaction to the Historia Thématique issue was indicative of the current climate of intolerance. He pointed out that the issue was also about Christian and Jewish fundamentalism, adding that his staff decided that fundamentalism was an appropriate subject because of the increasing frequency of cases of offence being taken on the grounds of religious sensibilities.

(Emphasis added-DD)

Unfortunately, when regimes censor in order to avoid offending Islamist sensibilities, they simply fuel this "current climate of intolerance".