Free Republic

A group of demonstrators gathered by Istanbul's Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art for a rally in commemoration of Armenian Genocide victims. Hrant Dink’s son Arat Dink, publisher and human rights advocate Ragip Zarakolu participated in the event. Negation of Genocide is continuation of massacres; it’s time to put an end to Turkish policy of negation...

Last week’s elections in Turkey prompted New York Sun contributing editor Hillel Halkin to recall an article he wrote for the Forward a dozen years ago about evidence he uncovered that Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, was half Jewish (his father being Doenmeh): Who but a member of a religious minority would want so badly to eliminate religion from the identity of a Muslim majority that, after the genocide of Turkey's Christian Armenians in World War I and the expulsion of nearly all of its Christian Greeks in the early 1920s, was 99% of Turkey's population? … Halkin...

Los Angeles Daily News columnist and Political Mavens Fellow Bridget Johnson saddened and shocked The Stiletto with her report that Arat Dink, son of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who was slain in cold blood by Turkish nationalists in January, is being charged with "insulting Turkishness" under Turkey’s notorious Article 301: [W]hen Dink prophesized in that last column that additional injustices would arise, he could have been speaking not only of his cold-blooded killing but of the trials that would follow.First, it was revealed that hearings for his alleged assailants will be closed to the press, and journalists won't even be...

Make no mistake about it: The photos and TV footage of Turks lamenting the January 19 assassination of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in Istanbul were nothing more than PR damage control, to show the European Union that Armenians and other Christian minorities in the 99.8 percent Muslim country do not have to fear persecution – or worse.But truth always trumps PR, and the Belfast Telegraph reports: "Less than a fortnight after huge crowds thronged the streets of Istanbul at the funeral of the murdered Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, chanting, ‘We are all Armenian,’ Turkey … showed another, more sinister face."When...

The United States government continues to remain silent on free speech restrictions in Turkey – most notably, what the European Union has called the "infamous" Article 301 of the Penal Code. Under Article 301, more than 60 fiction and non-fiction writers have been prosecuted for "denigrating Turkishness" – typically, for acknowledging the Armenian Genocide.Turkish novelist and Novel Laureate Orhan Pamuk was prosecuted under Article 301 because he told a Swiss magazine, "Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it." Another Turkish novelist, Elif ªafak, was also tried...

The Stiletto has written several articles examining what freedom of religion means to Muslims. In a nutshell: You have the freedom to convert to Islam, or to live under sharia law even though you are not Muslim and are living in a Western country.The Stiletto now turns her attention on how (really, whether) Muslims comprehend the concept of free speech:† Exhibit A: The riots in Denmark over the newspaper Jyllands-Posten publishing a handful of cartoons that depicted Mohammed.† Exhibit B: The death threats against Pope Benedict XVI in Turkey and throughout the Muslim world – and the cold-blooded murder of...

Hilmi Aydogdu, a Kurd who heads the Democratic Society Party's branch in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir was arrested and charged by Turkish authorities with “threatening public safety by inciting racial enmity and hatred,” reports The Associated Press. Aydogdu allegedly made remarks suggesting that if Turkey attacks Iraqi Kurds in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, 20 million Turkish Kurds would consider it an attack on Diyarbakir.The Stiletto is surprised that there is such a law in Turkey. Hrant Dink’s assassin, Ogun Samast, shouted “I shot the Armenian” after he gunned the journalist down right in front of his newspaper’s...

It was on 5 February 2006 that Don Andrea Santoro, a Roman Fidei Donum priest, was killed by two pistol shots as he was praying in St Mary’s Church in Trabzon, where he had been parish priest for three years. It was an absurd death that shocked everyone, a gesture undertaken “in the name of Allah” by a 16-year-old boy condemned to 18 years in prison. A year has passed. It has been an intense year, full of other dramatic events, but also of small signs of change and hope in the port city on the Black Sea, the sad...

Istanbul, 2 Feb. (AKI) - A storm has broken out in Turkey over video images showing police posing with the alleged killer of an ethnic Armenian journalist while he holds a Turkish flag. The footage broadcast by the private TGRT television channel, shows police giving the 17-year-old ultra-nationalist suspect, Ogun Samast what a newspaper denounced as "hero treatment". Other newspapers ran outraged headlines including "Worse than the Assassination", and "Hand in Hand with the Killer". Samast is charged with killing Hrant Dink, who had angered Turkish nationalists with repeated assertions that the mass killings of Armenians during the ealy 20th...

Istanbul, 23 Jan. (AKI) - Tens of thousands of people have taken part in a funeral march in Istanbul on Tuesday to commemorate prominent Armenian Turkish journalist Hrant Dink who was shot dead in the city last Friday. A calm crowd gathered along the march's 80-kilometre route from the downtown offices of Dink's Agos newspaper to the Balikli Armenian cemetery in the city's Yenikapi district, where he was due to be buried. Mourners dressed in black carried placards that read "We are all Hrant Dink" in Turkish and Armenian. Occasional rounds of applause could be heard, Turkish news agency Cihan...

Let’s not mince words. It was a teenager who pumped three bullets into Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, 53, at the entrance to the offices of Agos, the bilingual Armenian-Turkish weekly newspaper he founded in 1996. But Dink’s execution is a direct consequence of the policies of the Turkish government concerning the Armenian Genocide, and what Amnesty International terms "a pattern of judicial harassment against him for peacefully expressing his dissenting opinion."For more than nine decades, successive Turkish governments have denied that Ottoman Turks carried out a systematic – nearly successful – genocidal plan to exterminate Armenians. The official Turkish position...