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Let us be very clear about one thing: POLITICS KILLS. The entire Israeli political apparatus lied to the public for 18 days about the three yeshiva boys who were killed brutally by a Hamas split-up. Those in charge knew from the start that the boys were dead, but kept on the search in order to build public support for the brutal invasion of the largest Ghetto in the world, the Gaza Strip. (Source: http://forward.com/articles/201764/how-politics-and-lies-triggered-an-unintended-war/?p=all ) The pictures and the reports coming from Gaza are brutal, heart breaking and making me lose any confidence that I still might have for the international peace keeping efforts. Pounding a population who has no where else to go does not fall short of a war crime. Furthermore these pictures does not help Israel's security and the well-being of its citizens at all. As a supporter of Isreal's lawful existence in the region, this hurts me even more. In the end, nothings changed since Tom Wai...

Hatay'da emperyalist oyunlar oynanıyor ( link ). Bu sefer figüran değil, sahne arkasındayız. Nedense Bob Dylan'ın Highway 61 Revisited şarkısının sözleri aklıma geldi: Bir sonraki Dünya Savaşı'nı çıkarmaya çalışan Gezgin kumarbaz çok sıkılmıştı, "Daha önce böyle birşeye kalkışmadım" diyen Tertipçisi önce koltuğundan düşüyordu, "61. Otobanda, beyazlatıcıları güneşe yaydık mı, Hallederiz kolayca bu işi de!"

Democracy is the mother of all buzzwords. From totalitarian regimes calling themselves the real democrats (German Democratic Republic, Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea) to the so called advanced democracies such as US, where the wealthy are simply rewriting rules for themselves (1), or Germany, where the state recklessly lets the police attack peaceful protesters who are protesting the construction in their own city(2), the word democracy is used to whitewash practices that are directly contrary to what the democracy supposed to mean. Add to this the dangerous Western (mostly American) international relations rhetoric, that democracy is a panacea that would magically cure all the worlds problems. Although it is not logical, and perhaps not ethical, to choose any other form of government over democracy, it is certainly not realistic to believe democracy is a solution to any problem. In my humble opinion, it is only a tool, or a mere set of practices, that lets people solve probl...

Turkey's dynamic and to be honest visionary foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu boasted the new Turkish foreign policy doctrine in this Foreign Policy article . I am quoting from the article: The second methodological principle is to base Turkish foreign policy on a "consistent and systematic" framework around the world. Turkey's vision for the Middle East is not in opposition to its approach in Central Asia or in the Balkans; our approach to Africa is no different from our approach to Asia. Turkey is also actively trying to improve relations with nearby countries like Greece, Iraq, the Russian Federation, and Syria. Prime Minister Erdogan made a brave speech during the meeting of his parliamentary group. I hope his call for a tougher approach to Israel's violent and reckless approach to the Middle East problem will bring a change to the response of the international community. I am not optimistic about this, since Obama is in a real hard position to open up yet an...

David and Goliath is an important story for the believers of the three Abrahamic religion. It is an allegory, how the weak can overcome the mighty opressor. Jewish people were prosecuted through the ages, since they represented the perfect "other" for uncivilized communities to build their identities. The story of David and Goliath must have helped them in their darkest hours, this I am sure. But the story of David does not end there. After uniting the kingdoms of the Israelites, David brought the Ark of Covenant to Jerusalem, intending to build a temple in the name of Jehovah. Jehovah forbids David from building this temple, since David has blood in his hands. The temple is built by Salomon, his son. The government of Israel should remember the second part of the story. They cannot build a peaceful homeland for their citizens with blood on their hands. On the other side, I am disgusted by the lack of compassion and the calculatedness of the words of Nobel Peace Prize Laureat...

The leaders of a country tell a lot about a country. This is true for my beloved country too, and there is not point in hiding the truth. Prime Minister Erdogan, not only reflects the mentality of his voters, but also the country in general. In my humble opinion, Turkey is still trying to come in terms with the trauma of the First World War. After seeing themselves in a giants mirror for hundreds of years, the Turkish people had to come in terms with losing a war, even after winning many battles, losing millions of sons. This came after almost a hundred years of losing territory, in the aftermath of the birth of nation states. There is a deeply rooted view in the Turkish society, that Turkey is "a giant sedated by the outsiders" and would be unstoppable once she wakes up. This results in a high level of distrust towards "others" whether or not this "other" are foreign countries, minorities, or simply people who are different. This has got to do with the fe...

18 days and there is no end in sight for the situation in Gazza. I have written about my disgust at the unbelievable disrespect to human dignity and human life from both sides, and my disillusionment with political progress earlier . With no changes in sight to the cruelties, and stupidities on the politics side of things I want to write about something else, which caught my attention. We use the word "inhumane" when we are describing Israel bombing a school, or Hamas blowing up a bus in Israel and killing innocent people -who is an innocent person by the way?-. This is nothing but a misnomer to say the least. Humans are the only species on this earth who use their intelligence to lock their siblings underground for years, and rape them, who built factories of death to kill other humans, build atom bombs to kill hundreds of thousands in a slip second, and come up with ideologies which praise killing yourself and others as a backstage pass to some imaginary place. So these ...

I am feeling extremely disillusioned about democracy in the shadow of the incomprehensible suffering in the Gazza Strip. Though neither of the sides can be called democratic, -Israel is not secular, and Hamas has only won an election, which is just one tiny component of democracy to make it a democratic government- the workings of democracy play an important role in the escalation. There are elections in Israel, which promotes populist, yet short sighted and cruel display of military power. On the other side a religious terrorist organization who fires rockets at will, won the elections riding on the resentment towards the peace-seeking, yet corrupt government. On the other side of the Atlantic, the country whose political system is the most democratic on the world is staying silent. Yesterday in the subway, I found an answer to my disillusion, in the words of Leonard Cohen. I shouldn't have assumed that Democracy had already arrived in any part of the world. Not even USA: Democrac...

I am watching CNN with absolute horror, disbelief, anger, confusion. My emotions are way too raw, and fierce for me to reflect on the events themselves. Do we ever learn anything from history? Do we really ever make "progress"? Or are we as humans suffer from extreme short memory spans of maximum 10 years? I am reading Dostoevsky's "Karamazov Brother's." 129 years gone, and people suffer from the same ills and delusions, fight the same problems, make the same mistakes and lose in the end. This is terrifying me. The other day, I read a quotation from Jose Luis Borges On the back of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment": "Discovering Dostoevsky is as important as seeing the sea for the first time in ones life. This usually happens in the youth, we prefer more soothing books when we get older. I read Crime and Punishment in 1915 in Geneve. This book, whose heroes were a murderer and a whore, seemed more destructive than the war surrounding me....