When two Turkish cabinet members were barred from campaigning for the dictatorship of Turkish President Erdogan in Germany, the sultan wannabe snarled: “If I want, I will come. If you don’t let me in, I will shake up the world for such impudence.” He then ordered his toady foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, to arrange a… Continue reading
In his book, The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump shares with his readers a typical hour-by-hour day of phone calls and meetings with various New York officials over building permits, acquisitions and charities. By 3:00 pm, there is no sign of lunch. No, Donald Trump is not fasting. Exhausting details have simply consumed his… Continue reading
(Or an Open Letter to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) Dear Mr. Ahmadinejad: You recently made news in America with your open letter to President Trump, renewing your habit of venting your pent-up frustrations by writing to American presidents. Presidents Obama and Bush ignored your letters. President Trump, despite his news-junkie bents, has so far kept quiet. Let’s… Continue reading
American judges are under a glaring spotlight. They nullified President Trump’s executive order barring citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. I can’t speak for 3.3 million Muslim-Americans, but 50,000 American Kurds had one common sentiment: black robes rock! I thought that too—until I read the decision of a Virginia judge who… Continue reading
We don’t normally think of American novelist Ernest Hemingway and former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the same breath. But when you throw a CIA interrogator into the mix, curious things can pop out. It’s sort of like giving a small boy a hammer, noted American philosopher Abraham Kaplan: “He will find that everything he… Continue reading
December 25, 2016 Is shooting an unarmed man courageous? Is shooting him in the back manful? That’s what one Turkish man did, whose name means courageous, manful, red-blooded and trustworthy in English. Cold-blooded, back-shooting murder is neither red-blooded nor courageous to me—especially shooting an unarmed, defenseless man in the back eight times! Crowning his cowardly… Continue reading
Two Kurdish organizations have lavishly praised Fidel Castro, the longtime Cuban leader who died recently. The Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) and the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK) each issued statements hailing Mr. Castro for his contributions to “freedom” and “democracy.” Really? Are we talking about the same fellow? Isn’t Castro the despot who ruthlessly murdered hundreds… Continue reading
November 17, 2016 You and the Kurds have a common foe. In Washington lingo, that is enough for both of us to become friends, and fast ones at that, immediately. We should consider it and consider this: a modest Kurdish proposal. The foreign-policy establishment doesn’t like either of us. They don’t have a phone number… Continue reading
“To be ignorant of the past is to be forever a child.” —Cicero What is best for the Kurds: Islam or Nationalism? That question gnawed at me as I read, Islam and Competing Nationalisms in the Middle East, 1876-1926, a scholarly book by Kamal Soleimani analyzing the place of faith and identity in the politics… Continue reading
September 18, 2016 “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” –Mother Teresa Acclaimed Turkish journalist Ece Temelkuran, who commands an astonishing two million Twitter fans on her cutting-edge microblogging universe, is her country’s most popular columnist. Kurds should probe her sensational new book, Turkey, the… Continue reading