Take a deep breath ...

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Did he mention the Kurdish issue aswell?
This seems to be another major problem in Turkey's foreign relations.

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2011 Prius

Yes, the Kurdish issue has been brought up a number of times. The dialogue foundation we met with today is planning a session in the Kurdish section of the country next year. The people we have been meeting with are very concerned about the problem but nobody seems to be in favor of a separate Kurdish nation.

I'm beginning to get dialogued/toleranced/humanized out. Met with 5 different Gulen groups today. There's only so much introducing and polite smiling a person can put up with. The major redeeming feature of the day was watching the first half of the football match between Turkey and Switzerland with a Turkish family in their home. They are committed to dialogue but there is a clear limit, which is reached once their soccer team starts playing. Then it's either watch the game with us or leave. I liked that attitude.
Also experienced my first insult when one of the leaders of a Gulen movement relief agency assumed all the trip participants were Christians and stated that all that really matters is that everyone is a monotheist, because monotheists are clearly morally superior to atheists. I just smiled politely as the trip hosts who know me, tried to smooth things over.

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1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

Monotheists yes, but excluding football...
As your hosts will probably have explained to you, yesterday's football game against the Swiss was a special one, since the Swiss kept Turkey out of the World Cup two years ago in a playoff match that got completely out of hand, for which Turkey was severely punished. It must have been a HUGE party afterwards... Their next match is on Sunday, and if they beat the Czech's and go to the quarterfinals, the country will explode !

Did the Armenian genocide came up, another highly sensitive issue ? For some reason, they persist to deny this atrocity from ever happening.
Tried the fresh figs yet?

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2011 Prius

Prospect last ran its intellectuals poll in November 2005. The positions of people who appeared in the 2005 poll are given in brackets. New entries are marked with an asterisk. You can discuss the poll at First Drafts, Prospect 's blog.

1 Fethullah Gülen (*)

2 Muhammad Yunus (*)

3 Yusuf Al-Qaradawi (56)

4 Orhan Pamuk (54)

5 Aitzaz Ahsan (*)

6 Amr Khaled (*)

7 Abdolkarim Soroush (15)

8 Tariq Ramadan (58)

9 Mahmood Mamdani (*)

10 Shirin Ebadi (12)

11 Noam Chomsky (1)

12 Al Gore (*)

13 Bernard Lewis (34)

14 Umberto Eco (2)

15 Ayaan Hirsi Ali

16 Amartya Sen (8)

17 Fareed Zakaria (35)

18 Garry Kasparov (*)

19 Richard Dawkins (3)

20 Mario Vargas Llosa (29)

21 Lee Smolin (*)

22 Jürgen Habermas (7)

23 Salman Rushdie (10)

24 Sari Nusseibeh (65)

25 Slavoj Zizek (23)

26 Vaclav Havel (4)

27 Christopher Hitchens (5)

28 Samuel Huntington (28)

29 Peter Singer (33)

30 Paul Krugman (6)

31 Jared Diamond (9)

32 Pope Benedict XVI (17)

33 Fan Gang (82)

34 Michael Ignatieff (37)

35 Fernando Henrique Cardoso (43)

36 Lilia Shevtsova (*)

37 Charles Taylor (*)

38 Martin Wolf (*)

39 EO Wilson (31)

40 Thomas Friedman (16)

41 Bjørn Lomborg (14)

42 Daniel Dennett (24)

43 Francis Fukuyama (21)

44 Ramachandra Guha (*)

45 Tony Judt (*)

46 Steven Levitt (*)

47 Nouriel Roubini (*)

48 Jeffrey Sachs (27)

49 Wang Hui (*)

50 VS Ramachandran (*)

51 Drew Gilpin Faust (*)

52 Lawrence Lessig (40)

53 JM Coetzee (44)

54 Fernando Savater (*)

55 Wole Soyinka (66)

56 Yan Xuetong (*)

57 Steven Pinker (26)

58 Alma Guillermoprieto (*)

59 Sunita Narain (80)

60 Anies Baswedan (*)

61 Michael Walzer (68)

62 Niall Ferguson (45)

63 George Ayittey (*)

64 Ashis Nandy (*)

65 David Petraeus (*)

66 Olivier Roy (*)

67 Lawrence Summers (60)

68 Martha Nussbaum (53)

69 Robert Kagan (62)

70 James Lovelock (71)

71 J Craig Venter (74)

72 Amos Oz (59)

73 Samantha Power (*)

74 Lee Kuan Yew (*)

75 Hu Shuli (*)

76 Kwame Anthony Appiah (*)

77 Malcolm Gladwell (*)

78 Alexander De Waal (*)

79 Gianni Riotta (*)

80 Daniel Barenboim (*)

81 Thérèse Delpech (*)

82 William Easterly (*)

83 Minxin Pei (*)

84 Richard Posner (32)

85 Ivan Krastev (*)

86 Enrique Krauze (85)

87 Anne Applebaum (*)

88 Rem Koolhaas (51)

89 Jacques Attali (*)

90 Paul Collier (*)

91 Esther Duflo (*)

92 Michael Spence (*)

93 Robert Putnam (77)

94 Harold Varmus (94)

95 Howard Gardner (70)

96 Daniel Kahneman (64)

97 Yegor Gaidar (*)

98 Neil Gershenfeld (87)

99 Alain Finkielkraut (81)

100 Ian Buruma (*)

The only people to have the same placings in both 2005 and 2008 are Samuel Huntington (28th) and Harold Varmus (94th). Excluding new entrie, the g reatest advance between 2005 and 2008 was 53 places, by Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, from 56th to 3rd. The greatest fall was by Richard Posner, by 52 places, from 32nd to 84th. The highest-ranked intellectual from 2005 not to be included in the 2008 poll was Naomi Klein, who made 11th place in 2005.

That's a pretty surprising result for Gulen. It probably does reflect his influence in Turkish Islam. I've been reading some of his books recently and I'm of the opinion that he doesn't seem to have any unusual insights or profound philosophy. His importance seems to arise from his pushing Muslims in a new and interesting direction that shows promise in adapting an ancient religion to a modern world.

__________________
1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

Court cases sharpen Turkey divide
By Roger Hardy,
Middle East analyst, BBC News

Mr Erdogan's AKP stands accused of subverting Turkey's secular system
Two court cases in Turkey are deepening the rift between secularists and a government with Islamist roots. At the heart of the latest political crisis in Turkey is a shadowy ultra-nationalist group called Ergenekon.

It is a name steeped in Turkish mythology.
Ergenekon was a legendary valley in Central Asia that was home to the ancient Turks, until a grey wolf led them out onto the road to eventual nationhood.

One of Turkey's top prosecutors has described the group as a terrorist organisation and indicted 86 alleged members for plotting to overthrow the government. They include two retired four-star generals, a newspaper editor, the leader of a small nationalist party and the head of the chamber of commerce in the capital, Ankara. Hard evidence of the nature of the group and what it was up to is still lacking.

Turkish prosecutor Aykut Cengiz Engin brought charges against 86 suspects
But for months the Turkish media have been full of lurid speculation about a planned campaign of bombings, shootings and mass protests which would have given the military a pretext to seize control.

The Ergenekon case is only one of two extraordinary court dramas heightening tensions between the government and its opponents. Simultaneously, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) stands accused of subverting the country's secular system. The constitutional court is expected to rule in a few weeks' time on whether the party should be shut down and its leaders - including the president and the prime minister - banned from politics for five years.

Technically, there is no connection between the two cases. But in the current highly-charged political atmosphere, many Turks think it is no coincidence the cases are running in tandem. Rather than resolving their differences through the political process, it seems each side has opted to resort to the courts.

The 'deep state'
Given that some of the allegations aired in the media are mind-boggling, it is not easy to know what to believe. But the history of military coups in Turkey - there have been four in as many decades - has left many Turks intrinsically suspicious of what is known as the "deep state".

Turkey charges 86 for 'coup plot'
This is the shadowy alliance of military and civilian nationalists thought to operate independently of the government - and sometimes in outright opposition to it.

Equally, given the rise of political Islam in Turkey over recent decades, many nationalists - by no means confined to the army - are deeply suspicious of the AKP, which they accuse of harbouring a secret Islamist agenda. Turks still revere the memory of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who founded the modern republic in the 1920s and sought to draw the country away from its Ottoman Muslim past towards a secular, European destiny.

Some are ready to go to extreme lengths to preserve Ataturk's legacy. To their chagrin, their efforts to defeat the ruling party at the ballot-box have failed. In last year's elections AK increased its share of the vote to 47%.

But even some of those who dislike the party are alarmed at the implications of the current crisis. They fear it will damage Turkey's international standing and wreck its chances of eventual membership of the European Union.

Foreign Policy interview with Fethullah Gulen:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4408

By the way the Turkish Constitutional Court ruled in favor of the current political party about a week ago. A narrow victory for Turkish democracy.

__________________
1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

Since you are obviously a student of history, and maybe even a teacher, i am sure you are aware of the track record of those who have taken religous extremists at their word. Bani-sadr can take your call and answer any questions you might have - he's got a lot of free time on his hands...in france.