Harry's Place

This is a cross-post from Howie’s Corner
The Turkish public sector trade union representing some 240,000 members has begun a two day strike accusing the Islamist Government of committing “state terror” according to today’s issue of the London Evening Standard. Two people have been killed and more than 1,700 people arrested as protests have spread to [...]

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan is blaming social media for the outbreak of mass protests in Istanbul and other cities– which his government has been violently suppressing.

“There is now a menace which is called Twitter,” Erdogan said. “The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to [...]

The pianist and composer, a vocal opponent of Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan, has been given a suspended 10 month jail term for his ‘blasphemous’ comments on Twitter.
In one message he retweeted a verse from a poem by Omar Khayyám in which the 11th-century Persian poet attacks pious hypocrisy: “You say rivers of wine flow in [...]

That’s what Syrian President Bashar al-Assad alleged in an interview with a pro-Assad Turkish TV station, responding to a question about Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s recent apology to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan:
The same person, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, was prime minister when the Marmara massacre took place three years ago. He is still prime [...]

I posted last year about the prosecution of pianist Fazil Say for ‘insulting Islam’.  Now English PEN reports that six members of the PEN Turkey board have been summoned for questioning by the Istanbul Public Prosecutor’s Office in connection with their support for Say.
In June 2012, PEN Turkey’s website carried a statement condemning the prosecution of the [...]

Fazil Say, a leading Turkish pianist, is being charged with insulting ‘religious values’ after apparently making a series of facetious remarks about Islam back in April:
Akyol said Say’s tweets and retweets on social media cannot be considered as public remarks because only people who follow him can see them. In one tweet cited in the [...]

The Associated Press reports:
In Turkey, state television on Thursday broadcast the epic French documentary “Shoah,” about the mass murder of Jews under the German Nazi regime. It was the first time the film has been aired on public television in a predominantly Muslim country.
“It is a historical event,” filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, 87, said in a [...]

This news from Syria seems to mark some sort of turning point for the Assad regime.
Not only did the Arab League vote to suspend Syria for failing to abide by its pledge to end its crackdown on protests, but pro-Assad mobs in Damascus attacked the embassies of several Arab countries as well as the embassy [...]

While Bashar al-Assad was intent on warning Western countries against intervening in Syria– saying it could cause an “earthquake” and “another Afghanistan”– it seems his regime is facing a bigger threat from his once-friendly neighbor Turkey.
The New York Times reports that the Turkish government is “providing shelter to the commander and dozens of members of [...]

Seriously. It really has.
I mention this only because it doesn’t appear to be on the front page of the Guardian, or the BBC, or any other newspaper. So you may well have missed it.
It isn’t a minor border skirmish. It is a major military operation:

A major Turkish military offensive is continuing in northern Iraq, following [...]