Aegean Disclosure

-----------------------

Swooping down like the dirty Taksim pigeon

My hope would be that when I wake up tomorrow the fucking retarded and honorless Justice Minister Cemil Cicek, who spent much of his energy resisting pressure to remove or modify the 301 law for 'insulting Turkishness', and who called Hrant Dink a traitor and referred to an academic conference on the Armenian Genocide 'a dagger in the back of Turkey' and allowed Hrant Dink and others to be paraded in front of the nation as traitors and become an open target for ultranationalists, to have resigned his pathetic did-I-say-dagger-I-meant-aloe-vera-massage-oil-post with a letter of resignation written in the finest reeking horeshit.

The 17-year-old shooter from Trabzon, who was identified by his father from video footage on TV, has been caught in Samsun on the way to Trabzon from Istanbul and has confessed. His uncle told news agencies that his nephew, "Didn't have enough knowledge of Istanbul to have been able to pull it off himself." The kid who shot a Catholic priest in Trabzon in 2006 was also under 18 years of age. If someone organizes shit like this it always helps when the shooter can be tried as a minor. Trabzon was also the town in which far-leftists putting up posters and dropping pamphlets were almost lynched by an angry nationalist mob. But it is precisely the general failure of the government and the people who avoided showing the required outrage for these events that paved the way for continued travesties. And the misguided mentality that drove them, or rather didn't, was that fear of 'escalating' or 'provoking' the situation to the point where deadly violence would break out between the two sides: "If we defend these people too much, it will only encourage the nationalists more,"-- an understandable fear from a population that has a military coup that was attributed to the gunfights between leftist and fascist militias etched in its memory. Well, Hrant Dink is dead...and everytime I read his chilling last column my blood curls. As one exasperated journalist put it, "We have taken objectivity to absurd lengths. When you witness a struggle between a firetruck and a raging fire, you side with the fire truck." One recalls how government ministers incredulously called Valley of the Wolves: Iraq a great movie that presents the truth as it is while at the same time condemning the prophet cartoons from Denmark and signing some Alliance of Civilizations bullshit. Around the same time, the Catholic priest in Trabzon was shot. As Yalim Eralp, a retired ambassador, in response to Hrant Dink's death put it: "This is a country of peace? Can there be anything more insulting to one's intelligence?"