peace train....I do not really wish to burden anyone here with my own prejudices. Instead, I will copy here an article from ZAMAN, exactly as posted by one of the other members, in another thread.

It is full of historical blunders and deliberate lies, in very good English and obviously has a purpose.

You tell me whose interests this article serves...Turks, Kurds, PKK, somebody else ? Also tell me one other nationalistic facist country where surpressed newspapers of the national press would be allowed to print this sort of an article.
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The roots of Turkey’s identity problem

by Omer Taspinar

It is hard to avoid the impression that every issue in Turkish politics somehow relates to the country’s complex identity problems. From the Kurdish question to whether the president’s wife can wear a headscarf, we are always debating identity issues.
Yet we are often unable to address the root causes of the problem. A major part of the problem has to do with the peculiarity of Turkey’s “civilizational” dilemmas with “Westernization.” Having a complex civilizational identity, or being a “torn country” to use Samuel Huntington’s terminology, is part of Turkish history. Indeed, the difficulty with assigning Turkey to a specific geography or civilization derives from the fact that it had always been a border country. A glance at the map shows why Turkey does not fit into any of the clear-cut geographical categories formulated by Western scholars. The country straddles the geographical and cultural borders between Europe and Asia, without really belonging to either. Such an “in-between” Turkish identity is made all the more complicated by a number of historical factors.
Perhaps most important is the fact that the Ottoman Empire was historically the intimate enemy of Europe. In religious and military terms, the Turk represented “the other” who played a crucial role in consolidating Europe’s own Christian identity. However, as centuries of Ottoman imperial splendor came to an end and territorial regression began, the Ottoman ruling elite sought salvation in one of the earliest projects of modernization. Since modernization was pragmatically identified with Christian Western Europe, the Ottomans faced major difficulties in adapting to the new paradigm without surrendering their Islamic pride. Throughout the 19th century, the result has often been a chaotic coexistence of traditional Islamic and modernized institutions. This situation did not change until the radicalization of the Westernization project, first under the Young Turks and later under their Kemalist successors.

The Kemalist revolution was by far the most radical attempt at cultural transformation in the Islamic world. Yet, it achieved a rather limited penetration of Turkish society at large. Especially the rural parts of Anatolia remained largely unaffected by the social engineering taking place in Ankara during the single party rule. In that sense, the Kemalism was too state-centered and elitist to be fully absorbed by Anatolian society. As in Ottoman times, it was essentially the governing elite and the urban bourgeoisie that supported Westernization and easily adapted to its norms. In the meantime, the gap between the state and rural periphery widened even further.

The Kemalist mission, aiming to create a centralized, secular and homogenous “Turkish” nation-state, met the active opposition of religious conservatives and ethnic Kurds. Not surprisingly, resistance to centralization and nation-building was strongest in historically semi-autonomous Kurdish provinces, which had little exposure to central taxation during Ottoman times. Between 1923 and 1938, it took the military suppression of a long series of Kurdish and Islamist rebellions for a sense of Kemalist stability to emerge. Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, one can argue that behind the facade of a successful nationalist-secularist revolution, the repression of Kurdish and Islamic identities remained the Achilles’ heel of the Kemalist project.

With the Cold War, international dynamics gained precedence over Turkey’s domestic problems. A new era started in republican history in 1946, when the Soviet territorial threat and the willingness to be part of the “Free World” forced the Kemalist regime to hold multiparty elections. During the next three decades, from 1950 to 1980, ideological politics superficially trumped identity problems. Kurdish and Islamic dissent were no longer high on the political agenda, since they soon came to be absorbed by the new political divisions in Turkey. Kurdish discontent found its place within radical leftwing politics, while Islam became part of the anti-communist struggle.

When left-wing and rightwing politics lost their relevance with the end of the Cold War, Kurdish and Islamic dissent quickly re-emerged. This Kurdish and Islamic revival during the 1990s once again triggered a strong Kemalist reaction. After the long Cold War interlude, it was as if Turkey was back in the 1930s. The military had to take the initiative against Kurdish-Islamic forces by forcefully reasserting Turkish nationalism and secularism. The result was the “lost decade” of the 1990s. If we want to avoid another lost decade, now that similar dynamics are once again at play, we need to find liberal solutions to our identity problems.

23.04.2007
Today's Zaman

is he a liar? ok lets look at who Omer Taspinar is:

http://www.sais-jhu.edu/programs/europe/taspinar.html

Omer Taspinar
Ph.D. Professorial Lecturer, Fellow at the Brookings Institution

Dr. Omer Taspinar is the Co-Director of the US-Turkey project at the Brookings Institution and an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He completed his doctorate studies on Political Islam and Kurdish nationalism in Turkey at the European Studies Department of SAIS, Johns Hopkins University in 2001.

The courses he has been teaching at SAIS include: “Islam and Europe”; Turkish Domestic and Foreign Policy”; “Western European Political Economy”; “French Domestic and Foreign Policy” and “International Political Economy”. Prior to his teaching and research career, he worked as a consultant, at the Strategic Planning Unit of TOFAS- FIAT during 1996-1997 (Istanbul).

His recent publications include: “Europe’s Muslim Street” Foreign Policy (March-April 2003); “An Uneven Fit: The Turkish Model and the Arab World” (Brookings Analysis Paper, August 2003); “Fighting Radicalism with Human Development” (Brookings Press, forthcoming 2004),: “Political Islam and Kurdish Nationalism in Turkey,” (Routledge, forthcoming 2004).

Dr. Taspinar speaks Turkish (native), French, English, and Italian.

He lives in America and is probably an American citizen, on a plush salary.

Guess whose interests he is serving !

I think he is selling you and his own academic dignity out.

I thought his thoughts in the article were common opinion

Omer Taspinar is a singer of many songs, mostly American Pop...His other articles, on a variety of different tunes, are also available on the net...Read before you start to talk.

I do not think his loyalty is with Kurds, if that is why you symphatize with him. His recent articles are advising US withdrawal from Iraq. The day US withdraws from Iraq, all Arabs will remember how Kurds in North Iraq sold Arabs to Americans. There will be a day of reckoning and a bill to pay.

If this happens, where do you think the the Kurds will run to, for safety? Where did they find food, shelter and protection last time Saddam attacked them?

Anyone who is trying to flare animosity between Turks and Kurds should be viewed with extreme caution by both parties.


PS: Lucky, if anyone gets a chance to read this post before our mysterious Village Eraser catches up with it ))))))))

"To this day, Brookings is commonly, and inaccurately, dubbed "liberal" (e.g., Baltimore Sun, 8/9/98; Cincinnati Enquirer, 7/30/98; Dallas Morning News, 7/1/98; AP,
5/29/98). CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg even publicly chastised one of his colleagues for not tagging Brookings as "liberal" in his reporting (Wall Street Journal op-ed, 2/13/96). It's called "centrist" almost as often, but never "conservative," though that label would be more accurate than "liberal."

In fact, much of Brookings' top brass has come from Republican administrations. Its current president, Michael Armacost, was an undersecretary of state for the Reagan administration and ambassador to Japan under Bush. Brookings' president from 1977 to 1995, Bruce MacLaury, spent most of his career in the Federal Reserve, with a stint in the Nixon Treasury Department."

Brookings

I find it interesting to learn more about just who are behind the influence making organizations. Here's more:

Brookings Institution

Those are the author's thoughts that had been told under freedom of expression concept. But i would like to ask if being Kurdish is an identity so what the heck is islamic identity ?