No, I don´t excuse you. The problem is you have no problem excusing yourself even after blatantly insulting people. Don´t despair though, mods seem to excuse you too, on everyone´s behalf.

Aren´t you the same girl who kept calling everyone a liar? You know exactly what I wrote and what I actually meant without ever reading my post. Be truthful to yourself first.

This is a debate between believers not thinkers. On one side, there are those who assume millions of Armenians were butchered overnight and on the other there are those who believe hundreds of Turks and Azeris were slaughtered by Armenians. I don´t trust or believe either thesis. I just know some lives were lost and I am willing to express my sorrow for each and every innocent victim regardless what ethnicity they were. Those biased, colored thinker-believers will keep talking about things which they perceive as iron-clad truth about a period which is highly speculative.

In my opinion, when one million or so people are murdered like that this will certainly have consequences other than mere word of the mouth, tales and stories. Unless some one comes up with the hard proof of exactly who did what to whom, I tend believe what we are presented with is nothing more than a highly exegerated account of a possibly very sad chapter of our common history with the Armenians.

I don´t like policies centering around hatred. I wish the prejudices to be forgotten a new page to be opened between new generations of both countries and peoples.

We surely can´t know exactly what happened on such a big boat like the Titanic. Thousands of people were involved and the size of the vessel that went through the tragedy was not smaller than a village  with so many floors, rooms, aisles, decks forming a labyrinth of steel structure.

Of course, I based my observation on the recent movie on the incident. Admittedly, it cannot be a true representation of what happened in 1915. I would also expect witnesses to be concerned with what was happening to them rather than others when the ship was sinking.

Keeping in mind that the Titanic was a metaphor rather than the subject itself, I can provide two supportive arguments one from the story of a famous Turkish wrestler Koca Yusuf (The Terrible Turk) an interesting story about an unbelievably huge and strong Turkish wrestler who got killed in a ship disaster in the middle of the Atlantic on his way back home. He was said to be wearing a belt filled with gold he had won in the US. He tries to climb to a life boat but other passengers fear that such a huge man would capsize the boat and they begin hitting on his hands with a hammer one of them happened to have. This is the story left in my mind you can browse the net for the details.

There are also paragraphs in some psychology books that describes the behaviour of the passengers on a boat or a plane. Although passengers seem to be happy when everything is normal, they are actually very alert about a possible danger. Once something goes wrong and a life threatening danger is expected they begin to lose control. They have heart attacks, nervous break downs but until that moment they usually do even the most unacceptable things just to save their lives...

In my version of Turkish which is standard Istanbul Turkish, "ð" is a consonant (in my opinion a semiwovel) which is difficult to notice as it is merely an instantaneous and barely noticable narrowing of the glottal opening. For all practical purposes, you could prolong the preceding wovel to get a similar effect.

Wikipedia says in Azerbeijani, Crimean and Tartarian Turkish it can be used at the beginning of a word. In Turkey´s Turkish it is never used like that.

This is an age long conflict. Naturally, it stems from the very fact that the world is roughly divided into four zones which are North, South, East and West. Political and Economic differences between the North and the South are significant only locally. In other words, we can only talk about say North and South Europe or America etc.

Meanwhile, there is a more pronounced contrast between the Eastern and Western parts of our globe. The seeds of the East/West rivalry were sown by the likes of Marco Polo who began describing each and every different object, manner, trait or whatsoever specific to the East. We also know that Arabic and Chinese voyagers travelled to Europe with some of them even reaching the Britain. The stories based on the reports of those persons lived for thousands of years turning into legends and became a part of their folklore.

Then came the crusades, trade lines, great conquests and big wars. On one side, there were the Turks advancing into the heart of Europe up to Vienna and controlling entire trade lines  and all the maritime traffic in the Meditterranean which meant an abrubt discontinuation of the trade with the East. The Turkish involvement brought the borders of the East much nearer and eventually to the point of interpolation. On the other hand, there were holy grail hunters who were mesmerized by the stories of a wealthy East.

These were two distinctively different worlds initially. As a matter of fact, the culture of the East is much older and profound compared to that of Europe. Notwithstanding with its past glory, the advancement of the East is reined by the strong obsessions of its people with God, destiny, fate and metaphysics. The West on the other hand has been able to both describe man´s role in the universe in a much more pragmatic and materialistic way and organize social life in a highly competitive and success oriented manner. While poverty and misery are endured more easily because of the fatalistic point of view common to Eastern societies, in the West, deprivation is usually regarded as a calamity which needs to be sorted out sooner than later.

Furthermore in the West, every step needs to be defined and planned beforehand. Nothing is left to chance. The Eastern culture is much more tolerant to lack of success and through greater solidarity among people they tend to ease individual hardships, calamities and mishap of all sorts by collectively embracing it in families and communities.

In the end, there are people on both ends. People can adapt themselves to changing circumstances. It is not guaranteed to be happy by choosing the seemingly more preferable side. Reports point out to greater crime rates and suicidal tendencies in the Western part of the globe. Meanwhile, in some poorer quarters of the Eastern world, people live deprived lives but they can still come up with a few shakras or charms to divert the materialistic indulgence of Western people to the teachings of their own prophets who could inspire almost a whole Western generation happiness and solidarity.

Ataturk was a great man. He is someone whom we can always refer to. There is no denying that his life sets an example to anyone regardless of their whereabout and it has so far been this way.

Nevertheless, anyone claiming that he understands Ataturk must also know how this person brought himself to the point of excellence from military and statesmanship points of view. Isn´t it through his desire to be at the forefront of his time? What books did he have in his library? Where did he have all that knowledge so as to predict there would soon be another war (WWII) suggesting Turkey not to get involved in it. How could he foresee that there would be a need for an international organization (the UN) to prevent further wars.

Do you mean those Kurds opportunistically sided up with the invading US troops, provided them with logistics, pillaging the Arab and Turkmen villages and towns, stealing ownership documents from registry offices and claiming the ownership of the entire Northern Iraq and further claim they are entitled to establishing a government there.

I suggest studying this link carefully to learn about the true dimensions of a plot designed to trust the whole nation of Iraq to the hands of the Kurdish minority which would act as a watchdog:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_Iraq_from_2006

Folks, stop cursing one another.

"Nato mermer nato" kafa as it is used in Turkish means you are thick as a brick...

You mustn´t call each other like that. I devote a full page just to imply that.

In my opinion most people are cureless idiots. These are usually harmless people.

The problem begins when an idiot thinks he has an IQ exceeding those of others combined.

That is the extent which we can go when describing a father like him : "I find this man to be a very selfish person.."  With all due respect, many of us still think that we live in an ideal world full of decent people. In fact, it is far from being like that. Like the heroes and heroins of both fiction and history there are egoist, sadist, misagonist, misanthropic and mazochistic people in addition to perverts, criminals, murderers, baby rapists (source recent news) and you name it.

In other words, people may surprize you anytime, anywhere. You´d better be prepared.

Now anyone of you wishing to drink a bottle of wine with me in the middle of the night?

Thehandsom, I don´t have access to statistics of the past but I know that today there are marriages between Armenians and Turks. For example, the one I attended a while ago was between an Armenian man and a Turkish woman. Although both families had considerable difficulty accepting that marriage, they could sort out their differences in the end.

Interracial or intercultural marriages are still a problem today regardless of where we are talking.

As for President Gul´s ethnic roots, I wouldn´t care less. What I care about is his performance as a president which is awful to say the least.