Wednesday, February 04, 2009

KURDISH PHONES, "TERRORISM", PROPAGANDA

"The enormous US support for the massive atrocities of the 1990s in this region, which are some of the worst in the world in this period, is based on the role of Turkey within the US system of domination of the region. It’s not out of love of the Turks. It is out of love for the services that Turkey can perform in the region."
~ Noam Chomsky.


The next time you're in Amed (Diyarbakır), check out the Kurdish phones. From Hürriyet (Thanks to Gordon Taylor for the link):


New mobiles phones for the first time featuring Kurdish as a language option have been an instant hit.

[ . . . ]

"We started selling the mobile phones in Diyarbakır today and we were surprised as the Kurdish mobiles have proven very popular." [Employee Uğur] Akar also said that they could apply the Kurdish menu to any type of mobile phone and the D550 and D530 models of TTN Mobile also feature a Turkish menu selection. Akar said the price range for the Kurdish menu mobile phones varied from 210 to 250 Turkish liras. Akar announced the opening of the sale of Kurdish phones on a poster in Kurdish on the door of his store that read:"Mizgin, Mizgin, Mizgin, Çave We Roni Derket Telefona Kurdi," (Good news, good news, good news, Kurdish phones are out).


You know that any phone that's advertisement starts out "Mizgîn, Mizgîn, Mizgîn" has got to be good.

Also stop by Hevallo's place because he's got a post up announcing that Turkey tops the list of human rights abusers, according to the ECHR. According to the report, 57% of the applications to the ECHR were filed against four countries--Turkey, the Russian Federation, Romania, and Ukraine--while applications from 43 other EU countries made up the balance of the total. The ECHR made 257 judgements against Turkey in 2008. Surprise, surprise, surprise! Not.

Gordon Taylor also has a new post at The Pasha and The Gypsy, a re-write of an earlier post about a PKK şehîd named Aynur, "The Mona Lisa of Kurdistan".

Although I have no love for Hezbollah, you should also take a look at something The Saker posted today regarding First Amendment (i.e. free speech, free expression) rights, or the growing lack thereof. I have to concur with much of The Saker's commentary:


Commentary: needless to say, the Justice Department under President Obama could drop the charges, but the sad, and frightening, reality is that it will not. So much for Obama's "yes we can" and promises of change crap. Equally frightening is the silence surrounding this case. With the possible exception of people with severe brain damage, it is plainly clear to anyone that the US list of "terrorist organizations" is purely a political tool to brand some groups and not others, depending on their stance towards the USA and Israel.

[ . . . ]

Phase one: any organization worldwide the US government does not like, it can brand as "terrorist". Phase two: spreading any information about this organization becomes a federal crime. Phase three: Anyone challenging this risks being jailed.


Oh, yeah, change we can believe in!

There was also this today:


The United States accused a Kurdish group operating in the border region between Iraq and Iran of being controlled by terrorists and moved to financially isolate the group.

The Treasury Department leveled the allegation Wednesday against Free Life Party of Kurdistan, or PJAK, saying it is controlled by the terrorist group Kongra-Gel, or KGK, which also goes by the name of Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.

The action means that any bank accounts or other financial assets found in the United States belonging to PJAK must be frozen. Americans also are forbidden from contributing money or doing business with the organization.


Again: Surprise, surprise, surprise!

So I guess that's why these fuckers showed up around here today:


Domain Name treas.gov (U.S. Government)
IP Address 63.167.255.# (Sprint)
ISP Sprint
Location
Continent North America
Country United States (Facts)
Lat/Long 38, -97 (Map)
Language unknown
Operating System Microsoft WinXP
Browser Internet Explorer 6.0
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; GTB5; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)


Internet Explorer?? Losers.

Bianet has a story--and I do mean a story--about Turkish intellectuals who claim that HPG's website has issued "threats" against Turkish sociologist İsmail Beşikçi by "insulting and denigrating" him. How insults or denigration equal "threats" I haven't figured out yet, but a similar campaign was promoted a few years ago with Serok as the target. However, the Bianet story does not provide a link to any article by any HPG writers who've written anything about Beşikçi. My own search of HPG-Online, which is not available in Turkey, revealed nothing about Beşikçi nor anything about Beşikçi by the accused, Adil Kurtay or Kasım Engin.

It's another nice try by the propagandists but as far as I'm concerned, either put up or shut up.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sure, anything containing "Mizgîn" can only be good!

Elîshêr

Anonymous said...

Good post.

I have also read about the claim that the "PKK has threathened Besikci". Thats is a big fat lie. Their "proof" is that two person from PKK has written articles where they think that Besikces stepped out of line. They interpret "stepping outside the line" as a threat to he is life, which is ridicilous. I also read about this in Kurdmedia where Rebwar Fatah has turned his newspaper in to the pile of shit that a funny european blogger throws whatever garbage he wants. I am not against critisicm but I think that those guys should have some kind of editor or someone check that their "reporters" stick to some basic journalistic principles or as close to the facts as possible. That bloggen guy has turned Kurdmedia to some kind of rewrite-site of Zaman and or other Turkish newspapers.

Anonymous said...

can you respond to vladimir's article in KM so that way we can fix the negative lies in the eyes of thousands that read KM?

Mizgîn said...

Kurdish Media has no place for comments. However, you can go to the original blog post:

http://vvanwilgenburg.blogspot.com/2009/02/pkk-threatens-sociologist-ismail.html

and ask if the blogger in question has bothered to find the alleged articles in question.

Ask if he's searched HPG's site at all. If he has not, ask why he simply quotes Bianet without looking for the articles in question.

That's what a journalist, freelance or otherwise, is supposed to do, right, is check this stuff out?

If he hasn't checked it out, ask him why he hasn't.

That blogger should know better because there was a big argument about this on DozaMe way back when the first accusations, the ones against Ocalan, surfaced.

But maybe he doesn't remember that because he's been too busy bashing PKK.

Anonymous said...

Dear Mizgîn I have a few words for you.

The access information you have posted may be originating from a tor server. One can use firefox and have it shown like internet explorer as there are plugins for firefox that do that.You too may want to consider using tor when you visit certain websites.

I left a comment at http://vvanwilgenburg.blogspot.com/2009/02/pkk-threatens-sociologist-ismail.html after I checked google time machine which is a web site caching robot. There was nothing there.
Berfo

Mizgîn said...

Yes, you are correct, Berfo, the info may be originating from a tor server. However, there's no reason for organizations like the US Treasury to use tor when it's just snooping around for PJAK info.

Genelkurmay always shows up here from Ankara, as does AKP headquarters and Turkish foreign ministry. State Department shows up from both DC and Ankara--with correct time differences--and army.mil shows up from all over the place. Readers from Langley, VA show up too, but they're usually not giving up much more information than that. Google.com shows up from Mountain View, CA. Treasury has shown up here before, too, and after what they tried to do to KurdishInfo, I keep an eye on them.

I don't think all these organizations are running tor.

I do, however, run tor when I feel I need to ;)

Thanks for the info on Google time machine and for posting something at the blog in question. I had also checked for the authors' names on Google and if a webpage has been recently pulled, you can still see cached pages through a regular Google search. But there was nothing there from HPG pages.

Again, all these people need to put up or shut up.

Anonymous said...

I am anonymous nr 1.

First of all, I doubt that Kurdmedia has "thousends of readers", maybe in a year or in a month. Secondly, most of them are problably like me, they read news about Kurds from several sources. And when you read from several sources you easily detect that descriptions like "PKK symphatizers attacks Hizbullah in Adana" originates from Turkish news sources. Fine, spread the Turkish version, but why do they do not follow up the news with the disclamation from the organisation that represent the people that are accused of attacking Hizbullah? And why do they claim that PKK has attacked an other Islamist organization earlier, and then linking to a video where the attackers are described as "DTP-symphatizers", and where the narrator are spreading Turkish Islamist propaganda and lies. (It makes me wonder if Rebwar Fatah or any other KM-responsible guy/women even listened or understand what they said in that video).

http://www.kurdmedia.com/article.aspx?id=15430

I would comment on KM if there was any comment-space. The news about TRT 6 and Kurds is typical for this blogger. First he lets his own view to get through by interviewing someone that shares his views, then he lets "other side" to have its say. Except for using someone else as a mouthpiece for you views, this is normal and called to use a "conflict approach" in journalism. But what is unusual is to present the other sides view with one sentence, which he then also mocks by question it with a silly question. (Is it not ironic to not present the view of one side with one sentence and question it?

http://www.kurdmedia.com/article.aspx?id=15398

These are only examples. Kurds are so naive, just because it is a non-Kurd that is writing blog-texts they accept it and use it as news pieces.

Mizgîn said...

Okay, on the article about Turkish Hezbollah . . . First of all, Dogan news is cited but if you click on the Dogan link, it takes you to a Xinhua article that is not attributed to any other news agency. Xinhua is a Chinese news source, so I don't know how that's Dogan.

Secondly, the ANF article does not say that PKK supporters did anything. It doesn't mention PKK supporters at all. It doesn't mention DTP either. It mentions only "Kurdish youth". I guess this means that Wladimir also equates all Kurdish youth with PKK (i.e. "terrorists") just as the Turkish state has always done, right? Kurd = terrorist.

Next, the video . . . the video is posted on Youtube by a Turkish Hezbollah sympathizer, who links his websites. The huseynisevda site lists Huseyin Velioglu as "sehid". The video itself is staged. Compare that video with the videos of Kurdish women being beaten by police thugs last year at Newroz or with the kid who got his arm dislocated by police thugs, again last year at Newroz. In those videos, we did, in fact, have the perps on camera. The Turkish Hezbollah video shows nothing but broken windows, staged rocks, glass, and Efes beer bottles on Kurans. Where are the perps?

We all know that JITEM dressed up like PKK and committed atrocities, so where's the proof that DTP caused the damage staged in the video? The result is the video is bullshit.

In addition, it looks like Turkish Hezbollah is following the state's direction in staging pro-Palestinian rallies. Well, that's nice but I wasn't aware that the Kurdish "question" had been solved yet. Do you think these sons-of-bitches could get around to solving that first?

As they say in the US, "Charity begins at home." Right? By the way, one of the Hezbollah websites shows the rally and the speaker is making a political speech in Kurdish. When's he going to be charged for violating the law?

As for the TRT CEHS article, I'm so relieved to know that TRT CEHS has the support of Gulen's gang AND the military. I can sleep well tonight with that information in mind. After all, the TSK has only had Kurdish interests at heart for the last almost 90 years. We are also told it will help increase Kurdish nationalism. Great! I'm sure as soon as it does, the state will close TRT CEHS for doing that which is against the territorial integrity of the Turkish state.

Then this stupidity:

"One only wonders how one can assimilate an ethnicity, with setting up a TV-station in their own language."

Lots of Americans speak English, does that make them assimilate as Britons? Wladimir obviously speaks a certain amount of English, does that mean he's been assimilated into the British royal family? I speak Spanish, does that mean I've assimilated into Mexican, Spaniard, Puerto Rican, Venezuelan, or Chilean culture? There are JITEM members speak Kurdish, does this mean they have assimilated into Kurdish culture?

Yes the language should be preserved, but language is only one part of culture, not its entirety.

These kinds of arguments are only for simpletons.

Anonymous said...

You're right Mizgin that to suggest that language is the entirety of the Kurdish culture is an argument for a simpleton to make. But, what is Kurdish culture without the Kurdish language?

The language of popular TV shows has a huge role to play in what becomes the dominant language inside the house. Ten years ago my aunt who lived in Batman could only form basic Turkish sentences, now her Turkish is on par with mine. Her older children are bilingual but her younger children speak only Turkish. I was dismayed my aunt spoke Turkish so well since it had a huge influence on her children. I had asked her -- why and how? She said television. Her husband is a fanatic AKP supporter so he wouldn't allow "PKK television" in the house so they watched Turkish TV.

For the Kurds, language is an essential part of our culture. We are not like the Jews who have a common religion to bind us together which allows language to play a secondary role. The Kurds have also not been very good at preserving their cultural traditions (in Turkey) -- although I must admit, that I can probably survive on Govend/Dilan alone as my culture.

While I completely reject the argument that unless you speak Kurdish you shouldn't be considered "really" Kurdish, I also think it is dangerously naive to downplay the role of Kurdish in our national identity any more than it already is.

~nistiman

Anonymous said...

nistiman,

you sound like some of the guys in Turkey who see major steps and amazed by when they see the people started to talk about Kurdish identity, culture or the history. Usually these kind of people above that I described are well and truly being assimilated to Turkish culture and see Kurdish as a backward thing in every way.

As long as you can not register your own new born child as a Kurd or as long as you can not call your land officially Kurdistan then nothing they do or will do should satisfy anybody (at least the Kurds).

Kurdish is our mother language and if these bastards made our language forbidden for such a long time then they should appoligies to us for thousands of times.

You know and I know that every single improvements that so far made by the turkish state is because of the fight that PKK carried on for several years. PKK do not just fight for the language but they generalise their struggle as "FREEDOM" freedom for Kurdish people.

Turks are not that stupid to give you a TV and let you to grow Kurdish nationalism. Use your brain my friend or may be check what Rojin and Nilifer Akbay upto in that TRT Chash channel.

I was in Basque region of Spain last year. Before the Basque region was officially recognised by the spanish government almost every single Basque people were speaking Spanish but now only people who speak Spanish is the old people who fought for the Basque freedom.

Please do not carried away with this language thing. If Turks were not able to destroy the Kurdish language during this 80 years of extremely forced and harshed assimilation process then trust me Kurdish will be here at least another few millenia.

Mizgîn said...

Nistiman, I'm sure TRT CEHS will do an excellent job of preserving Kurdish culture since it is operated by the state that continues its attempts to wipe Kurdish culture off the face of the earth.

And I'm sure that everyone who speaks Kurdish is doing their utmost to preserve the continuity of Kurdish culture, such as the guy on the huseynisevda site (interesting name, don't you think?) who's giving a speech at a Turkish Hezbollah rally in North Kurdistan in Kurdish for the Gaza cause.

I guess it's irrelevant that, for Turkish Hezbollah, the Kurdish cause never existed. The only cause for them is the self-serving, billion-dollar empire of an Islamist charlatan-scholar who has a green card. Of course, the charlatan is in good company. Abdullah Catli was also a green card holder, as is Mehmet Eymur.

Turkish Hezbollah is another example of the state's meddling in Kurdish affairs and ensuring that Kurdish culture is wiped off the face of the earth. After all, the vast majority of Turkish Hezbollah's victims were Kurds.

If there has been any preservation or revival of Kurdish culture, including the language, it's a direct result of armed struggle by the PKK under the leadership of Abdullah Ocalan. I don't think I need to remind you--but others may need the "ugly" reminder--that the armed struggle has also been carried out by ethnic Turks as well and that fact continues to be a reality to this day. Those ethnic Turks, at least the ones I'm acquainted with don't speak Kurdish. I do not forget that they have sacrificed for the struggle for both Kurds and Turks, much more so than most of those who continue to insist--sometimes from their plush little offices in Sweden or from their comfy little dorm rooms in The Netherlands--that assimilation is impossible as long as an enemy regime is preserving your language.

And if anyone really wants to be serious about the language issue, then why is TRT CEHS pushed as the sole savior of Kurdish while the Peace Mothers and DTP efforts for mother language education are ignored by these same so-called concerned preservationists of Kurdish language and, therefore, all of Kurdish culture?

The blogger in question who's pushing this stupidity was given a lesson on the language issue on DozaMe a few years ago, around the same time that he got a lesson on the bullshit about PKK badmouthing Besikci. I was patient that time but my patience has run out.

Anonymous said...

Excelent reply Mizgin,

The funny thing is that the people who support the Turkish state for this Chash Tv thing is the people consider themselves nationalists. I see them like a big cattle of herds or sheeps who would go where ever or who ever's after when they showed a little bit of carrot.

Anonymous said...

I've witnessed a lot of debate on the TRT6 issue. My own family is divided on the matter but, even after careful consideration, I still am not impressed by PKK's reaction which to me demonstrated a lack of maturity.
Any way that I look at it, I can't see TRT6 as "harmful" to the Kurdish cause. I cannot fathom how I or the Kurdish cause will be harmed if I watch Brad Pitt’s movies in Kurdish or listen to Rojin or Nilufer Akbal’s music programs.
No one has said that TRT6 will be the "sole saviour" of the Kurdish culture or language, nor that our embrace of TRT6 precludes our appreciation for ROJ TV, the PKK's struggle, the struggle of the Peace Mothers, Saturday Mothers, or the Kurdish mothers who have actually kept the language alive in their homes...
If we are fighting a civil rights movement, surely we must properly characterize our gains and our losses. The PKK, by entering into partisan bickering, and blaming Kurds who support TRT6 looks disingenuous about its concern for Kurdish rights and seems more concerned that the move has strengthened AKP. You can’t demand reform and then reject them when the Turkish state delivers.
Now, I completely and wholeheartedly agree that no one expects PKK to end the struggle because of this mediocre “step”. However, this is a small gain for the Kurds. It is, in fact, a fruit of the efforts of the PKK. Too bad they missed the opportunity to claim it as such.

~nistiman

Anonymous said...

What?

However, this is a small gain for the Kurds. It is, in fact, a fruit of the efforts of the PKK. Too bad they missed the opportunity to claim it as such.

May be this was because of the contuniued and tiredless effort of the chash Mossad Barzani? If PKK doesn't want to take the credit for this step then why the hell bastard and his family above would not take the credit for it? Perfect opportunity for a man who messed his country badly?

Everytime, I see Chash and Bastard Barzani on TV, I feel sorry for myself and the people with the same ethnicity as I am!

Anonymous said...

thanks for reminding me again, hamo, why I too feel embarrassed by the words and actions of fellow Kurds especially their impressive ability to stretch logic and common sense to its very limits .

~nistiman