Link Banana

World opinion diverges enough to shock Blake Houshnell. While the greatest number of people appear to believe that it was Al Qaeda, Israel and America also won big votes. Israel was most often blamed by Arabs, with Egypt showing 43%, Jordon 31, and Palestine a (mere) 19.

Curiously, Mexicans were the second most likely — at 30% of those polled — to blame the United States. Turkey (36%) was the first, Palestine third at 27, and Germany fourth at 23.

You probably missed it — I nearly did — but Joshua Keating points out that three important things happened yesterday:

Israel and Syria, technically at war since 1967, are holding historic peace talks in Turkey that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert described as a “national obligation.” The Lebanese government negotiated a compromise with Hezbollah, ending 18 months of violence and political deadlock. And Pakistan’s government defied the U.S. by agreeing to withdraw from Taliban-controlled territory in exchange for security guarantees.

They also make the point that this is clear sign of the current irrelevance of the United States to world politics.

In case you hadn’t heard, Turkey’s ruling party is being taken to court in the hopes of making it illegal. This struck me as both odd and blatantly partisan, but Anne Applebaum offers some relatively reasonable explanations for why it may not be.

Fairly or not, in certain Turkish communities, a head covering in fact marks the wearer not just as faithful but as a believer in a particular version of Islam. Fairly or not, the head scarf carries with it, at least in Turkey, partisan connotations, as well as a suggestion of the wearer’s views of women. Political scientist Zeyno Baran pointed out to me that most of the wives of the current Turkish political leadership wear head scarves, that most of them donned the scarves after their marriages, and that most of them never worked or studied again after they wed. You can see why women who want something different might feel threatened.

In fact, the Turkish ban was first instituted in the 1980s precisely to protect these bareheaded women, as well as the secular students who wanted to remain so. For 20 years or so, the ban was relatively successful. After a few initial protests, it was widely accepted—how else can a deeply divided society survive, unless it creates zones of neutrality?—at least until the current government tried to get rid of it again this year.

More details about the situation are offered by The Economist.

Meline Toumani has a very good piece about the historical clash between Turkey and its Kurdish regions in today’s New York Times Magazine. She offers much greater depth than you find most places.

According to Hisyar Ozsoy, a scholar of Kurdish origin at the University of Texas who was as an adviser to Baydemir, Kurdish politics has been moving “from war and struggle to themes of multiculturalism,” and “when you talk to Abdullah Demirbas, you hear him saying that ‘this is just a kind of richness; we are very much innocent here.’ This is not the kind of political actor who was operating effectively in Diyarbakir during the 1990s.” Multiculturalism, according to Ozsoy, also helps Kurds gain legitimacy in the eyes of outsiders, especially Europeans: “There is always this foreign gaze on Kurds. They’re looking at us like” — he mimics a baby voice — “ ‘Oh, these poor guys, they just want to speak in Kurdish and sing songs and dance, and then we can come and enjoy the richness of these cultures.’ ” In democratic societies, such an attitude might properly be criticized as condescending, Ozsoy says, but in the Turkish system, it becomes a critical force in legitimizing ethnic identity.

Turkey’s recent easing of its headscarf ban has raised roughly equal amounts of praise and concern. The Economist asks why the government is lifting it at all.

Some believe they were designed merely to win votes in the local elections due next year. If the AK were serious about bolstering equality between the sexes, “there would be more than one woman in the cabinet,” says one AK-supporting lady. And if letting women cover their heads were a matter of rights, as Mr Erdogan claims, why has the government not scrapped Article 301 of the penal code, which criminalises free speech?

This is good news, even if it’s only happening slowly.

Turkey’s government has taken on the issue of free speech and is expected as early as Friday to announce a weakening of a law against insulting Turkishness, an amendment that is considered a key measure of the democratic maturity of this Muslim country as it tries to gain acceptance to the European Union.

But while that law, called Article 301, is known to many in the West — Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist, was prosecuted under 301 — it is just one of many laws that limit freedom of expression for intellectuals in Turkey. The law under which Mr. Yayla was prosecuted, for example, dates from 1951 and is not even part of the penal code.

While the change in Article 301 is likely to stop the wanton application of that law, the single most common statute used against critics of Turkey’s official line, the government was unable to remove it from the books completely, as liberals here had wanted.

For the new year, the Christian Science Monitor put together a quick-and-dirty run down of some of the world’s most interesting and important trouble spots. The list is neither exhaustive — Zimbabwe, Somalia, Sri Lanka, and (sadly) now Kenya are all worthy candidates, as is the suppressed conflict in Burma — or deep, but for those looking for a reminder of or introduction to international problems, it’s a great place to start. The quick list is: Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Kosovo, Turkey, Colombia, Darfur. (Single-page printer-friendly edition, if that’s your preference.)