Training Your Human

Training your human is a thankless task.
“Why bother with it?”, some kittens may ask.
The fate of the world is the issue at hand,
as felines worldwide stake a claim for their land.
Make no bones about it, we cats own the joint.
We spray in the corners to drive home the point.Some say the meek shall inherit the Earth,
But they’ve no fangs or claws, for what that’s worth.
The cat is the ultimate species, you see,
We’re poised to usurp man’s authority.
These silly old humans who cannot play nice!
We cats are peaceful, we hate only mice.Just what does training your human entail?
A host of fun things you must do without fail:
The sofas and rugs need a little makeover.
The La-Z-Boy’s target for kitty takeover.
Then sleep on clean towels placed in the guest bath.
And make their best clothing a target of wrath.Tear down those new drapes with a quick forceful tug.
Then tatter the pile of the new Berber rug.
And when they are sleeping, you block off their nose,
paw at their lower lip, chew on their toes.
Strut on the mantle. If they give any flack,
knock down their trophies and all bric-a-brac.

Shed on mom’s new velvet black evening gown,
as she’s headed out for a night on the town.
If they leave you home all alone for the night,
(Any human doing this can’t be all that bright),
They’re telling you by leaving, it’s perfectly all right,
To totally redecorate ’til dawn’s early light.
Knock over tables and chew up the fern.
Hurry, go faster! Soon, they’ll return…

When they try to punish, you mustn’t show concern.
(All attempts of discipline a pussycat should spurn.)
A snide flick of tail will convey no remorse,
but they will try harder to scold you, of course!
So, hide in the closet until they forget,
and then launch out just like an F-14 jet.

Tear up their ankle, their forearm, their hand,
then when they’ve had all the pain they can stand,
dart from the room while they call 9-1-1,
and celebrate victory: The felines have won!
To humans, however, the battle’s begun,
as they steep in their anger and wish for a gun.

Pathetic and lumbering and clumsy to boot,
My friend, human dominance is really a hoot.
Take charge in your home. It’s destiny, meow.
(The verses above have already told how.)
So sleep for an hour, and then grab some chow,
And then train your human, beginning right now.

Ataturk’s Turkey Overturned

Ataturk’s Turkey Overturned

By HILLEL HALKIN July 24, 2007

Some 12 or 13 years ago, when I was reporting from Israel for the New York weekly, the Forward, I wrote a piece on Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern secular Turkey, that I submitted to the newspaper with some trepidation.

In it, I presented evidence for the likelihood of Ataturk’s having had a Jewish — or more precisely, a Doenmeh — father.

The Doenmeh were a heretical Jewish sect formed, after the conversion to Islam in the 17th century of the Turkish-Jewish messianic pretender Sabbetai Zevi, by those of his followers who continued to believe in him.

Conducting themselves outwardly as Muslims in imitation of him, they lived secretly as Jews and continued to exist as a distinct, if shadowy, group well into the 20th century.

In the many biographies of Ataturk there were three or four different versions of his father’s background, and although none identified him as a Jew, their very multiplicity suggested that he had been covering up his family origins.

This evidence, though limited, was intriguing. Its strongest item was a chapter in a long-forgotten autobiography of the Hebrew journalist, Itamar Ben-Avi, who described in his book a chance meeting on a rainy night in the late winter of 1911 in the bar of a Jerusalem hotel with a young Turkish captain.

Tipsy from too much arak, the captain confided to Ben-Avi that he was Jewish and recited the opening Hebrew words of the Shema Yisra’el or “Hear O Israel” prayer, which almost any Jew or Doenmeh — but no Turkish Muslim — would have known. Ten years later, Ben-Avi wrote, he opened a newspaper, saw a headline about a military coup in Turkey, and in a photograph recognized the leader that the young officer he had met the other night.

At the time, Islamic political opposition to Ataturk-style secularism was gaining strength in Turkey. What would happen, I wondered, when a Jewish newspaper in New York broke the news that the revered founder of modern Turkey was half-Jewish? I pictured riots, statues of Ataturk toppling to the ground, the secular state he had created tottering with them.

I could have spared myself the anxiety. The piece was run in the Forward, there was hardly any reaction to it anywhere, and life in Turkey went on as before. As far as I knew, not a single Turk even read what I wrote. And then, a few months ago, I received an e-mail from someone who had. I won’t mention his name. He lives in a European country, is well-educated, works in the financial industry, is a staunchly secular Kemalist, and was writing to tell me that he had come across my article in the Forward and had decided to do some historical research in regard to it.

One thing he discovered, he wrote, was that Ataturk indeed traveled in the late winter of 1911 to Egypt from Damascus on his way to join the Turkish forces fighting an Italian army in Libya, a route that would have taken him through Jerusalem just when Ben-Avi claimed to have met him there.

Moreover, in 1911 he was indeed a captain, and his fondness of alcohol, which Ben-Avi could not have known about when he wrote his autobiography, is well-documented.

And here’s something else that was turned up by my Turkish e-mail correspondent: Ataturk, who was born and raised in Thessaloniki, a heavily Jewish city in his day that had a large Doenmeh population, attended a grade school, known as the ” Semsi Effendi School,” that was run by a religious leader of the Doenmeh community named Simon Zvi. The email concluded with the sentence: “I now know — know (and I haven’t a shred of doubt) — that Ataturk’s father’s family was indeed of Jewish stock.”

I haven’t a shred of doubt either. I just have, this time, less trepidation, not only because I no longer suffer from delusions of grandeur regarding the possible effects of my columns, but because there’s no need to fear toppling the secular establishment of Kemalist Turkey.

It toppled for good in the Turkish elections two days ago when the Islamic Justice and Development Party was returned to power with so overwhelming a victory over its rivals that it seems safe to say that secular Turkey, at least as Ataturk envisioned it, is a thing of the past.

Actually, Ataturk’s Jewishness, which he systematically sought to conceal, explains a great deal about him, above all, his fierce hostility toward Islam, the religion in which nearly every Turk of his day had been raised, and his iron-willed determination to create a strictly secular Turkish nationalism from which the Islamic component would be banished.

Who but a member of a religious minority would want so badly to eliminate religion from the identity of a Muslim majority that, after the genocide of Turkey’s Christian Armenians in World War I and the expulsion of nearly all of its Christian Greeks in the early 1920s, was 99% of Turkey’s population? The same motivation caused the banner of secular Arab nationalism to be first raised in the Arab world by Christian intellectuals.

Ataturk seems never to have been ashamed of his Jewish background. He hid it because it would have been political suicide not to, and the secular Turkish state that was his legacy hid it too, and with it, his personal diary, which was never published and has for all intents and purposes been kept a state secret all these years. There’s no need to hide it any longer. The Islamic counterrevolution has won the day in Turkey even without its exposure.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun

The new post-election parliament

The new post-election parliament has a unique spectrum of parties. Unlike its monolithic predecessor, diversity has reared it head in the form of two ‘new’ parties. The first is the 38 year old Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). The second is the Democratic Society Party (DTP), which won its seats by fielding its candidates as independents. The former is the party of Turkish nationalists while the latter is the party of Kurdish nationalists. The MHP’s history dates back to what are claimed to be racist and fascist origins that have been put aside by evolution into a more traditional rightist party. The DTP’s history is marked by illegal organizations, third-world dreams of independence, and Stalinist guerilla actions. Today, both of these parties represent the very extremes of the political spectrum.

Both parties survive on the ethnic problem. The DTP represents the radical tendencies of Turkey’s Kurdish population, with most ethnically Kurdish nationalist movements believed linked to the party. The MHP represents the growing stream of Turkish nationalism that has arisen in response to the Kurdish terrorism of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Serious concerns surfaced when the election results were announced and there were claims that the new parliament would descend into destructive disputes between members of the two parties. In fact, the contrary occurred on the opening day the session: the DTP’s leader Ahmet Türk and his colleagues walked towards the MHP seats and respectfully extended their hands to MHP’s leader Devlet Bahçeli. The MHP leader then also extended his hand and both leaders stood there shaking hands. The following day pictures of the two leaders shaking hands were all over the news.

Turkey has a chronic ethnic problem, which is actually the Kurdish problem. This problem is the very reason for the MHP’s and DTP’s existence. We can interpret how this problem will progress by looking at the actions of these two parties: actions like the shocking hand shake. These two parties are now expected to represent tendencies and policies that are vastly different from the stereotypes.

Leftist Kurdish nationalism:

Turkey has a rich ethnic tapestry. The Turkish Republic, the heir to an outstanding empire, hosts many ethnic groups and faiths. Most of the larger ethnic groups are communities that immigrated to Anatolia and they have been open to integration. The Kurds are different, they are indigenous and now comprise between ten and fifteen million of the state’s seventy million population. The Kurds have managed to preserve their language and traditions and it is very natural for different political tendencies to have manifested themselves in the Kurdish population as they have expanded into Iraq, Iran and some parts of Syria. These tendencies have come from all parts of the political spectrum including the pro-independence set which calls for a United Kurdistan, and those who favor a great Turkish-Kurdish federation. Yet others want to fully integrate in Turkish society. The main Kurdish population center is in Turkey’s southeast but, social mobility and internal emigration now means that more than half of the Kurdish population lives outside of that region. The living conditions in this region are difficult at least partially because of the extremely arid climate and the underdeveloped economy. The Kurds are constantly moving to western Anatolia, making it is impossible for them to constitute a geographic entity. In fact the ideal of an “Independent Kurdistan” is a merely fairy tale to most Kurds because the Kurdish population in the west will lose all ties with their homeland in the southeast within two generations.

There are allegations that the DTP is the political arm of the outlawed terror organization, the PKK. But the DTP actually represents the extinction of violent methods and they persistently state that violence is not the solution and that they merely want to defend their rights through the democratic process and therefore support peace and dialogue. The high number of votes that the Justice and Development Party (AK party) attracted in the Kurdish regions decreased the DTP’s representation. The DTP, however, still represents one third of the Kurdish population.

MHP’s priorities:

The MHP exists as a result of the disturbances of the Kurdish problem, and the majority of its supporters perceive the Kurdish problem as a terror problem because of the flow funerals for martyrs that take place in western Anatolia of those lost in the southeast. The fear of separatism invoked by the Kurdish problem has fermented into paranoia for most of them. As for the DTP, this problem is what brought in the vote for the MHP.

The MHP is the traditional party of doctrinaire Turkish nationalism: MHP members were caught in the center of the deep right-left polarization of the 1970s and were arrested and punished after the 1980 coup. The advent of Kurdish separatist terrorism in 1984 accelerated the rise of the MHP, and in 1999 the MHP won its highest percentage of the vote, surprising even the founders of the party. The party, which represents nationalist reaction, lost many votes as a consequence of its part in three-party coalition government between 1999 and 2002. The 2002 elections then saw the MHP fail to pass the electoral threshold. Today, most analysts agree that the MHP made its way back into Parliament because of the Kurdish problem. Nevertheless, the MHP itself clearly believes that it is a party centered on the Kurdish problem as it fails to say much, if anything, about other critical issues.

The MHP leader’s statement following the hand shake hinted at a more constructive and careful approach to resolving this fragile problem in the new session. Unfortunately, there are obstacles before this constructive stance. First off, the “classically nationalist” group has a component that is against “compromise, tolerance and dialogue.” This component contains deposits of Hamas-like rhetoric, which see the world as black and white and appeals to the emotions rather than the mind. Note what Bahceli said during his party’s group meeting, his speech included words such as “seize, blood, blockade, trap, treachery, and destructive and separatist intentions,” we can see that it is hard to conduct politics with such warlike expressions, even though we’ve grown accustomed to such from military memorandums, and that there are serious difficulties in employing dialogue and tolerance in such a political atmosphere.

Secondly, the ideological leaders and principles Bahçeli refers to are open to interpretation and debate. The MHP needs to reevaluate these ideologies and principles and generate new ideas. Bahçeli referred to Oct. 29 1923 when explaining the basic rules of living under the roof of a united Turkish Republic and coexisting in a Turkish national identity. But the date is wrong, most of the sensitive concepts and descriptions we debate today date back to after 1923. Are we going to describe Turkishness according to the more enclosed description in the 1924 Constitution or, the more limiting description in the 1982 Constitution? Also Bahçeli needs to elaborate on what he means by “one state, one nation, one flag, one language,” which he listed as the principles of “national unity and solidarity.” How will we place the Kurds, whom it is believed to come from a different ethnic root, within this “one nation” conception? Again, will MHP be able to practice their “one language” ideal without violating the right to learn in and use your native language for communication?

The weeks following the elections are like a honeymoon. New parties wait for their votes to settle before they enter into polarization. This Parliament has two parties that owe their existence to the Kurdish problem, and so far, the signals from the deputies and parties have been positive. However, there is still a long road ahead of both parties.

Considering the geographic distribution of its vote, the AK Party is the only party that represents Turkey above its ethnic differences. This makes the AK Party’s identity and policies the new focus in the resolution of the Kurdish problem. This involves a three-way interaction, with the DTP’s thesis, the MHP’s anti-thesis, and the AK Party’s synthesis. It seems that the leftist Republican Peoples Party (CHP) will remain outside the action. Removing the problem from a two sided polarization, will increase solution alternatives.

Democratic solutions are gaining weight as violent methods are losing power and all sides are supporting permanent peace and tranquility. Ahmet Türk highlighted that those who voted from them are seeking a solution in Ankara. As long as it poses no threat to the unity of Turkey, the MHP is also mentioning “dialogue, tolerance and compromise.” As for the AK party, it is in power and representing the crushing majority , stability and security.

A new synthesis is being born in the Kurdish and Turkish nationalist relationship.

No need to fear of Gul

Articles & Analysises

This time round, Abdullah Gul will surely become Turkey’s president—to the annoyance of the army and the secular establishment. Economist says there is no need to fear of Gul ‘Presidential troubles, again’ - 17 / 08 / 2007 10:09 There was an ineluctable sense of déjà vu this week when Turkey’s foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, declared his intention to stand for president. When Mr Gul, a former Islamist, was first nominated for the post by the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party in April, a political crisis ensued. The army threatened to intervene because of serious risks to Turkey’s secular republic. Days later, the constitutional court upheld a case brought by Deniz Baykal, leader of the secular Republican People’s Party (CHP), arguing that a first round of parliamentary voting to elect the president was invalid because of the lack of a quorum. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister and AK Party leader, was forced to withdraw Mr Gul’s candidacy and call an early election on July 22nd, ahead of the scheduled date of November 4th.  In the event AK won almost 47% of the vote, a big jump from the 34% that first took it to single-party rule in 2002. This was a crushing defeat for the generals, who refuse to believe Mr Erdogan’s repeated assertions that he and his party no longer mix politics with Islam. Magnanimous in victory, Mr Erdogan was swift to assure Turkey’s shell-shocked secular elite that he was sensitive to their concerns. He even pledged to seek consensus when nominating a new president. Many took this to mean that he would choose an AK man with a tamer Islamist past—and one whose wife, unlike Hayrunnisa Gul, does not wear the Islamic-style headscarf, which is banned in all government buildings and schools. For the army and its backers, the headscarf is an unequivocal symbol of Islamic militancy. To them, a veiled first lady would not only spell the end of Ataturk’s cherished republic but also seal the ascendancy of a new, pious bourgeoisie from Turkey’s Anatolian hinterland. The army also frets that a President Gul might approve several AK laws that were rejected as unconstitutional by the incumbent, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a fiercely secular judge. As commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Mr Gul would also have a big say in military and other appointments. Wary of provoking a fresh confrontation with the generals, Mr Erdogan has tried since the election to douse Mr Gul’s presidential ambitions—but he has failed.  The question, given his unrivalled authority over AK and his big election win, is why. The other question is how the generals, who have dislodged four elected governments since 1960, will react. The answer to the first question is now becoming clearer. As Mr Gul himself keeps pointing out, in handing the AK such a big mandate voters were also endorsing his presidential candidacy.  Indeed, “Gul for president” was a common refrain at election rallies. The AK has a moral obligation to stand by him, the Gul camp insists. Several AK bigwigs, notably a former parliamentary speaker, Bulent Arinc, who supported Mr Gul’s earlier bid, duly did so again. More important, Devlet Bahceli, leader of the far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP), which won 71 seats, said his party would take part in a first round of balloting, giving the AK its prized quorum. With 20 Kurdish nationalist members also pledging to show up, Mr Gul is set to become president, if not in the first or second rounds of balloting, which require a two-thirds majority, then in a third round in late August, when a simple majority will be sufficient. Few doubt that the affable Mr Gul will make a good president. Unlike the reclusive Mr Sezer, Mr Gul is a sophisticated man who speaks fluent English and has lived abroad. As foreign minister, he was the driving force behind the sweeping reforms that prodded European Union leaders into opening membership talks with Turkey in 2005. Even as he has reached out to Turkey’s Arab neighbours and to Iran, Mr Gul has worked hard to restore a friendship with America that was bruised by the Iraq war. “Condi [Rice] likes him and trusts him,” says a senior American official.  Mr Gul also promises that defending secularism will be one of his “basic principles”. He has even hinted at a concession: his wife might soon knot the silk scarf that she winds tightly around her head and neck in a hipper style. Atil Kutoglu, a Vienna-based Turkish fashion designer, has been asked to come up with ideas. If Turkey is really going Islamic, Mr Gul’s supporters wonder, why did Saadet, the only overtly Islamist party, scrape a measly 2% of the vote? Nowadays, the Islamic intelligentsia seems less preoccupied with the veil than with whether it is appropriate for pious female Muslims to wear G-string knickers—because, as one luminary has opined, “they keep women in a permanent state of sexual arousal.” None of this is likely to impress the generals, who say their views on the presidency remain unchanged. Yet “short of an outright coup there is little they can do [to stop Gul],” observes Soli Ozel, a political scientist at Istanbul’s Bilgi University.  Mehmet Ali Kislali, one of the rare Turkish journalists with good connections in the general staff, disagrees. “They have other means to make their weight felt,” he has argued in Radikal, a liberal daily. They could boycott presidential functions, as Mr Baykal’s CHP has vowed to do. They could scale down their presence in the presidential palace. More drastically still, they could galvanise the courts into launching a case to close down the AK. Zafer Uskul, a constitutional lawyer (and one of 150 new deputies recruited by Mr Erdogan to replace more militant party members) may have provided them with ammunition.  He has opined that Kemalism (Ataturk’s ideology) needs to be “expunged” from a new constitution being drafted by AK to replace the one produced by the generals after their most recent direct coup in 1980. This provoked uproar, and Mr Uskul swiftly declared that his words had been “misunderstood”. Most commentators concur that, given the scale of AK’s victory, the courts cannot touch it without leaving their own credibility in tatters. For the same reason it is hard to see the army stepping in directly. So a more likely outcome is that the generals will be forced to lick their wounds and take Mr Gul on his merits. His record suggests they have nothing to fear—if, that is, they truly believe in democracy. Economist

Ignore politics at your own peril

One of the occupational hazards of being a professional economist is that our forecasts are sometimes wrong. Real world situations are usually very complex, non-linear and therefore difficult to predict. In order to simplify complicated real world problems, we make assumptions. Obviously, a change in the underlying assumptions can send a whole forecast in an opposite direction. This makes it easy to understand John Maynard Keynes, a great British economist, who is reported to have said “When the facts change, I change my mind.” In early February this year, I presented Merrill Lynch’s 2007 Year Ahead Report to local investors in İstanbul. The presentation, which included an overview of key global economic trends and investments themes, was also focused on Turkey’s political outlook because both presidential and parliamentary elections were scheduled for this year. With the usual caveats about the difficulties of making point forecasts, I painted a reasonably constructive scenario for both the global economy — strong growth and plenty of liquidity — and domestic Turkish politics — plenty of noise, but a benign outcome in both the presidential and parliamentary elections. Noting that the ruling party had a significant majority in the parliament, I argued that presidential elections would be smooth. I’ve also noted that opinion polls were suggesting that the governing Justice and Development Party (AK Party) would most likely win a second term either as a single-party government or be the lead coalition member. Our base case scenario for Turkish politics was implicitly based on a working assumption that Turkey, as an EU accession candidate, had implemented political reforms, enhancing its democracy. Global backdrop has so far remained supportive of emerging markets in general and Turkey in particular. Despite the economic slowdown in the US, global growth is still strong and liquidity is ample. However, I got it wrong on domestic politics. Turkey’s presidential elections were far from being smooth. Why? Well, I simply failed to anticipate the extent of the opposition by Turkey’s secular and military establishment. Despite the compromise, the opposition parties have boycotted the presidential election, and appealed to the Constitutional Court for cancellation of the parliamentary ballot on the grounds that there was no two-third quorum. Only hours after the main opposition Republican People’s Party appealed to the Constitutional Court, the army stepped in with its own statement threatening the government with an intervention. The court ruled in favor of the opposition last week, effectively preventing the ruling AK Party from choosing Mr. Gül as the president. This was a highly controversial ruling because the Turkish constitution doesn’t have an explicit provision for a two-third quorum. In addition, such a quorum was not sought in the previous presidential elections. The latest news is that Gül has withdrawn his candidacy. While the political turmoil has unsettled investors, the market reaction has been relatively modest. Turkish equities fell 7.3 percent in dollar terms, YTL weakened 1.1 percent, while the sovereign debt spreads widened by 10 base points. Despite last week’s losses, Turkey is one of the best performing emerging markets year-to-date. The stock market is up 20.4 percent, YTL is nearly 5 percent stronger against the dollar, and the Turkish external debt has generated year-to-date total return of 3.4 percent, slightly outperforming ML IGOV index. The market’s unemotional response to political crisis doesn’t seem to be unique to Turkey. Other emerging markets such as Israel, Ukraine, and Thailand have recently weathered political turmoil reasonably well. Have investors become complacent about political risk in Turkey and around the world or are they simply demanding less compensation for holding risky assets because of improvements in the underlying macroeconomic fundamentals? We think it is a bit of both. Yes, there have been significant improvements in emerging markets macro fundamentals, making them more resilient to both internal and external shocks. For example, EM foreign currency reserves now amount to more than 70 percent of their external debt. More importantly, the global backdrop remains supportive of risk taking. The pace of global growth remains strong and inflationary pressures appear moderate. World economic growth in 2007 is expected to be around 5 percent for the third year in a row, making it the best growth cycle in three decades. Similarly, there is still ample liquidity. The year-on-year growth in the global dollar liquidity remains above 10 percent. However, past experience shows that sustained financial market upswings can also make investors complacent. Even though there have been significant interruptions in the current global bull market, the market corrections since October 2002 have been short-lived. Investors, who tend to have short memories, seem to be treating every market correction as a buying opportunity. Looking at Turkey specific factors, investors seem to think that the constitutional court decision, which paves the way for elections, will help defuse political tensions between the government and the establishment. Markets also seem to think that the ruling AK Party will do well in early elections. In short, the court ruling is a significant development. Early parliamentary elections, scheduled for July 22nd, should provide some clarity on politics. With the governing AK Party pushing for the president to be elected directly by the Turkish people, despite the wishes of the establishment, there appears to be more questions than answers about presidential elections. It is also worth noting that sometimes political shocks take time to work their way through the system. Investors should ask themselves, ‘Do these events fundamentally change the economic landscape?’ In other words, will the parliamentary elections generate a strong, stable and reformist government? * Chief Emerging EMEA Economist & Strategist, Merrill Lynch

09.05.2007