New Media

Throw out your first answer, give your head a shake and read this insightful piece in The Propagandist from a refugee from Arab lands:

My thoughts turn to those savage days when my family fled Libya in 1967. We narrowly escaped death at the hands of a bus driver who, instead of taking us to the airport, tried to burn us alive inside the bus.

I am one of nearly one million Jews indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa who were forced to flee their ancestral homes in the last 60 years. I am now the voice of an Arab minority culture that has been ethnically cleansed…

Lately, I’ve been devoting a fair bit of blog space to Turkey’s role in the Middle East, so I’ve been receiving attention from a new class of weirdo.

I get a fair bit of hate mail from people who can barely spell, but this rambling stream of consciousness from muavenet_06@hotmail.com seemed funnier than usual. I especially enjoyed the part about genital herpes.

Jonathan narvey called sucka.someone is using your name to ask questions on yahoo travel Turkey section.

So don’t you get in to those matters again.

On a side note, someone really was impersonating my in the Yahoo! Travel Answers section. They were mis-spelling my name, but their intention was clear, since as far as I know, there are no other Jonathon (or Jonathan) Narvey’s in the universe. So I did report the impersonator.

By the way, muavenet_06@hotmail.com, I hope you noticed that my latest piece on Turkey got picked up by the National Post this morning. Enjoy.

Some interesting comments of late coming from Turkey’s leader, regarding Kurdish terrorist attacks:

“I say here very clearly, they will not win. They will gain nothing. They will melt away in their own darkness … they will drown in their own blood.” (The Guardian)

“Our fight will continue until the terrorist organization has been annihilated.” (BBC News)

Of course, Mr. Erdogan is very careful speaker and his words are not to be taken out of context. There are terrorists and then there are… whatever this Hamas guy is. Definitely not a terrorist, though.

The macho dude above is in Gaza. And you can’t be a terrorist and live in Gaza. Just like it’s impossible for a Muslim nation to commit genocide — which is certainly of great consolation to the victims of Darfur as well as a million or so dead Armenians.

Libby Davies can be seen on YouTube saying she thinks that chanting “long live the intifada” “sounds good” and saying (not once but twice) that Israel has been occupying Palestinian land since 1948, that “it’s the longest occupation in history,” and that it’s time for boycotts and disinvestment. – Bob Rae

People are fired up about this. Here’s video of a protest outside NDP MP Libby Davies’ office in the heart of Vancouver:

A lot closer than most people realized. A new Guardian documentary reveals “a ruling elite so unsettled by the uprising that it had a plane on standby ready to fly the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, to Syria at a moment’s notice.”

What might have been.

H/T to Harry’s Place