by Nicholas Birch | Dec 26, 2016 | Media
Washington — It did not take long after election night for the donations to start pouring in to America’s nonprofit journalism organizations. Almost a month later, the money keeps coming, $10 and $20 and sometimes hundreds of dollars or more from small donors all over...
by Nicholas Birch | Jun 24, 2014 | Majalla Blogs
There have been a lot of positive reactions to the news that Turkey’s secular opposition have joined with nationalists to back a pious former Secretary-General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference as its candidate for the country’s first-ever direct...
by Nicholas Birch | Dec 24, 2013 | Majalla Blogs
The fall from grace of Turkey’s much-fabled foreign policy of “zero problems with neighbors” has been dramatic. Not long ago, the world was praising Prime Minister Erdoğan for expanding links with Arab countries, lifting visa restrictions, and even brokering talks...
by Nicholas Birch | Nov 6, 2013 | Majalla Blogs
There’s a Turkish joke about a man who is taken on a tour of hell. It’s a dark plain filled with huge vats of boiling liquid in which the damned are slowly deep-frying. Devils stand around the vats, and whenever a sinner pokes his head up out of the liquid, they push...
by Nicholas Birch | Sep 6, 2013 | Majalla Blogs
In politics, the pursuit of power always wins out over ideological affinity. That seems to be the moral behind the latest round of tensions between Turkey’s two most powerful Islamic groups—the government itself and the Fethullah Gülen Movement—tensions that...