Unbearable Irony Watch: Ghannouchi at the Erbakan Funeral
Oh, I hardly know where to start. I mentioned the death of Necmettin Erbakan here on Ricochet the other day. You might want to go back and refresh your memory. Well, the Tunisian Islamist Rached Ghannouchi pitched up for his funeral.
His press conference took place at the Istanbul headquarters of the Humanitarian Relief Foundation, or İHH, a Turkish Islamic charity that led the Gaza-bound aid flotilla raided by Israeli commandos in May, an operation that resulted in the deaths of nine activists.
Of course it did, where else? That's International Moderation Central, after all.
Ghannouchi says he's been inspired by Turkey:
Asked whether he and his party were receiving any support from Turkey and the Turkish government, Ghannouchi said only that Turkey’s example is in itself a form of support. ....
In his remarks, Ghannouchi also touched on the freedom of the press, mentioning at least once that Turkey’s free press is an inspiration to the Arab world. “Freedom of the press is something we should nurture; protection of the news is a sort of liberation,” he said.
And that, my Ricochet friends, is where normal instruments of irony measurement collapse. Because you know what else happened here last week besides the death of Erbakan? Why, the arrest of ten more journalists. Yes indeed. So headlines about Ghannouchi's comments are literally juxtaposed here against headlines like these: International press organizations slam raid against Turkish journalists:
International press organizations reacted harshly Thursday against a new wave of police raid on the homes of several people, including journalists, as part of the ongoing Ergenekon case.
“We are very concerned about the recent developments concerning journalists in Turkey. Fifty-one journalists are already in prison and it seems the number is likely to increase,” Renate Schroeder, European director of the International Federation of Journalists and the European Federation of Journalists, told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review.
The raids came two weeks after a court jailed three journalists from the dissident website Oda TV as part of a crackdown on the alleged Ergenekon gang, which is accused of conspiring to topple the government.
Police searched the homes of renowned hard-line secularist and leftist writer Yalçın Küçük and Nedim Şener, an investigative reporter for daily Milliyet and author who received the International Press Institute, or IPI’s, “World Press Freedom Hero” award last year for a book that blamed security forces in the 2007 murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink.
Turkish police crack down on journalists:
Turkish police Thursday targeted more journalists as part of a controversial probe into alleged coup plots, among them a prominent award-winning reporter, Anatolia news agency reported.
Police were searching the homes of 11 people in Istanbul and Ankara, following a similar raid targeting the media last month that sparked an outcry over press freedom in EU-hopeful Turkey and drew a U.S. rebuke, Agence France-Presse reported.
Ghannouchi's call to protect and nurture the press has, at least, been taken deeply to heart here. The government responded by opening new prison cells to make all the journalists more comfortable.
Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin said Wednesday the accommodation capacities of the prison in Silivri had previously been insufficient, and that now new blocks and prison units had been opened and made available to accommodate prisoners and those under arrest more comfortably.
Modern science is, alas, incapable of measuring irony on this scale, because as far as I know, even the most sophisticated International Irony Measurement Device only goes to eleven.
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Oct '10
Re: Unbearable Irony Watch: Ghannouchi at the Erbakan Funeral
Muslim Moderate Watch from the mainstream media.