THE virtual control he already has of a majority ofTurkey’s newspapers and TV stations apparently isn’t enough for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. On Friday, with the zeal of its despotic leader, his government seized my paper, Today’s Zaman, and its parent, the Turkish-language Zaman, which is the highest-circulating daily in the country. Together, these titles were two of the few remaining independent voices inside Turkey — and Today’s Zaman, in particular, was a reliable English-language news source for diplomats, academics and expatriates.
On Friday, a government-controlled court appointed trustees to take over the newspapers in what amounts to a politically motivated assault. At midnight, protesters faced tear gas and water cannons as riot police stormed our Istanbul headquarters.
The authorities used power tools to force open the iron gate to the building. The following day, our Internet connection was cut off to stop staff members from working on a special edition about the takeover. Since then, the authorities have been unplugging the newspapers’ servers, destroying our digital archive.
Twitter Steps Up Efforts to Thwart Terrorists’ Tweets
Twitter on Friday made clear that it was stepping up its fight to stem that tide. The social media company said it had suspended 125,000 Twitter accounts associated with extremism since the middle of 2015, the first time it has publicized the number of accounts it has suspended. Twitter also said it had expanded the teams that review reports of accounts connected to extremism, to remove the accounts more quickly.
.. The disclosure follows intensifying pressure on Twitter and other technology companies from the White House, presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton and government agencies to take more action to combat the digital practices of terrorist groups. The scrutiny has grown after mass shootings in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., last year, because of concerns that radicalizations can be accelerated by extremist postings on the web and social media.
News Desk NEWS DESK JANUARY 4, 2016 Iran and Saudi Arabia: The Showdown Between Islam’s Rival Powers
For decades, there were sporadic protests among Shiites in the eastern provinces, over economic and political grievances. Nimr was arrested in 2012, after a round of protests spawned by the Arab Spring. He was beheaded on Saturday for “breaking allegiance with the ruler,” instigating unrest, and “undermining the kingdom’s security.”
.. In an unusually candid statement on Saturday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that he was “deeply dismayed” by Nimr’s execution, and questioned “trials that raised serious concerns over the nature of the charges and the fairness of the process.” The European Union called into question “freedom of expression and the respect of basic civil and political rights” in Saudi Arabia. Jubeir rebuffed criticism of the executions. “We should be applauded for this, not criticized,” he said Monday, in an interview with Reuters.
Race and the Free-Speech Diversion
The fault line here is between those who find intolerance objectionable and those who oppose intolerance of the intolerant.
.. Six weeks ago, I participated in a forum at Yale on the massacre in Charleston. When the historian Edward Ball pointed out that the shootings had occurred on Calhoun Street, named for the intellectual godfather of the Confederacy, students immediately pointed out that Calhoun was an alumnus and that a college is still named for him. One member of the audience asked Jonathan Holloway, a civil-rights historian and the dean of Yale College, who has been at the center of the recent events, if he would remove Calhoun’s name from the college. (Holloway, who previously served as the master of Calhoun College, indicated that he had not yet decided how he would handle the matter.) To understand the real complexities of these students’ situation, free-speech purists would have to grapple with what it means to live in a building named for a man who dedicated himself to the principle of white supremacy and to the ownership of your ancestors.
.. Eight months ago, fraternity members at the University of Oklahoma were filmed singing an ode to lynching.
These are not abstractions. And this is where the arguments about the freedom of speech become most tone deaf. The freedom to offend the powerful is not equivalent to the freedom to bully the relatively disempowered.
.. During the debates over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Senator J. Lister Hill, of Alabama, stood up and declared his opposition to the bill by arguing that the protection of black rights would necessarily infringe upon the rights of whites. This is the left-footed logic of a career Negrophobe