With Friends Like These Turk(ey)s...

...who needs enemies? From MEMRI comes this Special Dispatch which inaugurates their Turkish Media Project. And what an item this is.

The linked column appears in a Turkish daily whose owner has become related to the prime minister of Turkey through the marriage of their children. Let's see--we have a Turk of Syrian origins saying that Americans routinely commit murder, that it is in our genes, and that we routinely lie. He also employs a play on words that only one who knows Turkish would understand: the initials of our country, USA in English, are ABD in Turkish. Trouble is, ABD stands for "Allah-damned country" in Turkish.

This so-called columnist also descends to cheap sensationalism, employing the most lurid images he can conjure up to inflame people's sensibilities. Trouble is, nothing that he says is true. It's either an outright fabrication or a distortion.

Ah, well. We get this kind of distortion in our own country's media. The Killian Memoranda Affair wasn't much better than this.