Blogger.com Banned In Turkey

petermp writes "A Turkish court has blocked access to the popular blog hosting service Blogger (Blogger.com and Blogspot.com, owned by Google), since Friday, October 24th, 2008. According to BasBasBas.com, a Dutch blogger based in Istanbul, who alerted readers about the issue: 'It is suspected that the reason for this has something to do with Adnan Oktar, by some considered the leading Muslim advocate for creationism, who has in the past managed to get Wordpress, Google Groups, as well as Richard Dawkins' website [banned].'"

1 simple PGP script...

Can we expect to see thousands of people download a PHP blog script and host their own?

You can block Blogger, but in its place will grow thousands of pages, you cannot stop them all! (but you can easily identify the creators I suppose).

This seems like a very irrational decision, surely this will be appealed.

Re:1 simple PGP script...

Wow. That was almost completely unintelligible, and I can't even exactly figure out who you were trying to offend. But props on at least getting across the point that you were trying to offend someone - that's a good first step!

Re:1 simple PGP script...

All religions are dogmatic , and extremly dangerous if they becomes to powerfull.

And it's everyone's right , or even duty , to guard against that. Period.

Turkey?

I have to say, I'm really surprised this is happening in Turkey. Turkey is actually a fairly westernized country, and while it is predominantly Islamic, it is quite progressive on religious issues. Its constitution even guarantees freedom of religion (and Turkey has no official state religion), and since 1924 has maintained a secular government. I was led to understand that there is strong opposition in Turkey to the government interfering in matters of religion, but perhaps that is no longer the case for whatever reason...

Re:Turkey?

Its constitution even guarantees freedom of religion...

Regrettably, this was never implemented well in practice, as both the Islamists and the secularists are suspicious of outside religious traditions, whether because they are not Muslim or because they are not "Turkish". Case in point, the attempts to wipe out Eastern Orthodox Christianity in Turkey. The law states that the Ecumenical Patriarch must be a Turkish citizen, and not brought from e.g. Greece or another Orthodox country, but the authorities have tried to shut down all Orthodox seminaries in Turkey so that it's increasingly difficult to raise up a successor.

Re:Turkey?

What ignorance. What about Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia? They're all peaceful*, large Muslim nations. Indonesia has more Muslims than any other nation.

Besides, intolerance, genocide and xenophobia are a key part of any religious book. It might as well be in the job description. The problem is when people actually listen to the book, and that normally rises out of external issues (e.g. crippling poverty and corruption).

*Granted Indonesia and Malaysia fight a bit, but that's not religiously motivated.

Re:Turkey?

An then there is history

"Turkey is the one Muslim country that does not directly attacks anyone with another religion, and commits genocide upon them."

Pretty much wiped out the Armenians in an inconvenient genocide. The Greeks are gone in repeated pogroms. Any equality was pretty much expressed in the form that everybody got genocided pretty much evenly.

They are now working on the Kurds. A decade ago it was illegal to speak Kurdish, name your child with a Kurdish name, broadcast in Kurdish, used Kurdish colors. This has been relaxed because Turkey wants in on international institutions.

I guess "equality" is a work in progress in Turkey with it trying it equalize everybody into being a particular Turk, God forbid if you are not.

You'd be insulting Turkishness (A criminal offense by the way)

G

Re:Turkey?

Yes, Turkey has done some bad stuff and killed quite a lot of people, but never in the name of religion. Turkey is almost aggressively secular. The military is known to step in and take control whenever any religion gets to much power. There is at the moment 86 people in a single trial for treason because the tried to perform a coup against the government, which is run by an openly Islamic party (elected in a free and open election). But then the grandparent is also wrong in calling Turkey a Muslim country, the currently ruling party still tries to keep Turkey a secular country.

Re:Turkey?

To be honest, I think that aggressive nationalism practiced by Turkey is needed for them to retain their secular state. Ataturk took their religion and traditions away from them, but gave them the idea of unity on the basis of strong, even aggressive civil (non-ethnic) nationalism instead. It is obvious that neither is desireable, but given the choice, I'd very much rather have a nationalist Turkey than an theocratic Islamic one...

Re:Turkey?

Thank you now with this post, /. can be banned as well, and even *without needing court approval*. Since you were offensive to Kemal Ataturk.

Re:Turkey?

I think you're mistaken, the Armenian genocides are a figment of your imagination, silly.

Turkey is a military dictatorship.

The modern western turkey was founded by Ataturk and is currently enforced by the military. The democracy part of Turkey ONLY exists as long as it does what the military wants and in the past the military HAS intefened several times when the elected leaders did NOT do what it wants.

The sad and confusing thing is that from a WESTERN point of view it is the MILITARY that is right and the public/voter/elected leaders who are wrong. It is the MILITARY that wants a STRICT seperation of church and state, even going so far that Turkey is NOT an islamic nation. It has NO STATE RELIGION. There is equality, press freedom etc etc. Because the military says so.

The voter however in recent years has been increasingly voting for religious parties. The reasons for this are complex. Part of the problem is that the current system works to well. In those cases people tend to forget what brings them their current prosperity. Turkey is doing amazingly well but it is a bit like the US where places like New York and LA are being outvoted by the people from the bible belt. So, right now the country is being torn. If the voter is allowed to elect religious leaders then that is the democracy that the EU wants in its members BUT it would also mean Turkey slides into an islamic nation the EU does NOT want on its borders. Allow the military to keep the current system and Turkey is dictatorship in all but name, something the EU could never allow a member to be.

As for the individual Turk, well, there is of course no such thing. You might as well label all US slashdotters along with that comment in Oprah story yesterday where she was considered new age because she said there might be more then one way to heaven then through jesus. The religious right is on the rise. Turkey is struggling with its desire to be a democracy and the risk this would cause it to slide into a islamic dictatorship.

It does raise the intresting question, if people elected their dictators, is it still a dictatorship? Make no mistake, the people who protest this bloggers ban are NOT intrested in democracy. They want to turn Turkey into an Islamic state where the islamic law rules. They just know that their best bet to get this is through the voting booth because any violent means to do this would be opposed harshly by the military.

Westerners find this hard to understand. We are used to thinking of the military as the opressors. Not the guardians of freedom.

a mistake you have there

military has never been dictatorial in turkey. in ALL the coups that have taken place in the last 40 years, military have acted to prevent country from going to an islamist or totalitarian dictatorship.

first major coup was in 1960, against adnan menderes (who is, curiously and coincidentally, the first islamist leaning leader in turkish republic's history - the current islamist party comes from his party's roots). adnan menderes had increasingly become dictatorial in the late years of his reign -> he first censored all opposing papers, and then shut them down. then he shut down the opposition party. then his party moved to create a party organization called 'vatan cephesi' (motherland front) that you had to join. even so, they were naming people out of census registry in the radios each night, saying that these people joined the motherland front. situation was going out of hand. so, military intervened, and hanged the 3 political leaders of that party. that has set an example for all extremists in turkey -> they havent been able to find the courage to radically change the secular modern republic for 20 years.

in 1980, things were out of hand again. extremism was abound, and extreme right and left organizations were killing each other, bystanders, anyone daily. the daily average death toll in the country was 200. yea, you heard that right, 200 people a day.

politicians of the time were doing NOTHING. just bickering. a moderate party, an islamist party, a nationalist party, and a social democrat party. all bickering and nothing.

things were going this way for the last 5 years. and military was warning about deteriorating security situation within the country for those last 5 years.

all political leaders of that time were saying was 'it will be democratically solved, democracy is strong blah this bleh that'.

nothing happened. they did nothing.

and when in 1980, a huge throng of islamists have sat down during the national anthem and booed the national anthem in konya in 1980, declaring that they wanted an iranian style islamist government, within 2-3 weeks' time military had taken control of the country and locked up the extremist leaders, and put an interim government and called a group of experts to prepare a new constitution to prevent extremism from being able to change anything.

1982 constituton was put to vote of the people. people were SO fed up with extremism and the chaos environment that it got a whopping 80% approval rate and was ratified. this is the constitution we have today, and this is the constitution that islamist party is trying to change so they can move ahead with islamist proceedings.

just 1 years later, in 1983, elections were held and a technocrat, turgut ozal, a western style free market evangelist was elected with a whopping vote total. and he furthered the country until islamist elements got rise again.

so today here we are. the islamist party is trying to get rid of the elements in constitution that prevent them from establishing islamist and pro-religion laws, saying that 'it is the will of the people' (only 38% first election, only 42% last, a lot of reactionary votes and a lot of election fraud).

what is stupefying is that, european union SUPPORTS them. they are in the delusion that, if you let everything be in turkey, it will just become a country like belgium. but the last 40 years' history of turkey says otherwise.

the going is not good. it is a cosmic joke that european union is supporting and harboring a party that wants to break turkey from all modern values and enlightenment ideals. leave aside being contradictory, its self damaging.

Re:a mistake you have there

Excuse me, but doesn't what you're saying boil down to this: periodically, the people of Turkey elect leaders which campaign on a fundamentalist Islamic platform, who, once elected, start to push the country towards theocracy. At which point the Army intervenes. Which is pretty much what the GP was saying, no?

heh they should jam all the religious nuts

on this bus [guim.co.uk]

fracking religion what good has it ever done

sigh

Re:heh they should jam all the religious nuts

btw the image is taken from this comment is free article [guardian.co.uk]

the article and the comments that followed make for an interesting sunday read

Why bans happen this much in Turkey

I'm from Turkey. As far as I know bans happen this way: If court decides that the content is illegal (attacking personal rights, advertising drugs etc.) they contact the owner of the site and demand the content to be removed. If the owner doesn't comply they ban the site. Previously bans happened by modifying DNS data of the de facto ISP monopoly in Turkey and redirecting sites to another page with legal information. This was easily circumvented by using another DNS. Then they started blocking IP addresses. Interesting thing is they don't block IP addresses of all banned sites. They only do this to popular sites and I believe courts are not deciding this. Someone outside courts decides that they must do IP blocking or not.
The law which orders bans also have a precaution clause which permits getting a site banned before court decides that the content is illegal or not. Bad guys uses this legal loophole to ban web sites easily.

YouTube is still banned in Turkey

As a Turkey citizen all I can say is this sucks a lot, but does not surprise me a little. YouTube is banned for months and the ban won't seem to be lifted soon.

Bad Turkey, no EU for you!

And there are people who still argue that Turkey should be allowed to join the EU. We have enough problems as is, let us not compound them by giving (more) religious zealots power in Europe.

Reason of the ban...

The ban is not about Adnan Oktar or some religious subject but simply is about Digiturk which holds the right to broadcast the Turkish Football Super League.

Digiturk claims that the bloggers illegally streams the matches (you have to buy a receiver and a special card in order to view the Turkish Super League) from internet via their blogs.

Therefore they appeal to court and court bans the whole sites ending with ...blogspot.com abd blogger.com. Therefore the complete blogger has
been banned.

I admit that this is totally bullshit but not everything in Turkey is not about religion etc.

Best regards,

"anonymous coward".

As someone else mentioned

It's not a government ban, but actually caused vy a loophole in the law. (It has never been a government ban, nevertheless it's embarrassing).

*Any* court can order the ban of *any* website in Turkey. It only takes a single prosecutor deeming the case worthy, and a judge accepting it.

So for example, you can complain "google is infringing on my intellectual property", and if the prosecutor buys it, the judge can put in a preliminary motion to ban google. The ISPs can not do anything about it (except for going for an appeal).

The related law is being questioned, and will probably be replaced soon. (Hopefully).

Good for Turkey.

Everyone is screaming censorship, but thats not it. They are saving themselves and the rest of the world. By Turkey not having access to blogger, all those people will no longer be made dumber by reading someones retarded online diary. The rest of the world will no longer have to be subjected to stupid blogs from Turkey.

No one has blocked the 3 blogs on the Internet that are actually useful, the other 4 billion useless online diaries will not be noticed when they disappear by anyone other than the emo that posts to them, and possibly a other emo's that cry with them after school.

We really do need to stop trying to shoehorn the censorship issue onto anything that we don't agree with. I can see how you might think this is censorship, but its not.

Nothing of value was lost in this ban, move on.

UPDATE ON BAN

Heres the update on the situation: Itâ(TM)s now reported that it is not Oktar that got Blogger banned, but Digiturk, a subscription based digital TV platform that owns the rights to the live broadcasting of Turkish football league games. Apparently, Digiturk asked Blogger to take several blogs or blog entries down containing links to pirated transmissions of the live games. Blogger did nothing, Digiturk went to court and under Turkish intellectual property law, they managed to get Blogger banned completely, effectively banning millions of websites that have nothing to do with Turkish football or pirating. Leave it to turkey to ban an entire site becuase of soccer. *sigh

Re:Reality knocks

Let's hope they will never be allowed to join the EU.

Let's hope they change their ways so that we wish them to join the EU.

Re:Reality knocks

Let's hope they will never be allowed to join the EU.

Let's hope they change their ways so that we wish them to join the EU.

Like a German comedian of turkish descent once said:

What are you talking about? We're already here.