{"id":3965,"date":"2010-06-02T12:09:54","date_gmt":"2010-06-02T16:09:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=3965"},"modified":"2010-06-02T10:43:50","modified_gmt":"2010-06-02T14:43:50","slug":"qotd-turkeys-conspiracy-theorists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/06\/02\/qotd-turkeys-conspiracy-theorists\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Turkey&#8217;s conspiracy theorists"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p> I\u2019m a little surprised by how resolutely Turkey is turning against Israel at this moment (although it\u2019s been building for years). When I was living in Ankara, it wasn\u2019t too hard to find a Turkish-language copy of <em>Mein Kampf<\/em> in mainstream bookstores; even more widespread was books of conspiracy theories of every stripe and variety. Many Turks believed that there was a secret Israeli plot to harm Turkey; they also believed in a secret American plot with the same goal, a secret European plot, a secret Iranian plot, a secret Arab plot, a secret Russian plot, a secret Chinese plot, a Vatican plot, and perhaps a secret plot by the penguins in Antarctica. From my experience, the first rule of Turkish political philosophy is that <em>everyone is always out to get Turkey<\/em>, and the fact that what most Americans know about Turkey could fit on a 3\u00d75 index card is no impediment to this conclusion. We may be subconsciously conspiring against them.<\/p>\n<p>(Rule number two of of Turkish political philosophy is that they\u2019re not Arabs and in their minds, Turks are nothing like Arabs. They\u2019re like Europeans; sophisticated, comparatively wealthy, advanced, educated, technologically innovative, honorable and nothing like those backwards despotic hellholes across the border. A lot of Turks look at Arab states as former branch offices of the Ottoman Empire; the sense is that they couldn\u2019t be anything like the Arabs because they used to rule over the Arabs.)<\/p>\n<p>Jim Geraghty, <a href=\"\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Oh, Turkey, You Used to Be So Different From All the Others\u2026&#8221;, <em>National Review<\/em><\/a>, 2010-06-02<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019m a little surprised by how resolutely Turkey is turning against Israel at this moment (although it\u2019s been building for years). When I was living in Ankara, it wasn\u2019t too hard to find a Turkish-language copy of Mein Kampf in mainstream bookstores; even more widespread was books of conspiracy theories of every stripe and variety. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[370,41],"tags":[127,291,249],"class_list":["post-3965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-middle-east","category-quotations","tag-conspiracytheories","tag-israel","tag-turkey"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-11X","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3965"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3966,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3965\/revisions\/3966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}