Banned in Turkey: More on Richard Dawkins’ Blog
From The New Humanist:
Back in our May/June issue, Peter C Kjaergaard reported on the efforts of Adnan Oktar, AKA Harun Yahya, the shadowy Turkish creationist responsible for sending the lavish and absurd Atlas of Creation to science professors and teachers around the world.
He’s also well-known for going through the Turkish courts in order to have websites shut down that are critical of him, and he may have just achieved his greatest victory by having Richard Dawkins’s official website blocked there. Earlier this year he tried, and failed, to have The God Delusion banned in Turkey, but no doubt he’ll see this as a valuable consolation prize. His office has claimed the courts blocked the site because it “violated” Oktar’s personality, as his press officer explained… (click for the rest)
I note that at least one Guardian piece labels this as a religion issue. It is not. That Adnan Oktar is a creationist is immaterial. I quote from AO’s spokesperson:
We are not against freedom of speech or expression but you cannot insult people.
This is precisely the problem. The law is on his side. English-speaking people assume these are libel suits but they are not. Of course that particular law is against freedom of speech, but this is not generally understood here even by people who present themselves as civil libertarians. I’m not sure but I don’t think the EU takes a principled stance on this (the US does). Once you have this law and the facility to centrally ban sites (thanks to the Telco monopoly and the new censorship infrastructure) it is natural for litigants to seek this kind of injunctive relief.
I’d rather see the law revised so that one can only be sued for libel that casued actual damage. I fear, though, that things will get finessed for embrarassing cases like this while the threat remains for the rest of us. This, BTW, is how the PM and many other powerful people have been suing and collecting money from cartoonists, journalists and such.
I have seen just one comment among the ones I skimmed at RD’s site that nails it as far as the civil/criminal law contrast goes. The poster doesn’t realize that Turkish law reaches far beyond ‘defamation’ in such cases though:
http://richarddawkins.net/articleComments,3128,Turkey-bans-biologist-Richard-Dawkins-website,Monsters-and-Critics,page4#249898
Also, this guy seems to understand the freedom of expression issue and has interesting statistics (though appears to be somewhat misinformed/sloppy otherwise):
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2008/09/muslim_creationists_the_real_t.php
Regardless of the legal arcana, this makes Turkey look ridiculous in the eyes of many, and reinforces the (correct) notion that creationism is a near-uniform belief in the Muslim world. Richard Dawkins has now added a large banner–with a Turkish flag flying proudly against a blue sky–across the top of his home page proclaiming: Banned in Turkey
With this kind of thing going on, how is Turkey ever going to emerge as a center of science, reason and innovation?
Michael,
I think a number of things are getting confounded and that they are getting confounded especially in a forum that calls itself ‘a clear thinking oasis’ (RD.net) is particularly troubling. I think we can infer several things from this situation and not all of them are about Turkey.
– Freedom of expression can be very tricky to maintain unless a principled stance is taken by all branches of government and especially the judiciary. People in the English-speaking world seem oblivious to how their freedom to both speak and hear is maintained and what kind of framework emerged to protect it. This is, perhaps, to be expected in the case of the US because it wasn’t the congress but the supreme court that did it. It is also troubling in the sense that there is no real democratic support behind the crucial decisions about libel, prior restraint and even hate speech and such. One obvious parallel to draw — again for the US — would be to observe that despite the presence of an excellent scientific community, the citizenry there is second only to Turkey among the OECD nations in the prevalence of creationist belief.
– Human flaws like muddled thinking, the inclination to resort to non-sequiturs and confimation bias are alive and well among the atheists and people who have no problem with Darwin. In fact the very same kind of confused argument that the ID people use to get traction among the general population is evident even in what you wrote. I will illustrate:
A: X, therefore Y.
B: X isn’t true, you don’t understand, what you think is X is actually W.
A: Oh that’s just nitpicking, we all know know Z and therefore Y. So there.
In this case:
X: assertions about religious censorship
Y: the assertion that Muslims/Turks are and will remain backward unless they mend their ways wrt. religion
W: personal ‘insult’ laws and the monopoly control of the net in Turkey.
Z: prevalence of creationism in Turkey
In the ID case:
X: some made-up math about complexity, much appeal to teleogical instict.
Y: design
W: good math
Z: some flaw or other about scientists in general (with appeal to Kuhn, misquoted Popper or some ridiculous picture/diagram in some old textbook etc.)
– Dawkins is right of course, his site is banned in in Turkey. If people here are embarassed by that banner, they can get the parliament to fine tune the laws. In that sense it is far better for someone with RD’s stature to be banned than a hundred little guys’ sites to quietly disappear. These laws do exist, the courts do issue these injunctions and quite a few sites are blocked here. Wheter or not the guy who sued to get the site blocked is a creationist/Muslim is immaterial and nothing is being helped by bringing religion or Darwinism into it. This is not about creationism or Islam, it is about freedom of expression.
– As for Turkey emerging as a center of science, I’ll point out that a lot of science is being done in many countries where freedom of expression is somewhat restricted. The US is pretty much alone in many ways when it comes to such freedoms. That said, I do agree that a society that produces and nurtures a sizeable number of first-rate scientists would have better practices concerning freedom of expression, but if there is any causal connection there it is probably not in the direction that you suggest.
I’ll reiterate: this development is actually a good thing. This kind of interference with speech had been going on with print media and local web sites here for a long time and nobody really knew about it. If folks abroad wish to help the process along, it’d be far more producive if lucid explanations of the way their legal system is restrained from interfering with expression were presented. As things stand, what I see is merely a confirmation of an old Turkish Sufi verse: ‘the fish in the sea are oblivious of the sea.’
Dear Bulent–
I agree with much of what you wrote, including the observation that the US (my country) has an exceptionally high proportion of people who believe in creationism and a literal reading of the Bible in general (or at least they think they do–the Bible in fact cannot be read literally in its entirety by anyone).
i also admit to minimal personal knowledge about freedoms in other countries, but I do realize that freedom of speech is particularly fragile and unequally applied in much of the world.
However, I don’t agree with your dismissal of the significance that in this particular instance it is a creationist who has succeeded in banning Dawkins’ site using legal means. Creationism is an expecially dangerous form of religious ideology. This is particularly true in the US. In fact, the widespread belief in creationism poses a threat to the continued scientific and technical leadership of the US in the world. And that danger may be growing–witness the Republican VP nominee.
I have been to Turkey several times and, precisely because it’s such a wonderful country in so many ways, it pains me to see the Dawkins website banned, and other ridiculous and inexcusable forms of censorship, such as the banning of apparently much if not all of Youtube. In Turkey’s case, the legal process that results in the banning of the Dawkins’ site and other actions may in fact have nothing to do with religion. One can easily imagine Kemalist, atheist motives for such an action. However, it is demonstrably true that religions frequently are deeply complicit in the restraint of scientific knowledge and the discrediting of reason in their advancement of magical thinking. Examples in our own day are legion: the mullah government in Iran, the support of the Russian Orthodox Church for the Putin regime, the Catholic Church’s teachings against condom use in Africa and, at this very moment, the huge influx of money from the Mormon Church into a campaign to repeal (civil) gay marriage in California. I think one errs when one overlooks these religion-inspired actions as a minor example of a larger issue for which religion is an irrelevant detail. Such an attitude I believe limits one’s appreciation of the potential for lasting damage to any society’s aspirations to join the First World (or the EU), or of a First World society’s potential for decline.
Best, Michael
In this case, the fish do indeed seem very oblivious. What would be most appropriate for Dawkins, and most effective in terms of promoting freedom of expression inside Turkey, would indeed be some sort of dialogue on the value of speech, and in this case, perhaps even occasional insult.
Bülent: I am curious as to what you think is the best way to commence this sort of dialogue. If Dawkins were to actually take the time to commence a serious conversation, how might it begin? What sorts of arguments would be effective? What is the best way to convince Turkish citizens that laws against insult can be destructive to discourse on the whole? How might this conversation effect a larger discourse on other forms of speech that might be considered more broadly offensive, e.g. charges of insulting the Turkish nation or discouraging people to join the military?
Ragan I wish a had a good answer for your very appropriate question. I’ll just jot down a few notes and give you many links.
This is a very broad issue, that needs to be addressed not only for the benefit of the Turks but also for those living in other countries. Yes, of course, it will entail ‘allowing’ insults. One cannot, in good faith, even claim that insults will be rare or occasional. It’ll also entail allowing pictures of religious figures and even libel against public figures[1] alongside such things as pornography and ‘dangerous’ cult literature. This is what needs to be explained to everyone. One cannot weasel one’s way out of recognizing that offensive stuff, by definition, is what will need to be placed beyond the reach of the law[2]. Hitchens makes a decent and forceful case for that particular point to Canadians here. As evidenced by the article I linked to above, it turns out he was right to warn them.
As for Turkey in particular, I don’t think piggybacking anti-religious arguments on top of the discussion of freedom of expression issues will work. In that regard Dawkins might be the wrong kind of person to make a dent in general, but he could help by making in clear that freedom of expression is essential for both religious and anti-religious arguments to be made and furthermore that what appears to be mere details of the law (be it criminal or civil) are extremely important. Needless to say, if it were a British court that issued the injunction, RD would have had to pull the offending content[3].
Turkey is in a very odd situation where the overtly religious (eg Gulen’s people) claim to be civil libertarians and accuse the secularists of being oppressive. I don’t think either side mean what they say, but the situation can be opportunistically exploited for forcing people to take a principled stance. Perhaps a good way to approach it would be to leave the army, the Ataturk law and 301 out of it and concentrate on the ‘insult’ laws and civil litigation. Oktar’s SLAPP approach, the PM’s lawsuits against cartoonists, Gulen people’s recent and successful prior restraint example can be leveraged to this end.
[1] Your own country even sets a very high threshold for libel when it involves public figures. See NY Times vs. Sullivan and note the date. It is relatively recent. Since the demos had nothing to do with it and could very well be persuaded that the law ought to prevent smear campaigns (eg veterans against Kerry) it is not clear how long that approach will survive in a truly democratic environment. On the other hand it is clearly good for freedom on the net and in general. Turkey is a good example of the opposite case where public figures continously drag journalists and even cartoonists to court for civil suits for things that don’t even involve libel.
[2] Ataturk understood this well, it turns out. He also recognized what kind of attitude the citizenry will need to have for such a liberal approach to survive. See this comment here.
[3] See this for examples of British law that were brought up for this particular case. Nihat (another commenter here) and I tried to cover many aspects of the issue as it pertains to the Internet, Turkish law, and cross-jurisdiction enforcement here and here.
I agree: Dawkins is not the right kind of person to make a dent in the desired direction. Our most decorated sociologists have declared that our nation could not do without religion.
I have no bright ideas to offer for a solution.
Heh, somebody translated RD’s review (the one with the fishing lure) into Turkish and now RD.net is breaking our sensitive compatriot’s heart in two languages:
http://richarddawkins.net/article,3151,Zehirli-Yilanlar-Kaygan-Yilanbaliklari-ve-Harun-Yahya,Richard-Dawkins