Richard Falk and Hilal Elver are fighting with The Economist over whether the latter erred by offering Turks advice on how to vote in the latter's recent election. In doing so, they explain:
Turkey‘s sensitivities are historically frayed by European penetrations of their sovereign space during the decades of Ottoman decline in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the Turkish reaction reflected this sensitivity, not inappropriately, in our view.
This is the sort of multicultural crap Western academics have been serving up for years. "Post-colonial consciousness" is routinely served up on our campuses to justify or excuse bad conduct by dictators and mobs, but Falk and Elver take it to an extreme when they apply it to a country that by their own admission was "never actually colonized."
Indeed, not only was Turkey never actually colonized, it spent much of its history as an aggressor building up a massive empire, much of it at the expense of--and to the demise of--formerly Christian nations and communities.
So by Falk and Elver's logic, shouldn't I be able to claim that my "sensitivities [as an American of English descent] are historically frayed" by the Roman conquest of my homeland in 43 AD. Or that my "sensitivities [as a Christian citizen of the West] are historically frayed" by the Arab conquest of Alexandria--at the time, one of the great intellectual centers of Christianity--in 641? Or the Turkish conquest of Byzantium in 1453?
Should the fraying of those sensibilities be reflected, "not inappropriately," for example, in my reaction to the persecution being directed at my Christian brothers and sisters in Egypt by Islamists?
Or is that a cultural street that only runs one direction?
