New Meaning to the term ECUMENICAL

It seems there is a new game show in Turkey. It is very ecumenical. In fact I can imagine why an American company didn't think of it first. Here it is, as described by the Washington Monthly:

Reader R.K. alerted me to a very strange new gameshow in Turkey in which a Muslim imam, a Christian priest, a rabbi, and a Buddhist monk try to convert a group of atheists. "The prize for converts will be a pilgrimage to a holy site of their chosen religion -- Mecca for Muslims, the Vatican for Christians, Jerusalem for Jews and Tibet for Buddhists." The name of the show is "Penitents Compete," and is expected to begin airing in September.

Must be a last ditch effort to make the EU accept them as Europeans.

Hi Birsen!

Irony and WSJ

The Wall Street Journal. I have never credited it with having quite the fine sense of irony that it displays in publishing this opinion piece. No comment. You either get it or you don't. But I do believe that Turkey is waging a genuine War on Terror.


Once I wrote it I realized that I love the headline for this post.

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Bulgaria and the Turks

Not so many years ago much of Europe was in the hands of the Ottoman Turks, rulers of a great Muslim empire. It was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that the final push to drive them out of Europe got under way. World War I would finish them off.

During all those centuries they were in Europe, however, many Turks moved into the area and many more locals became Muslims. Some of these latter continued to speak their native languages, like the Bosnian Muslims, others adopted Turkish. Many of those Turkish speaking Muslims stayed, at least until recently.

Take the 900,000 of them who lived in Bulgaria. Tony Judt in Postwar: A History of Europe since 1949 tells what happened to them at the hands of the Bulgarian government:

Things were brought to a head by the exodus to Turkey, during the summer of 1989, of an estimated 300,000 ethnic Turks -- another public relations calamity for the regime, and an economic one too, as the country began to run short of manual labors.

Of course, the effect on a wealthy country like America would be .... probably much worse.

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Turkey, Greece and the USA

Greece has traditionally been somewhat more anti-American than France. Now that the Greeks are facing the reality of having Turkey in the EU, without passports or borders needed, and with only the elite (and hypothetical) EU rapid deployment force to protect them, the Americans don't seem quite so bad after all.

Victor Davis Hanson, vacationing in Greece, has the observation.