An insult to free speech, with malice aforethought

"An Istanbul court today convicted a Turkish journalist of insulting the Turkish national identity. Journalist Hrant Dink is a Turkish citizen and editor of the bilingual Armenian-Turkish newspaper Agos. He was convicted for urging diaspora Armenians in a series of articles to get rid of the "poisoning effect" of their history in Turkey and focus on the welfare of Armenia. He was given a six-month suspended sentence, which means he will not serve prison time unless he repeats the offense."
http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/10/82a26d34-0ad7-474a-a50c-61cc33ed87ce.html

"Two ideas usually hover closely around Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, author of My Name is Red, Snow, and, most recently, Istanbul, a memoir. The first is the Nobel Prize, which he will doubtlessly garner for the second idea, namely that his fiction is undeniably “prescient.” In a reversal of art imitating life that plays darkly upon this prescience, Pamuk has been charged with insulting Turkish national identity—a transgression that extremist characters pin on Ka, the protagonist of Snow—and faces up to three years in prison. When considering the nature of these charges in light of Snow (written pre- and post-9/11 and published in Turkey in 2002, in the U.S. last year, and in paperback this summer), Pamuk’s ability to write politically-charged narrative whose themes haunt, and will indefinitely plague, the globe is rendered all the more terrifyingly sublime.
"The east versus the west, radical Islam versus right-wing republican governments, belief in God versus secular atheism, poverty versus so-called enlightenment, and national sovereignty versus freedom of speech are a handful of dueling variegations in the novel, in which Pamuk himself appears as a character. In certain ways, this Orhan, revealed halfway through as the appearing and disappearing first-person guide, will also be put on trial on December 16.... "
http://www.thesimon.com/magazine/articles/between_the_covers/000_prosecuting_pamuk_author_narrator_trial.html

"Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul on Sunday sought to play down the controversy, telling Canal television that he expected the case to be dismissed because a court had thrown out similar charges against a different person.
Gul said that despite the case, human rights had advanced by leaps and bounds in the past three years. "We have a limited democracy in Turkey ... but thanks to the reforms of the past few years, its scope has widened enormously." http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/283BDC36-DAD4-4B6C-9270-79FF74D335DD.htm