E-mail from my dad

Please do not insult Turks, turkeys, Thanksgiving,
gravy, college football, Armenians, Armenian football,
arms, legs, fingers(middle), the Pope, poop, or
anything else your little satyrical heart may find
humorous over there. These people are crazy sooo be
careful what you post. Please read attached article.
Your very worried father


PM pledges to find editor's killer
POSTED: 1734 GMT (0134 HKT), January 19, 2007
-- Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to find the killer of a
prominent Turkish journalist of Armenian descent shot
to death in broad daylight Friday.

Hrant Dink, editor of the Armenian-Turkish-language
weekly Agos newspaper, was killed in front of the
building that houses the Istanbul publication.

The murder shocked all of Turkey, where Dink also has
earned a reputation for promoting dialogue between
Turks and Armenians, backing open borders between
Turkey and the nation of Armenia, and expressing a
love of his Turkish homeland.

The killing prompted swift denunciation by Turkish PM
Erdogan, who said the attack was a "shock" and an
"insult" to the Turkish nation and a "dark day" -- not
only for Dink's family but for all of Turkey as well.

"The dark hands that killed him will be found and
punished," Erdogan said, in televised remarks.

Authorities are looking into a lead that he was shot
by a young man who appeared to be 18 or 19 years old.
Dink's body could be seen covered with a white sheet
in front of the newspaper's entrance, before an
emergency vehicle came to take it away.

"Aged 53, Dink was killed by several shots fired at
him shortly after midday as he was outside the
premises of his privately owned newspaper in Sisli, a
district on the European side of Istanbul. The police
said they were looking for a youth aged about 18 or 19
wearing a jean-jacket and a white beret," said
Reporters Without Borders, a journalists' advocacy
group that denounced the killing.

Described as a "well-known commentator on Armenian
affairs," Dink had been called into court a number of
times on allegations of "insulting" the Turkish state
in his writing.

"Some of the trial hearings have been marred by
violent scenes inside and outside the courtrooms,
instigated by nationalist activists calling for Dink
to be punished," says a profile on the Web site of Pen
American Center -- the writers' group that defends
free expression.

Hot-button issue
Agos was established in 1996, and Dink didn't shy away
from dealing with the controversies in that region
over the killings of Armenians from 1915 through 1917
-- a hot-button issue in Turkey.

Armenians and other countries regard those killings as
a genocide, a claim rejected by the Turkish
government, which says Armenians and Turks were killed
in civil warfare.

Andrew Finkel, a journalist in Turkey and a friend of
Dink's, emphasized that Dink's killing was "a tragedy"
for a country attempting to "come to terms with its
past."

Finkel said resentment toward Dink existed among
ultranationalist Turks, and the people who staged
"ugly scenes" at his trials are the same ones who
staged rallies directed at Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel
Prize-winning Turkish writer who faced charges of
insulting Turkishness as well.

He described Dink as a "bright" and brash" man who was
a "well-known figure in Istanbul" and an advocate for
Turkey's small Armenian community -- a once-populous
group now numbering around 60,000 or 70,000.

"If anything, he was a great Turkish patriot," Finkel
told CNN in an interview.

Joel Campagna, Mideast program coordinator for the
Committee to Protect Journalists, said, "Like dozens
of other Turkish journalists, Hrant Dink has faced
political persecution because of his work. Now it
appears he's paid the ultimate price for it."

Campagna said that Turkey "must ensure that this crime
does not go unpunished like other cases in the past
and that those responsible for his murder are brought
to justice."

He said that over the last 15 years, 18 Turkish
journalists have been killed -- making the country the
eighth deadliest in the world for journalists in that
period. He said that many of the deaths took place in
the early 1990s "at the peak of the Kurdish separatist
insurgency."

He said killings, other attacks against journalists
that don't result in deaths, and the many cases of
Turkish journalists facing criminal charges under
"vague statutes" create a "chilling effect" among
media workers.

Reporters Without Borders, another journalists'
advocacy group, also said a proper investigation is
needed, underscoring its position that "this will be a
key test for a country that hopes to join the European
Union. No one would understand if Turkey failed to do
everything possible to shed light on this tragedy."
Turkey has long coveted membership in the EU.

'Dialogue sought'
Pen American Center said Dink's publication sought to
"provide a voice to the Armenian community and create
a dialogue between Turks and Armenians."

Here are case histories Pen lists involving Dink:

-- "In 2001, the Turkish government suspended
publication of Agos when Dink wrote that 'the laws (on
the genocide) will cease to be a problem when Turkey
shows consideration for the pain created by 24 April.'
While the government brought legal action against
Dink, he was found innocent and was permitted to
resume printing Agos."

-- "On February 13, 2004, Dink published an article
titled 'Get to Know Armenia,' which discussed the
modern-day impact of the Armenian massacres and urged
Armenians to reject 'the adulterated part of their
Turkish blood.'"

-- "Dink explained that he was writing a series of
articles focusing on the Armenian diaspora, and that
the article was intended as a plea to Armenians to
resolve their anger towards the Turks. However, the
Turkish government interpreted this comment as an
insult to Turkish blood, and Dink was consequently
brought to trial for the article."

"On October 7, 2005, the Sisli Court of Second
Instance in Istanbul handed Dink a six-month suspended
sentence. Dink appealed the sentence and issued a
protest, saying that 'as long as I live (in Turkey), I
will go on telling the truth, just as I always have.'"

-- After that sentencing, Dink was "placed on trial
for remarks that he made at a conference in 2002 that
were deemed in violation of Article 301 of the Turkish
Penal Code -- 'insult(ing) to the Turkish state.'"

Dink said "charges stem from remarks he made that
criticized a patriotic verse Armenian school children
are forced to memorize. He said that the lines 'I am a
Turk, I am honest, I am hardworking' were
objectionable because 'even though (he) was honest and
hardworking, (he) was not a Turk, (he) was an
Armenian.'"

Pen said Dink had been "critical of a verse in the
national anthem that he felt was discriminatory for
referring to the Turks as 'a heroic race.' Dink was
acquitted on February 9, 2006, although he still faced
further charges of trying to influence the courts."

-- Pen said that on July 12, 2006, Dink "was handed a
six-month suspended sentence for insulting Turkishness
after writing an article which called for Armenians to
'now turn their attention to the new life offered by
an independent Armenia.'"

On July 19, 2006, "the Istanbul public prosecutor
opened a new case against Dink for referring to the
1915 massacre of Armenians as a 'genocide' during a
July 14 interview with Reuters."

Dink was awaiting his next trial on those charges.

Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian
National Committee of America, told CNN that the case
is the "product of the environment that the Turkish
government has created" -- its persistent denial that
the killings of the Armenians last century did not
amount to a genocide and "a provision of the Turkish
penal code that prohibits people from speaking about
the Armenia genocide."

Said Hamparian: "Turkey needs to come to grips with
its past."

Sit on his lap and tell him how many virgins you want in the afterlife - but wait until he finishes knitting my new pair of underwear

America. . . land of the free and home of the brave!

I'd like to give a shout out to my peeps in the homeland. . . and to those of you who have not received an update lately, here it is. Happy New Year, I hope yours was as good as mine. First, in the Muslim tradition, I slaughtered a camel. I have 2 roommates and one of them is in America, so I used her room for the throat-slitting and blood-letting. It was cool, I was able to make grilled cheese and camel sandwiches for my friends.

In professional news, I submitted an essay to an anthology and was rejected in the most polite way you could imagine. It was my first official rejection letter and after I chewed a few bottles of pills and shined up the razor blades, I started writing something new. It's about this girl who likes to travel and becomes a terrorist and kills some publishers. . .

School is going well, the juniors have settled down and stopped stabbing me, kicking me in the stomach and locking me in corridors. I've developed some authority somehow. For a while there, I thought I was going to have to line them up and pick one to kill in front of the others as a show of strength to get the rest to behave. I also thought about challenging the Lord of the Flies ringleader to a cage match, but he would never give me the conch and I would have gotten in trouble if I slapped him across the face with my leather riding gloves. They tortured me for the first month or so, but then I did what anybody should do when being attacked by 7 and 8 year olds when tazers are still banned in the classroom - I called their moms. I've gotten to the point where I can actually say they're pretty cute. And so are man-eating pandas. Totally adorable. Today they were showing me how if you sit improperly in your chair, you can fall backwards and break your spine and die.

Turkey is still pretty cool. I recently had a visitor - the Pope. He came for Hanukkah. If you ever want him to come to your Festival of Lights shindig - gotta ask in advance - it's like his favorite holiday what with the fire and latkes and all - so he accepts the first invitation to hit the Vatican. So Po-po and I were chillin in my low-rider, cruising the malls and eating kebaps. It was awesome.

In 4 weeks, I am heading to the United States to eat my weight in bacon and cheese popcorn so I'm hoping to see as many people as possible. Especially if you owe me money. Cheers!