World-famous Turkish pianist Fazil Say has appeared in court in Istanbul charged with inciting hatred and insulting the values of Muslims.

He is being prosecuted over tweets he wrote mocking radical Muslims, in a case which has rekindled concern about religious influence in the country.

More: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19990943

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Prompted by The Awesome Conversation (FTAC), 10/18/2012/1450H

The greater the right’s demonization of Obama, the more inclined I am to vote for him.

Any POTUS would have his (or her) hands full between the Ayatollah in Iran, the failed dictator in Syria, and the rising star in Turkey. Each of those believe their power in office has come directly from God himself (although henchmen, armies, a lot of lawyers, and a few generals plus a reliable treasury don’t hurt) and the above story about an incident hate Tweet (against the most hate-worthy of humans) tells you — tells everyone, including their own constituents — how very mean spirited and small these guys really are.

Just to back up my charge here, I remind: Maher Assad appears to have sent his army into the field without the least restrictive doctrine or rules-of-engagement, setting the tone for what has become the most abysmal, bankrupt, and vacuous of civil wars; the Ayatollah through his pet Ahmadinejad has been railing about the Zionist entity and, apparently, taking steps to rid their small world of it, for years, and they too signal evidence of zero boundaries, a signal that echoes forward from the “chain murders” accompanying the establishment of the “Islamic Revolution in Iran” to the cells of Evin Prison and the complete crap shoot of a justice system subordinated to a political system defined by patronage; and Erdogan, whose run for president was opposed in the streets by hundreds of thousands of Turks, has succeeded in bullying opposition in Turkey’s business community, introducing journalists to jail on something close to mere dictatorial wishes, and replacing an entire class of generals.

What’s Erdogan’s big schtick today?

The old fashioned NATO vs. Russia music playing in the background. A fine European state Turkey would make today, eh?

I’ve left out of this Egypt’s Mursi, but the patterns — power, treasury, military, and belligerent talk in public: all familiar. To deflect attention from all of that (really, all of that political criminality), Turkey’s most accomplished classical pianist goes to court, so it seems, for slandering “louts” by associating them with “Islamists” and doing so in fewer than 140 words.

I’m going to set out a vocabulary related to the Islamic Small Wars (ISW) and language in a while, but the small-minded demonstration of power signaled by this story (a musician tweets a nasty something about “Islamists” — whoop-de-do — and winds up in a Turkish court) begs for reason, and that in spaces where greed and the lust for power (plus perhaps the cold stab of fear instilled by “conservative” and “Islamist” political behavior in the reasonable) have overcome anything like it.