A Turkish court has banned access within the country to YouTube because some Greeks evidently put up a juvenile video insulting Kemal Ataturk, “the founder of modern Turkey” — insult to whom is illegal in Turkey. The video had evidently been up for a while, leading for a tit-for-tat round of Coulteresque name-calling between the two countries.
One BoingBoing correspondent summarized the tiff this way:
A (presumably) Greek youtube user […] uploaded a video that (if I remember correctly) had a picture of Ataturk, his eyes bulging out talking about how he’s gay, insulting himself, talking about how all Turks are Gay etc. Pretty South Park type affair, though both less amusing and also with less good intentions. Somehow it ended up in the most popular video category in my rss reader a while back.
[…] Though I was unable to locate the original video, if you type in “Kemal Gay Turk” in youtube now, you’ll find a couple of dozen response videos by some Turks. I’m sure these stories sound vaguely familiar to who lives in a country that has a historical grudge against another one. Comment box wars, hundreds of videos calling each other names, usually in bad English, etc. (Which does give it a surreal Borat-ish humor. If only it wasn’t real.)
In other words, Youtube access in Turkey was restricted because a bunch of kids with nothing better to do kept calling each other faggots. Online. With Youtube videos.
It would all be amusing, in a “look at those sophomoric chowderheads” kind of way, if not for … well … a freaking law against insulting the founder of Turkey to escalate it all into Censorshipville. (And people wonder why I oppose anti-flag-burning amendments …)
You know, if Turkey had never made a fuss about it, hardly anyone would have cared to have watched it.
Well, that’s the whole dynamic, isn’t it? Demonstrate power over someone by goading them into anger? Works for flag-burners, too.