Pointing out the ridiculousness of this is getting a bit old, but it needs to be said one more time. So who’s the “culprit”? It’s Ipek Calislar, who in her best-selling biography of the wife of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, accused Ataturk of dressing as a woman to escape an assassination attempt. If found guilty of insulting Ataturk’s reputation, Calislar faces four and a half years in prison.
Despite Calislar’s insistence that the assassination attempt was “historic fact”, the passage prompted a Turkish nationalist, Huseyin Tugrul Pekin, to file the suit as “it is the greatest insult to claim that Mustafa Kemal, whose courage none of us would dare judge, did something like that”. Or maybe Pekin just doesn’t want to take his head out of the sand…