Why Obama Should Not Have Had To Show His Papers

[robertlouis]

Fascinating debate, you two, so I'll intervene briefly on a pint of pedantry.

The Ottoman Turks are not, and never were, Arabs. They emerged in the early middle ages as yet another disparate group of central Asian tribes heading west for new pastures, and finding that they liked it, eventually into settling and conquest. Over the centuries that expansion moved south into North Africa and the Middle East, but it's arguable which group, the Arabs or the Turks, had the greater influence on the other.

And as the Ottoman Empire imploded gradually from the end of the 19th century to its total collapse at the end of the First World War, the Arabs were very keen to throw off the yoke of what was for them an alien oppressor.

The subsequent French and British carve-up and fuck-up of the region which has led directly to the current impasse in the middle east is of course another story for another day....

[Stavros]

But I never used the term 'Ottoman Turks' just Ottoman -their language was written in Arabic script until Kemal had it Latinized. Even if you believe the original Turks were from central Asia, these Turks were not exclusive to the region; Mustapha Kemal was born in Thessaloniki which as you know is today in Greece. Anatolia was a melting pot of nationalities and religions, one of the main driving forces of the Nationalist Revolution was precisely to create a Turkish identity and 'erase' these multiplicities and turn them into a singularity -to accept Turkish nationality was to be defined as a Turk regardless of what you wanted, just as Palestinians had the 'choice' of staying in Jaffa and becoming 'Israelis' in 1948. This bogus offer -offered at the point of a gun- was rejected by most of the Greeks, the Armenians, the Jews, the Russians, the Azeris and so on -the ones who did become 'Turkish' did so through coercion and the need to survive; or like the immigrants from Bosnia were happy to trade a worthless identity for one that gave them equal rights with the 'locals'. The ones who implacably refused -the Kurds- became ghosts in the Turkish machine, until resorting to violence to give flesh to their own aspirations. Alexandretta is a fascinating example of how a multi-national, multi-religious part of the Ottoman Empire, remained outside Turkey until 1938 -The Turks funded Turkish nationalist agitators there, and walked in and seized it having made it clear to Britain and France that if they opposed it, Turkey's neutrality in any forthcoming war with Germany would not be guaranteed -needless to say neither Britain nor France cared what happened to this area (the main city being the port of Iskenderun/Alexandretta) -but Syria has always claimed it would have been part of the independent Syria that was briefly established under Faisal in 1920, and retains its claim to this very day. In the meantime, the 'non-Turks' have all but gone, there are probably more Russians in Alexandretta these days.

[robertlouis]

Stavros, my gentle pop was at hippi, not you - he called the Turks "the arabs who conquered byzantium".

Your analysis of Turkey and the forced diaspora of its ethnic minorities in the 20th century is spot-on. As it happens, I ended up in Bulgaria for a sizeable chunk in the early 90s, putting a joint venture telco together, and while I was there the Yugoslavian civil wars broke out. Scary times with land borders with both Serbia and Croatia just over 100km north of Sofia. We often drove over to Thessaloniki - or Salonica for R&R, so I have experienced all the ethnic tensions, myths and hatreds of the Balkans at first hand. Fascinating and chilling at the same time. Every nationality and minority carries its own very different map of the region in its head and in its heart.

If you haven't read it, I can heartily recommend Mark Mazower's excellent book on Salonica and its lost society, a wonderful melting-pot where cultures blended rather than clashed, more or less up to the outbreak of war in 1914, and arguably the most civilised spot in the Mediterranean since Frederick 11 held court in Sicily in the 12th century.

[beandip]

So much stupid in one thread. As required by law the POTUS must be a US citizen and both parents must also be US natural born citizens. When someone runs for POTUS, in order to be POTUS, at some point they must bide by the law. He didn't, sucks being him now...LOL.

Too bad if you don't believe in laws.

Big fail there as Obama's father is not.

John Mccain had to cough up his BC when he was running for POTUS. He was born in PCZ, a US territory.

[Stavros]

This is what your constitution says:
No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

I don't know what the difficulty is in reading the words and understanding what they say: and its been said so many times. End of story. Move on to the issues.

[hippifried]

This is what your constitution says:
No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

I don't know what the difficulty is in reading the words and understanding what they say: and its been said so many times. End of story. Move on to the issues.

Well Stavros, the problem with the "birthers" is that they don't want to know anything. They ignore anything that doesn't fit whatever known lie they choose to believe, so that they can continue telling the lie & feign surprize when nobody else agrees. (I guess that's why they call it ignorance) This is the big lie as told by the "birthers" & klan/nazis that just can't abide color in power:

As required by law the POTUS must be a US citizen and both parents must also be US natural born citizens.

Simply not true. This isn't Europe, remember? There's no parental requirement of any kind for citizenship to anyone born in the US. But you can't tell glassy eyed kool-aid drinkers anything. They don't want to know. Aside from legislation to aid the citizenship claims of people born to service people stationed overseas, this is the only applicable law governing citizenship:

Section 1.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

(The underlining is mine) Hell, you don't even need to know who daddy is to be a citizen of the US. Orphans are natural citizens if they're born here. Most hospitals now have a policy that foundling or abandoned children can be dropped off there no questions asked. Those kids are natural born citizens too, because they're innocent, they're here, & there's no evidence they belong anywhere else. This is home.

At the risk of sounding redundant, let me repeat:
All this birther nonsense is, was, & has never been anything but klan shit.
There's really no other explanation for the vile stupidity & vociferousness of the attack.

[south ov da border]

well this came out yesterday.



THoughts???

[hippifried]

THoughts???

Sure. Corsi's another long winded conspiracy nut. From what I can see, he'll jump head first into any conspiracy theory. He's a birther. He's a truther. He claims that the US is trying to secretly abdicate it's sovereinty, & is secretly aiding Iran in the development of nuclear weapons. He adheres to the abiogenic hypothesis for the origin of petoleum. So what? Oh yeah, he has a PHD in political science. So does Rachel Maddow. Again, so what? This guys just another fruitcake, & proof of what most of us hippies were saying back in the '70s, that PHDs in the non-science sciences were being handed out like candy on halloween.

My thoughts? I just think this bozo's stupid. Another one of those educated fools.