About the Tagline: What does “blocked in Turkey” mean?
“You are apparently banned in Turkey,” my husband wrote.
I should probably bring this over here, since I am here — at Medium — most of the time. Modified from an intro written in January, 2015.
I had been blogging for about a year when my husband, an energy and alternative dispute resolution attorney, made a trip to Turkey. While there, he had some time to catch up on reading his wife’s blog. He couldn’t. On March 31, 2011, I got this email from him:
You are apparently banned in Turkey. If I try to access the blog from outside our VPN, through a Turkish ISP, then I get this message: Bu siteye erişim mahkeme kararıyla engellenmiştir. Google translations thinks this means something like “by court order this site is barred”.
In the months prior, I had posted many links to stories about brave Muslim women such as, Shaista Gohir and Veena Malik. [The Malik link is not the original one I used, but it is now broken so I found another about that newscast.] Those posts bounced around Turkey. For a short while I had close to a third, a third, and a third traffic for the UK, US, and Turkey. But someone didn’t like that. My old blog, An American Housewife in London, was not only blocked, but also someone made a fraudulent copyright claim against that blog for credited excerpts from The Times of London. [It was the Gohir profile by Stefanie Marsh. I checked with Marsh at the time, it wasn’t her. She was happy the story was getting shared.]
Yasha hasn’t been back to Turkey in a while so I don’t know if this blog is blocked, though I’ve not stopped writing about brave Muslim women, see Malika Sherawat or Sajda Mughal, so it is a good bet. [Elsewhere I’ve alluded to conservative women disagreeing more than outsiders expect. The Sherawat link is the end of a ‘what to do about feminism?’ debate slmgoldberg and I had at PJMedia a few years ago.]
In 2014, the censoring powers in Turkey got tired of trying to block all sorts of little sources of inconvenient information, so they started blocking Twitter. This will not likely succeed. As for me, getting blocked in Turkey was one of those moments when I realized I must be doing something right, blogging wise. We are known by our friends and our adversaries.
I’ve been looking for a tagline for a while. I already had it.
UPDATE: As of May 2015, Persephone (one of my sister-in-laws, and not her real name) tells me that my tagline remains accurate. I am still blocked in Turkey.
Another UPDATE: It is now 2018. My son is 14 and recently searched for any writing I had done on some topic involving Turkey. (Most of the things I write about are common dinner and car conversations.) Instead he came across a comment thread from a year or so ago with my handle in it. He got his friend to translate. Apparently, they lament the day any man gave me a computer. I should never have been allowed to write.
