Funeral of Necmettin Erbakan. Myrat/Wikcommons. Some rights reserved.I appreciate the invitation by openDemocracy to submit my reflections on the Richard Falk interview and the responses that followed. Let me begin by saying that I am not a specialist on Turkey. That said, I have been going to Turkey since 1971, lectured, participated in conferences by a diverse group of organizations, co-authored and co-edited books and articles, and most recently co-authored the book, Islam and Democracy after the Arab Spring, in which Turkey is substantially covered, in press with OUP.
Given openDemocracy’s reputation and the quality of many of its published pieces, I must say I was initially surprised at what, with a few notable exceptions, looked like an orchestrated pile-on response to Richard Falk’s interview with Prime Minister Davutoglu.
Despite the fact that openDemocracy and its editor made clear the nature of the article, “an interview Richard Falk conducted with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmed Davutoglu on September 28 2014,” a good number of the critics ignore the genre and intent of the interview-article. Instead, some seize the platform to criticize the interviewer, focusing more on Falk rather than analyzing and critiquing Davatoglu’s statements.
