Google Erases Kurdistan From Maps in Compliance With Turkish Government (kurdistan24.net) 203
schwit1 shares a report: Google has removed a map outlining the geographical extent of the Greater Kurdistan after the Turkish state asked it to do so, a simple inquiry on the Internet giant's search engine from Wednesday on can show. "Unavailable. This map is no longer available due to a violation of our Terms of Service and/or policies," a note on the page that the map was previously on read. Google did not provide further details on how the Kurdistan map violated its rules.
The map in question, available for years, used to be on Google's My Maps service, a feature of Google Maps that enables users to create custom maps for personal use or sharing through search. Maps drawn by ancient Greeks, Islamic historians, Ottomans, and Westerners showing Kurdistan with alternative names such as "Corduene" or "Karduchi" have existed since antiquity. The use of the name "Kurdistan" was banned by the administration of Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the immediate aftermath of the crushed Sheikh Said uprising for Kurdish statehood in 1925. Further reading: Local media report. "Turkish officials outraged by Google map showing the unofficial border of Kurdistan. Turkey demands the removal of the map. There are around 40 million Kurds divided between 4 main countries," Jiyar Gol, a BBC correspondent tweeted.
The map in question, available for years, used to be on Google's My Maps service, a feature of Google Maps that enables users to create custom maps for personal use or sharing through search. Maps drawn by ancient Greeks, Islamic historians, Ottomans, and Westerners showing Kurdistan with alternative names such as "Corduene" or "Karduchi" have existed since antiquity. The use of the name "Kurdistan" was banned by the administration of Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the immediate aftermath of the crushed Sheikh Said uprising for Kurdish statehood in 1925. Further reading: Local media report. "Turkish officials outraged by Google map showing the unofficial border of Kurdistan. Turkey demands the removal of the map. There are around 40 million Kurds divided between 4 main countries," Jiyar Gol, a BBC correspondent tweeted.
Re:Politics (Score:4, Interesting)
Billions of people?
Google is evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Deliberately selling out to murderous authoritarian governments is about as close to pure evil as you can get.
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Right. Google is the one who should be standing up to the world and defining its borders. This is all google's fault.
Re:Google is evil (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Google is evil (Score:1)
There exists is a disturbing pattern of Google conduct. Google went out of their way to placate a human-rights violating, totalitarian regime in order to preserve the ability to increase revenues. Google could have simply added disclaimers about disputed territories, unrecognized claims, or fictional maps. But they chose the path of greatest revenue.
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There exists is a disturbing pattern of Google conduct. Google went out of their way to placate a human-rights violating, totalitarian regime in order to preserve the ability to increase revenues. Google could have simply added disclaimers about disputed territories, unrecognized claims, or fictional maps. But they chose the path of greatest revenue.
Are we still talking about Kurdistan or did we just move on to China?
We moved on from China to Turkey to establish a pattern of trading revenue for granting the wishes of human-rights violating, totalitarian regimes.
Of course, the alternative is that no quid pro quo exists and rather that that Google does actually ideologically support Chinese censorship and surveillance and Turkish suppression of the Kurdish.
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I'm curious...
Assuming you were alive in 1861, would you have the same opinion about, say, just where the United States ended and the Confederate States began?
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Assuming you were alive in 1861, would you have the same opinion about, say, just where the United States ended and the Confederate States began?
Um .. yes?
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Re: Google is evil (Score:2)
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I wonder why Google cares what Turkey wants - surely Google can't be making much money in ads from Turkey. Perhaps Turkey has an ally here in the US who *could* do some damage to Google? Hmmmm..
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Who cares what Google executives care about, they should simply do their job on the international market and simply go with what ever the united nations goes with, what ever is their approved lines on a map and what ever are the undecided and in dispute ones and their extent. It is not up to Google to decide what the shape of the worlds countries are and present that to the public as reality, I mean really because of the consequences in disputes that kind of stuff should be illegal, depending upon how you p
Re: Google is evil (Score:2)
RTFA, already.
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Companies are not government agencies. They should have nothing to do with goverment decision making, in either direction.
But in this case there is no choice but to make a political statement. Removing the custom Kurdistan map is seen as siding with the Turkish government. Not removing it would be seen as siding against the Turkish government.
Sometimes when you're providing a service that is open to the public you don't get to choose to stay out of political faction politics. Your actions or lack thereof get you put on a definitive side regardless of what decision you make.
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Historical Revisionism (Score:5, Insightful)
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Does that matter? Google has maps for other things that don't exist. Google used to have a map of Middle Earth. This Kurdistan map wasn't actually Google's official world map, but a custom service on mymaps.google.com. And on that service you can find all sort of things, historical, fictional, informative, etc.
Google only took down this one map to appease the Turkish government, and not just within Turkey itself.
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Compared to everyone else in that region the Kurds are pretty decent.
Just don't make them annoyed with you.
It's only the Sikhs that have a better standard.
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One of the highest female genital mutilation rates in the region. Unapologetic and unironic marxist-leninist system.
It's true that enemy of your enemy can be your friend, but the enemy in question is all but gone for the West at this stage. Which means there's no need to maintain friendship with someone who's ideologically diametrically opposed to capitalism. And kurds are even more prone to fighting their civil wars in European countries after going there as refugees, and about as rapey as everyone else fr
Re:Nothing Worse (Score:5, Informative)
The Kurds are in deep economic trouble because they're practically under an embargo both from the central government in Baghdad as well as from Turkey, with Syria and Iran being absolutely no help. They do try to run a welfare state that they can't really afford, but the rest is you smoking crack. Capitalism is very much alive and well in Kurdistan.
Turkey is becoming another Islamic theocracy under Erdogan, the territory is strategically important but as allies they're in the "they're bastards, but they're our bastards" category. They're pissed off about the West and EU and is looking east to Russia for more dictator-friendly regimes. The Iraqi government can barely keep the country together, if it hadn't been for foreign military support and the Peshmerga most the country would be lost to IS.
They do seem to be one of the territories with a history of female genital mutilation though, I'll give you that. But hey they have women in the armed forces, this is not "stay at home and pop out babies in a burka"-Islam. The problem is that the creation of any Kurdistan - even just the independence of the Iraqi region - would set off a helluva chain reaction nobody wants to see where leads. But I think they've earned it.
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You're regurgitating stock grade current Western media propaganda, which demonstrates utter lack of familiarity with the region. Kurdish power structures themselves, such as PKK and YPG openly declare themselves marxist-leninist all the way from the time of founding to on the ground operations today. This is so uncontroversial, that it can be read on wikipedia if you're uninterested into wading into regions history and understanding how and why these people adopted these systems.
You're also utterly unaware
Why is the headline blue? (Score:2)
Normal stories get green headlines, and ads get brown. So what does blue mean?
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And now it's green. The heck?
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Are you a subscriber? /. used to release stories 'early' to them....
Next Steps (Score:1)
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What about Mexico (Score:2, Interesting)
Think about it from the point of view of Turkey. How about if Google showed a map of Mexico that included Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California? USA wouldn't be happy.
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There are many, many such maps " drawn by ancient" people and still used for "personal use or sharing through search." e.g., anything showing the borders before the Mexican-American war.
Nobody in the U.S. cares, least of all, the U.S. government.
Was it the name? (Score:3)
How about if Google showed a map of Mexico that included Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California? USA wouldn't be happy.
I doubt the United States would object to a historic map labeled "Mexico prior to American intervention". If it did, then a map of Mexico as of 1824 [wikimedia.org] would already have been removed from an article about American intervention in Mexico on an American website [wikipedia.org].
Would the map of Kurdish regions have been removed if its author eschewed the disputed name "Kurdistan" in favor of "Historically Kurdish regions of modern-day Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria"?
Re:What about Mexico (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the summary, no need to even go to TFA, you will see that Google deleted a personal map created by an individual on a service that exists for exactly that purpose - MyMaps.
If someone created a MyMap showing an ethnic region where there are many Latinos which extended into the U.S. and labelled it "LatinoLand" of something, why would the U.S. care, and why would it have any standing to demand that the personal map be deleted?
This is treating a personal map, showing a real ethnic group's real distribution, as if it were, say, child pornography -- something inherently criminal and illegal in all contexts.
And what should the Kurds call the region where Kurds actually live? "Place where the Kurd's live"? Seems reasonable, wouldn't you think? That is exactly what "Kurdistan" literally means.
places where kurd live is turkey not kurdistan (Score:2)
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Re:places where kurd live is turkey not kurdistan (Score:5, Interesting)
Then why is the Turkish government so fucked off about someone creating a map delineating the geographic boundaries of the areas in which Kurds live?
Sounds to me like the Turks want to commit another genocide. Hopefully the Kurds can avoid the same outcome the Armenians suffered.
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Sounds to me like the Turks want to commit another genocide. Hopefully the Kurds can avoid the same outcome the Armenians suffered.
Why hope for a different outcome? The Kurds would gladly pay that price to have a country to call their own.
I mean, Armenia exists and Kurdistan does not, with that being the only difference between the two groups so far. Both have suffered attempted genocide, so if the Kurds get the same outcome, they also get a country. See?
I know you meant that you hope that the Kurds do not experience more bloody slaughters. I just HAD to point out the naive interpretation despite that.
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Genocide doesn't assure any survivors gain independence.
Shit, genocide doesn't assure any survivors.
Re: What about Mexico (Score:2)
Google (Score:2)
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Calling a tail a leg (Score:2)
If someone wants to define a country called Kurdistan, or Palestine, or Candyland on a map, can't they extend to the users the ability to define such a country?
Hasbro might object to one of those.
As for the other two, I'd find it justified to map "historic Kurdish lands" and "historic Palestine", but "country" is a stretch. Just because you call something a country doesn't make it one. Recall a story [wordpress.com] that appears in the 1909 book Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln edited by Allen Thorndike Rice: If you call a tail a leg, a kangaroo has five legs but a cow only four. This is because a leg bears weight, and a cow's tail does not. Likewise, Kurdistan and Palestine fail
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When moving slowly, a kangaroo uses arms, legs, and tail all for weight bearing.
ethnicity and nationalism is tricky business (Score:2)
On the one hand the people of a geographically defined area should have every right to self determination, on the other hand basing self determination on ethnic majorities in arbitrarily defined regions isn't something that the modern more metropolitan world wants to be based on... but ethnic groups predominantly still is the dominant political organizing principle in the world.
So if we go with democracy and recognize that organizing along ethnic lines is a valid way to organize politically, then we should
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Except that the Turkish government has imposed their rules on the entire planet by having the map taken down. The map violates their laws so then they should have had Google make it so nobody in Turkey could view the map while leaving it up for everyone else to view.
This is not the first time (Score:2)
Sadly, this was not the first time Google caved in to Turkish demands. I mean, just a few years ago there was some kind of a video on Youtube that mocked Ataturk and caused an uproar in Turkish internet. Well, google took it down.
Internet Archive (Score:2)
Has anyone gone to the Internet Archive and tried to get the map from there? I get an error when it starts loading Google Maps but the border does show up. I think it's the way my browser is configured. If it had worked I was going to post a screen shot of the map on Twitter saying it's the map that Turkey doesn't the world to see. Maybe someone else can do it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
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Oops! Something went wrong. This page didn't load Google Maps correctly. See the JavaScript console for technical details.
For those unaware of the history of the region (Score:5, Informative)
Re palestine (Score:2)
There is no comparison to Palestine.
The Kurds already live in the area. And have proved themselves capable of operating an effective, fairly democratic state for many years. The Israelis had not lived there for centuries. An the Palestinians have proven themselves incapable of anything.
Your comment is nonsense.
When the CIA makes an offer (Score:2)
Now the truth sets in again with big US tech brands.
The USA used the Kurds for its own strategy of tension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] in the region.
Not to allow a US approved and supported "Kurdistan" to emerge.
Always read the fine print when the US gov and mil offers "support" for "democracy" and "freedom fighters".
There was no Genocide (Score:2)
Not much distance between erasing a map of a tribe's territory and deleting the entire history of the tribe.
There is no Tiananmen Square (Score:2)
Don't Google Turkish genocide of Armenians, or Chinese genocide of Muslims
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There are many extensive articles on both.
First, be evil. (Score:2)
Of course Google cannot explain how this private map violates its rules, because it doesn't. Every time some state official voices a desire, Google says Your wish is my command.
All hail Erdogan (Score:2)
Just leaving this trojan horse headline here for the Turkish thought police in case I ever have to go to the Ottoman empire on vacation, to prove my "support" for Turkish dictators.
Re:There's no such country as Kurdistan (Score:5, Insightful)
The winner writes the history. That is always the case.
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Quite literally... In this case, two people, british and french, who really had no clue as to what they were doing, have been shaping the world for almost a century. (source [wikipedia.org])
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And this is as opposed to all the indigenous peoples who were disorganized and allowed themselves to be colonized by the Brits and Frenchies?
There is no such thing as a native peoples. We are all conquerors. Might always makes right. The strong united tribes displace and subjugate the weaker tribes. This is how it must be. As we speak a weak and disunited United States of America is being colonized by Latino's. As we speak a weak politically correct European Union is being taken over by a strong and
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The future is for the strong. The strong inevitably become week and compliant until they are conquered. Then the cycle repeats.
This is a general rule, but there are exceptions, especially China. Throughout history, China has expanded by allowing themselves to be conquered, and then demographically swamping and absorbing the invaders. They won by out breeding their enemies rather than out fighting them.
This happened with the Xiong Nu (Huns), Mongols (90% of Mongols today are Chinese) and the Manchus.
Even Tibet first became part of China in the 1st millennium when the Tibetan Empire [wikipedia.org] invaded and conquered large parts of Sichuan and
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The British and French are responsible for a lot of problems in Southwest Asia, but not this one. The fate of the Kurds was sealed by Turkish victory in the 1919-1922 War of Independence [wikipedia.org]. The British and French were the losers, along with their Greek and Armenian allies.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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You could own 99.9% of the shares in a company, but if it's not preferred (voting) stock, you have no say in how the company runs.
While I'm quite happy you understand the subtleties of a Constitutional Republic government, its (mostly) the common stock that has the voting privileges. Preferred stock has no voting privileges. If it makes you feel any better, I've never really understood what makes preferred stock "preferable".
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In 2018 does it have to be? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re: In 2018 does it have to be? (Score:1, Insightful)
A big reason why black lives matter became a thing is because they lied and the leftist press covered it up or even pushed their lies as truth.
That plus the now common anti-white racism even when the cop being targeted is black, boggle, go figure on that one when blm fools call black cops racist.
FTFY
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when blm fools call black cops racist.
Are you suggesting that black cops can't be racist?
Go back to your potato, Russian stooge.
Re: In 2018 does it have to be? (Score:2)
BLM got huge press coverage - it was never a *popular* movement - because it was bankrolled by billionaire Nazi collaborator George Soros and embraced by the semi-official fake news media as a tactic to divide the working class along racist lines.
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BLM got huge press coverage - it was never a *popular* movement - because it was bankrolled by billionaire Nazi collaborator George Soros and embraced by the semi-official fake news media as a tactic to divide the working class along racist lines.
Lizard people.
You forgot to mention the lizard people.
Re: In 2018 does it have to be? (Score:2)
There are no lizard people. Just good old fashioned suitcases full of money and racist divide & conquer tactics.
Re:There's no such country as Kurdistan (Score:5, Interesting)
Right, 2500 years ago when the Ten Thousand invaded Karduchia (in order to pass through it and escape the Persian Empire) they were victorious in their strategic retreat. They fought a running battle from the southern border, in what is now Iraq, all the way north into Western Armenia, where the people were much more accepting of strangers. (!)(lol)
The Karduchians had previously been famously invaded by 1 million Persian cavalry, none (!) of whom made it home. If you look at the topo map, you can see a really really long valley, not a river valley but rather the remnants of an ancient mountain chain, with steep sides and no exits but at the ends, something like 50 or 100 miles apart. They blocked the end with their army, and the whole length of the trench was lined with villagers throwing down stones.
The Greeks took a different route; they captured a guide, and went right through the heart of the land, down the twisting mountain roads that the Karduchians used for local traffic. Without a guide, you just go in circles, but with a guide, (and heavy infantry) they were able to fight from ridge to ridge in two teams.
And later Xenophon wrote that history down. So it is too late to erase Karduchia merely by winning some war, because victors of yesteryear already wrote it down. And being that they had no intention of war, the Greeks merely wanted to pass through the land, they give an honest and direct account. The Kurds refused to even negotiate for passage at all, but they did negotiate and respect temporary cease-fires for both sides to recover and bury the dead.
Usage of language (Score:2)
What i find amazing is how this is not a English native language text. There is a few odd formats here and there, a few odd structures. And a really big masturbary focus on "Persian military numbers", written like somebody was dragging their jock strap like a mad man while hammering the keyboards tangents.
I don't have a opinion on this text, but i have seen similar expressions used when doing direct translation of various Arabic dialects.
What this strikes me as, is that the Text is intended to be a Strong O
Re:Usage of language (Score:4, Interesting)
Greek isn't really that difficult to translate into English.
For historical reasons. ;)
The "million" Persian cavalry was cited in the story as a rumor. Other military numbers are given by visual estimate, and there are detailed descriptions of the military engagements and who was where, who fought who, etc. The Ten Thousand is how many professional soldiers the Greeks had with them; that's just the people with full heavy armor. Each of them had a bunch of helpers, and there were lots of light units with them. They had numerous generals, and while Xenophon started as just a mercenary, he quickly rose during the campaign to be a general.
They describe the numbers because it was important to the story, if you assume that the intended audience would have their own military experience from that era. And for the same reason, the observations of numbers in the story are likely to be fairly accurate. I'm not sure why you presume that any sort of literary detail that you're not personally interested in must be "masturbary."[sic] And honestly, commentary on an English translation by a person who doesn't know the word masturbatory is a bit of an exercise in, well, you get it.
But absolutely, a story about an army that had to travel that far to get home, fighting through most of the lands as they went, is going to have a certain "mad man dragging his jock strap" character to it; because that is what it is like to engage in that sort of activity. If you're not ready to be mad, you're not ready to get home, you might as well dig your grave where you stand.
I don't think the Greeks cared at all about Arabic society, and they certainly didn't go that far south. They marched from Ionia through Turkey to what is now Syria, and crossed into Persia from the west. A route that was not considered wise at the time, but they were imposing enough to manage it. They fought a major battle with the Persians near what is now Baghdad. They were victorious in their own engagements, but the Persian prince they were fighting for died in the battle, and so their side had lost, and the story is their journey home. Most of the story takes places in Karduchia and Western Armenia.
I'm sure there were a few Arabs in the Persian army somewhere, but it wasn't part of the story. It is only in the last few hundred years that the Arab population have been that far north to border the Kurds.
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Their fake asses deserve their own Google maps.
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Can we erase Turkey, the real problem child of the region? Google made a big mistake and will be judged for this. This is political censorship on the "open" internet.
Re: There's no such country as Kurdistan (Score:2, Informative)
There was no country called Israel for 1900 years either. The last long-term ruler of the area was the Ottoman Empire so the former citizens of that have a far better claim on the area than a bunch of European refugees.
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Sure there was. You should check out all the references in the bible to "The Land of Israel", "The People of Israel", "the Borders of Israel." You're just confused into thinking if it didn't happen in the last hundred years it shouldn't be counted.
M
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Sorry, but your bible is a work of fiction. Do you have a real source?
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Re: There's no such country as Kurdistan (Score:5, Informative)
The state of Israel ceased to exist under the Roman Empire. I didn't say it never existed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Re: There's no such country as Kurdistan (Score:2)
1900 years is more than an "interruption"
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Thank you for your incredibly useful input. It added so much to the discussion.
Re: There's no such country as Kurdistan (Score:2)
What about them
Not RO
Re: There's no such country as Kurdistan (Score:2)
Depends on the leftist mate. I've got no time for religious fanatics of any stripe and there is plenty of that on both sides. The Israelis don't have any right to the former Ottoman province of Palestine just because their holy book says God gave it to them 4000 years ago. That doesn't give the Palestinians the right to murder the Israelis.
Re: There's no such country as Kurdistan (Score:2)
Conversely, there have been serious and significant human rights violations against the Palestinians by Israel.
And there haven't been any human rights violations against Israelis by Palestine, eh?
And Israel's current ultra-right-wing government is not showing any signs of changing that.
Whereas Palestine's current ultra-right-wing government is all about change, right?
This is why people assume you hate the Jews. You make a halfhearted effort to criticize Palestinians for indoctrinating their kids, and then turn around and lambast Israel with terminology which would apply even more strongly to the Palestinians.
For my part, I understand that this is just the limp-wristed-left's knee jerk reaction to back th
Re: There's no such country as Kurdistan (Score:2)
You're on crack. The actual number is around 300,000. Out of a total population of 81 million.
Compare that to Israel with about 1.5 million Muslims and 170,000 Christians, out of a total population of just under 9 million.
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Borders are not as well defined as some like them to be.
Border disputes happen for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes a border line is considered when it hits a river. Now over time such river will change, and give more land to one entity and less from the other, or even more complex the river bends to a point where there is an island, then which municipality owns that?
We have other areas such as districts where a particular culture resides where there is no formal border. Like the Italian District or
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Just as you can find Palistine under the similar name Philistine on biblical-era maps, you can find Karduchia too.
If you read Anabasis by Xenophon, he describes in detail their northwest border, which is currently in land claimed by Turkey. If you use a topo map, you can see that their traditional land includes most of a mountain range that goes from just north and east of the Euphrates river in modern Iraq, north to their border with the land that was traditionally Western Armenia, east in Iran, and south
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by integration of the Kurds into their society
Kurds don't want to be integrated into Turkey.
separations (Score:2)
...and maybe the British empire should integrate its rebel colonies (such as the USA).
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If you replace "integrate" with "assimilate" (very much in the Borg sense), you actually have a correct statement there.