All Wordpress.com blogs blocked in Turkey

I tried to visit orgtheory.net today and received a message saying that the site had been blocked by a Turkish civil court.  I got this message before when I tried to read a politics blog at CNN and found it annoying, but I didn’t investigate the story until today.

It turns out that lawyers working for Adnan Oktar, Turkey’s premier eccentric Muslim creationist whose work was profiled recently by the New York Times and the Economist, convinced a Turkish civil court to block all websites hosted on Wordpress.com because a few blogs supposedly contained libelous statements about Oktar.*

Matt from Wordpress.com posted the letter from Oktar’s lawyers and then invited suggestions about what he and the WP team should do on his own blog.  The comments there are pretty interesting, with noticeable frustration by Turkish bloggers that WP has chosen to stand on the sidelines, and one very practical question about upholding WP’s terms of service:  What responsibility (or capability) does WP have to monitor the websites it hosts for libelous material when said material is in a foreign language?

If there’s one really sad aspect of this story, it’s that the mainstream media hasn’t picked up on it at all.  When Turkey banned YouTube the news was everywhere, and the decision was reversed in a couple days.  Here it looks like a few old fogies on a civil court made a brash decision affecting millions and yet there’s hardly a stir.

*Oktar is definitely blogworthy, and I thought about writing a post on him in July, but something kept me from doing so.  I can’t remember exactly what, but perhaps I didn’t want to tangle with a guy who dresses like this.  His Wikipedia entry is extensive, but if you want a real treat, peruse his publications, which includes “Skilful Dam Constructors: Beavers,” “Fascism: The Bloody Ideology of Darwinism,” and “The Miracle of Talking Birds” (a companion to this week’s popular story about the death of Alex, the talking parrot?).  Of course, the one I’ll be reading next is “The Evil of Mockery.”