BU SİTEYE ERİŞİM ENGELLENMİŞTİR!!

This is the message I was greeted with while I was doing some early evening Internet thuggin' before a night out in Istanbul. As I browsed a couple of my favorite sites for a quick dl on everything that's popping in the world over the last month (the kid is way out of touch), I stumbled across a blank screen where a video was definitely supposed to be. Now, if this was Pornhub and I was really in the mood and had gotten blocked I would have been pissed and gone off memory (the kid is way out of touch). But in this case, it only peeked my curiosity. After a couple of failed refresh attempts, I figured I might as well go straight to the source: YouTube.

Translated from Turkish, this intimidating amalgamation of weirdly accented s's (weird because obviously English rules the world) and caps lock means, “Access to this site has been denied by court order!”

After some hardbody googling I found out the deal. In early 2007, Greek and Turkish YouTube users were beefing like it was the Byzantine days all over again. Aside from straight up dissing Turkishness (a crime punishable by jail time), the Greeks also got at the one man you don't touch, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Atatürk was the founder of the Turkish Republic, Turkey's first president, and overall "theman." According to The Times Online, there were several videos of Greeks accusing big A of homosexuality, followed by a retaliation snap about how Greece is the "birthplace of homosexuality."

I obviously haven't seen any of these videos, but I can only imagine the types of jokes from both sides. And as badly as I want to offer up a few of my own estimations, I am still in Istanbul and fly to Tel Aviv in about 2 hours. The amount of jail time a Jew Atatürk basher would receive isn't worth it. But please, by all means, try your hand at it. U-S-A!!