Turkey's first hotel for nudists welcomes foreign guests to bare all !

Turkey's first hotel for nudists welcomes foreign guests to bare all !

Last updated at 11:36 AM on 26th April 2010

British holidaymakers in Turkey are being invited to shed their inhibitions and their swimming costumes with the launch of the country’s first naturist hotel.

Visitors to the Adaburnu-Golmar hotel on the country's Aegean coast, set to open on May 1st, will be able to work on full-body tans in the resort grounds and will also be able to take advantage of the hotel’s private nudist beach, a short drive away.

Guests will be able to dine 'au naturel' at beside the Turkish hotel's pool

Hotel guests will have to cover up indoors but can eat ‘au-naturel’ at the pool bar and outdoor dining terrace from 8am to 8pm.

The beach in front of the hotel, near the popular resorts of Marmaris and Bodrum, is a public area so off limits to nudists but the resort is offering guests the chance to sunbathe as nature intended on a private beach, located a 20-minute drive away.

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"Nudism is allowed inside the hotel premises, but not on the nearby public beaches," Ahmet Cosar, bookings manager at the Adaburnu-Golmar hotel told local newspaper Milliyet.

The hotel's private naturist beach is located on the Aegean coast and will be open exclusively to foreigners

The private naturist beach will be open exclusively to foreigners and the hotel will spare any blushes by providing a free shuttle bus to and from the beach.

Facilities at the 600-metre beach include sunbeds, umbrellas, showers and a beach bar serving cocktails and food.

Nude sunbathers will, however, have to share their beach with the goats and chickens that belong to the hotel owners.

Waterslides, a fitness centre and hamman are all in the offing at the Adaburnu-Golamr hotel plus a shuttle service to a nearby naturist beach

The hotel, which is near the town of Datca and bills itself as a ‘lovely new family-owned hotel’, opens on 1st May. Other facilities at the hotel include a large pool with waterslides, a Turkish hammam, a fitness centre, boules and table tennis.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk /

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A family quarrel !

Turkey's president

A family quarrel !

Is Abdullah Gul ready to challenge Recep Tayyip Erdogan ?

Apr 15th 2010 | ANKARA | From The Economist print edition

A Turk in his palace

THE elegant office of President Abdullah Gul says something about Turkey. Its bay window looks out over Ankara. On a wall hang landscapes by an Armenian Ottoman court artist, Ivan Aivasovsky. Under Mr Gul’s predecessor, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, the window was walled in and the Aivasovskys rotted in the cellar. A dour former judge, Mr Sezer rarely travelled. Mr Gul completed his 61st foreign visit as president (to Oman) this week. Overtly pious, yet pro-Western and a free-marketeer, Mr Gul symbolises the new global ambitions of his country.

To most of the world Mr Gul is a moderate, who in five years as foreign minister balanced the excesses of his mercurial prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Mr Erdogan publicly sparred with Israel, but Mr Gul quietly lobbied Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions. Mr Erdogan stands for charisma, Mr Gul for common sense. But now an undeclared battle is brewing: Mr Erdogan is believed to covet the presidency, but Mr Gul wants to keep it.

One problem is that nobody, not even Mr Gul, seems to know when his term expires. “Do I have seven years or five years? I don’t know,” Mr Gul says. The trouble is that when parliament (dominated by Mr Erdogan’s mildly Islamist Justice and Development, or AK, party) elected Mr Gul to the job in 2007, it introduced changes to have the next president directly elected by voters for a renewable five-year term. The question is whether Mr Gul can benefit from this and run again; or whether he, like previous presidents, can serve only a single seven-year term and step down in 2014.

Legal opinion is divided, but politics will surely prevail. The Gul camp argues that the president is entitled to another term. Mr Erdogan’s allies disagree. “Mr Erdogan supported Mr Gul’s presidency. It’s his turn to make sacrifices for Mr Erdogan,” says a source close to the prime minister. A general election is due next year. Should AK win a third term, Mr Erdogan may be tempted to use the mandate to elevate himself into the presidency. Some believe that the AK’s latest attempts to reform the constitution, including measures to enhance the president’s powers, are tailored for Mr Erdogan to take the job. But what if Mr Gul decides to stand against him? That could split the party and even bring down the government.

The party faithful ridicule this idea. In Islamic tradition, they argue, the ambitions of any individual are set aside for the common good of the umma, or community. They may be right. Mr Gul and Mr Erdogan began their careers in Turkey’s Islamist movement and have been close for years. They co-founded AK and secured its first election victory, in 2002. Mr Gul was prime minister to start with, as Mr Erdogan could not take his parliamentary seat until March 2003, when he made Mr Gul foreign minister.

Differences between the two did not surface until 2007, when Mr Gul announced his bid for the presidency, apparently against Mr Erdogan’s wishes. The chief of staff, Yasar Buyukanit, promptly threatened a coup, on the grounds that Mr Gul’s wife, Hayrunissa, wears the Islamic headscarf (banned in state institutions), making her husband unfit to be president. Mr Erdogan then called a snap election, giving Mr Gul a platform to campaign for his presidency. When AK won again, with an even bigger share of the vote than in 2002, Mr Gul duly got the job.

This was a huge blow to the generals. Had Mr Gul not stuck to his guns, their views might have prevailed. Mr Gul’s mild demeanour disguises the steely will that first led him to rebel against Necmettin Erbakan, founder of Turkey’s political Islamists, who was ousted as prime minister in a “soft coup” in 1997. Although he does not have Mr Erdogan’s popular support, he retains influence inside AK. But will he keep it when Mr Erdogan draws up candidates’ lists for the next election?

Much may depend on the election result. Should AK do relatively badly, Mr Erdogan’s presidential ambitions will be squashed and Mr Gul might count himself lucky to have his seven years. What is clear is that, so long as Turkey’s opposition parties are ineffectual, the only serious challenges to AK come from within.

http://www.economist.com

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İsmail Aramaz has been posted to Sofia !

Foreign Ministry reshuffle promotes younger diplomats !

President Abdullah Gül has approved a decree reshuffling key ambassadorial posts at the Foreign Ministry, including postings to London, Moscow, Rome, Tel Aviv and Balkan capitals.

Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu personally telephoned the ambassadors subject to the reshuffle in order to let them know about their assignments and also spoke to their spouses and thanked them for their support.

According to the decree, Turkey’s Ambassador to Israel Ahmet Oğuz Çelikkol, who was publicly humiliated by a senior Israeli official in January, has been posted back to Ankara. Çelikkol will be replaced Kerim Uras, a young diplomat with expertise on Cyprus affairs. Foreign Ministry sources said Çelikkol could be posted abroad in the next decree since the ministry has “a high opinion of him.”

The posting in Tel Aviv will be Uras’ first ambassadorship as the decree in general is a reflection of Foreign Minister Davutoğlu’s approach of appointing younger diplomats to senior posts.

In a major reshuffling in August that included new appointments to 45 key positions, ambassadors who have served only one tour abroad dominated key diplomatic positions, including deputy undersecretary posts.

Ambassador Hüseyin Diriöz, currently the top foreign policy adviser to the Turkish president, has been posted to Rome. The outgoing ambassador in Rome, Ali Yakıtal, was last month recalled to Ankara in line with diplomatic protocol as he is the subject of an ongoing investigation over charges of “sexual harassment.”

Ambassador Aydın Sezgin, who is currently serving as the director general for intelligence at the Foreign Ministry and who is known for his expertise on the Armenian issue, has been posted to Moscow. This is also Sezgin’s first posting abroad as ambassador, although he served as Turkey’s consul general in Paris under the title of ambassador in the first half of this decade.

Ambassador Ünal Çeviköz, the deputy undersecretary of the Turkish Foreign Ministry for the Caucasus and Central Asia, who has been closely involved in normalization efforts with Armenia, has been posted to London, replacing Ambassador Yiğit Alpogan.

Among those who have become ambassador for the first time with this decree is Foreign Ministry spokesman Burak Özügergin, who has been posted to Zagreb at a time when Turkey’s focus on the Balkans affairs is intense.

İsmail Aramaz has been posted to Sofia, Ali Rıza Çolak to Belgrade and Gürol Sökmensüer to Skopje -- all of three have been appointed ambassador for the first time. Another young diplomat who will for the first time serve as ambassador is İnan Özyıldız, the current deputy director general for security affairs. Özyıldız has been posted to Beirut as Turkey’s former ambassador to Lebanon, Serdar Kılıç, was recently appointed the new secretary-general of the National Security Council (MGK), an institution that brings together top civilian and military officials. According to the decree, which will become official after being published in the Official Gazette, Ali Savut has been posted to Lisbon in order to replace Kaya Türkmen, who has been posted to Lefkoşa; Akın Algan to Tunisia; Murat Adalı to Jakarta; Nihat Civaner to Kinshasa; Ali Rıfat Köksal to Abuja; Lale Ülker to Astana; Tanju Sümer to Bern; and Aslı Üğdül to Senegal.

Ambassador Oğuz Demiralp, who was posted as ambassador to Bern in the summer of 2009, meanwhile, has been appointed as Turkey’s permanent representative to the United Nations office in Geneva.

05 April 2010,Monday
SÜLEYMAN KURT ANKARA

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Online Muslim sex shop in the Netherlands is all halal !

From The Times

March 31,2010

Online Muslim sex shop in the Netherlands is all halal !

Roger Boyes,Berlin

It’s not quite the Kama Sutra or The Joy of Sex but it does offer a similar kind of assistance: the first online sex shop for the Islamic world has opened in the Netherlands.

But there is nothing sleazy about “El Asira” — “Society” in Arabic. Indeed, the website looks positively demure. The home page depicts a street divided by a line; women customers click on the left of the line, men on the right. Inside the shop — navigable in Arabic, English and Dutch — customers can shop for massage oils, cocoa butter lubricants and aphrodisiacs such as Pure Power, a capsule that claims to “heighten male performance, desire and pleasure”.

Whether these services will also heighten the pleasure of religious fundamentalists or Dutch Islamophobes remains to be seen. Tensions run high in the country of Geert Wilders, the far-Right politician who has denounced what he calls a “tsunami of Islamification” of the Netherlands; six years ago the film-maker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim for making a documentary about Muslim women.

The founder of the website has been careful to take religious advice and so far his business has been a hit. “We had 70,000 hits in the first four days,” said Abdelaziz Aouragh, a Dutch citizen born and raised in Amsterdam of Moroccan parents. His aim, he says, is to change the idea that Islam is in some way hostile to women.

“The image of women in the kitchen, submissive, dressed in a burka isn’t true,” he told the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad. “There is a lot of love. Islam has a lot of respect for women. Our shop puts the woman at the centre of things.”

To be on the safe side, Mr Aouragh consulted Boularia Houari, who preaches in various Dutch mosques and gives lessons in the Koran. The imam told him: “It’s important in Islam that both men and women reach orgasm. If a woman is not satisfied, she will use impure methods such as masturbation or vibrators.”

Another imam, Abdul Jabbar, also said that there was no fundamental objection to selling sexual aids providing that they were not toys and were sold only to married couples.

It is unclear how the online shop will determine the marital status of its clients but it does make a big point of trying to treat sex with respect. All ingredients are halal, that is to say, permissible under Islam. None of the products displays naked people and there are no vibrators or pornography in stock. Even the mildly racey pink panties are said to be halal.

“We want to share with other Muslims in a positive way our contribution to a broader view of sexuality and eroticism within the Muslim community,” the website says. The shop seems set to stay online for the time being, unwilling to risk the wrath of more conservative clerics who warn of the corruption of morals of second-generation Muslim immigrants.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk /

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