Turkish News Anchor Appears in Blackface to Report on Obama

[whopis01]

http://www.breitbart.tv/?p=314743

WTF is wrong with people? I mean, really, wtf is wrong with them?

[Ian David]

1. Is this the Turkish version of "Red Eye" or "The Factor"? n/t

[flor de jasmim]

2. "We are all African Americans now"? Anyone know what he was saying?

[Bicoastal]

3. Somewhere, Glenn Beck is hastily scrapping plans for Friday's show. n/t

[whopis01]

4. That made me laugh out loud.... n/t

[jobycom]

8. Ha! nt

[burning rain]

13. Probably Glenn Beck......

or more likely, Greg Gutfeld, is preparing a monologue on how this shows that there's so much more good sense in Turkey, whereas humorless Americans have banished Sambo and the like, and it was all just good fun, really!

[hedgehog]

5. Not everyone shares our history.

[Marrah_G]

6. Someone must have forgotten to tell him how offensive that is to Americans.

[Igel]

11. I had a problem many years ago.

I was teaching Russian, and the textbook used the word "shit'". It's the Russian word for "to sew", and in most Americans' pronunciation it just sounds like "shit". I had to belabor the point that the word meant "sew", not "crap".

Some of my students were offended at the word, and I had to dwell on the point that when Russians say "shit'" the meaning 'feces' is not occurring to them. When they say "vyshit" they simply mean "embroidered", not "crapified". Russians do not speak Russian while monitoring what Americans might think their speech stream sounds like to monolingual Americans any more than Americans, speaking English, ponder what a monolingual Russian would "hear" them saying at times. Both focus on content, not form; form is primarily a way of conveying content, in most settings.

I told them that when somebody from another culture does something, or a person speaking another language says something, the key is to try to understand, first and foremost, what that other person means. That they had to put aside their petty, ethnocentric ideas, be ever so slightly humble, and seek to understand before judging, esp. when the person's audience is people from his/her own culture. I kept telling my students that they were not *that* important to the average Russian, the universe did not revolve around them any more than it did around their Russian peers. If the person is trying to offend you, be offended; if the person is not, don't be an ass.

That greatly offended some students. It rather made me happy. I managed to say two true things that offended them instead of just one. The first was fairly trivial; the second was rather important. It was a class worth its 50 minutes.

[burning rain]

12. Of course, there's also "smelyi khor" -- good for a laugh.

^

[jobycom]

7. All the translations I've seen say he was trying to show respect to Obama.

No reason to believe that Turkey has the same traditions and symbols as the US.

[TheWraith]

9. Someone should remind him we've invaded countries for a lot less than that.

A LOT less.

[soothsayer]

10. I hope he opened with Well hello der, sapphire!