Ataturk sent several Turkish staff officers to Afghanistan, helped them build their own army.

We speak Turkish at home, and I can speak the language. I have a lot of family there - I try to fly to Turkey once a year when I have holidays.

Turkey is not an enemy of Israel. I have worked closely with the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The Shat-el-Arab is a noble river or estuary. From both its Persian and Turkish shores, however, mountains have disappeared, and dark forests of date palms intersected by canals fringe its margin heavily, and extend to some distance inland.

The Turkish, Arab and Chinese nationalists who built new nation-states out of the ruins of old empires scorned their old, decrepit rulers as much as they did the foreign imperialists who imposed free trade through gunboats.

Ataturk approved of the mevlevi dervish approach to God as being 'an expression of Turkish genius' that reclaimed Islam from what he saw as hide-bound, backward Arab tradition.

It is beneficial for Turkish democracy that not all religious conservatives are united under one banner.

The Turkish Embassy in Washington is an ornate, eclectic building on the corner of Twenty-third Street and Massachusetts Avenue which was built originally for Edward Hamlin Everett, the man who put the crimp in bottle caps.

Urfa chillies are a Turkish variety that are mild on heat but big on aroma. They're sweet, smoky, a lovely dark red, and go with just about anything.

I write with humour about sadness, to introduce an element of sweet to the sour, a bit like Turkish food.

Various Turkish people invaded southwest Asia during the Middle Ages and carved an empire for themselves from lands occupied by the indigenous Semitic and Indo-European inhabitants.

Moreover, as the leadership of the House confirmed last year, the Administration remains opposed to a congressional resolution on the Armenian Genocide due to Turkish objections. This approach sends absolutely the wrong signal to Turkey and to the rest of the world.

In the 20th century, the Muslim world created a vision of religious nationalism. Turkey, for example, had to be ethnically Turkish. Kurds, Armenians, other minorities didn't have a place in such a vision of a nation-state.

Turkish cuisine is, to my mind, one of the most exciting and accomplished in the world.

My visit to the United States has also given me the opportunity to emphasize the objective of establishing close and intensive links between the Turkish and American peoples, scholars and businessmen.

If Turkish or Moroccan boys misbehave here, it's up to us to re-educate them and, when necessary, to punish them.

My message to the Turkish people is never to view any military intervention positively because through military intervention, democracy cannot be achieved.

By very conservative estimates, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the early 1990s; one index is the flight of more than a million Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital, Diyarbakir, from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside.

I speak Farsi, German, Dari, and I understand Turkish, but I haven't used it since 1985, so I'm a bit rusty.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.