Among the many other things wrong in Barbara Lerner’s awful article (via Andrew) in National Review was this:

His [Ataturk’s] Ottoman predecessors — the remarkable men who ruled Turkey and much of the rest of the known world before him — treated foreign ideas in a quite similar manner for centuries, before closing themselves off to Western developments in the 19th century and falling behind the West.

This gets things almost exactly backwards. Ottoman interest in Westernization and modernization became much greater in the nineteenth century starting under Selim III, and then not until the late 1830s with the beginning of the Tanzimat era did reform have a significant effect on matters beyond the military. It is beyond ridiculous to refer to Ataturk in one breath as a great modernizer and then ignore the decades of modernizing reformers that preceded him. The 1908 revolution, the Young Turks, and Kemalism didn’t just come out of nowhere. This passage is typical of the entire slapdash article. Didn’t anyone over there even bother to read this before publishing it?