When Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006 he was already in the international spotlight. A year earlier he had been put on trial for asserting that there had been mass killing of Armenians and Kurds in Turkey.
The pundits were still celebrating the liberation of Egypt from 60 years of pharaonic rule when the news no one wanted to believe began filtering back. Censorship by omission is in vogue again because of a reluctance, bordering on paralysis, to recognize there is no law and no order. Samples:
Good Muslims don't imbibe champagne, of course (at least in front of one another), but now's the time to pick up the empty bottles from a mighty elixir the thousands left in the wake of the revolution. The cheers, fireworks and dancing are over, too.
"If I donate my fortune to buy food," he once told an interviewer, "all of Egypt eats today, eats tomorrow, and the day after that they are starving again."
