Father knows best

Despite having pretensions of joining the European Union, Turkey continues to undermine its own candidacy with a series of draconian measures intended to silence critics of the state and censor speech it deems unbecoming. The latest in the series involves Google's video-sharing site, YouTube.

A Turkish court ordered this week that access to YouTube be blocked in the country starting Wednesday after a video allegedly insulting Mustafa Kemal "Ataturk" ("Father of the Turks"), the founder of modern Turkey, was posted on the video-sharing site. Paul Doany, head of Turk Telekom, Turkey's largest telecommunications provider, said his company began immediately enforcing the ban instituted by an Istanbul court, CBS News reports.

The video that led to the ban allegedly insulted Ataturk, an action punishable by jail time in Turkey. That is among a litany of speech crimes punishable in Turkey, which also forbids speech deemed insulting to "Turkishness" or questioning the unity of the Turkish state - as well as a host of other "crimes," including contradicting the official Turkish version of history.

Under Article 301 of Turkish law, Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk was charged for comments he made during an interview with a Swiss newspaper, and other authors have been taken to court for the words "spoken" by characters in their works of fiction.

The ban on YouTube comes as Turkish media has publicized a "virtual war" on YouTube in the last week between Turks and Greeks, with videos being posted by both sides that attack and insult each other.