It would be an understatement to say that there's a bit of bad blod between the Greeks and the Turks, who once ruled Greece, and much of the Balkans, in it's former incarnation as the Ottoman Empire.

And the ancient feud is not limited to fighter jet skirmishes above an Aegean island with a population of two goats and a colony of lizards. Countless feuds on messageboards, forums and websites bear witness to the virtual war of words, and images.

It's the latter which has now led the Istanbul First Criminal Peace Court to order the video sharing site YouTube blocked by the dominant Turkish internet provider, Turk Telekom, a state-run monopoly until it was privatized in 2005.

It seems a Greek member of YouTube had uploaded a mock-up video lampooning the father of the modern Turkish nation, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the Turkish people as homosexuals, as part of a "virtual war'' between Greeks and Turks on YouTube, with people from both sides posting videos to belittle and berate the other.

Visitors to the YouTube site from Turkey were greeted with the message: ``Access to this site has been blocked by a court decision! ...''

A message in both Turkish and English at the bottom of the page said, ``Access to www.youtube.com site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2007/384 dated 06.03.2007 of Istanbul First Criminal Peace Court.''
[...]
On its front page Wednesday, the newspaper Hurriyet said thousands of people had written to YouTube and that the Ataturk videos had been removed from the site. ``YouTube got the message,'' the headline said.

Insulting Ataturk or ``Turkishness'' is a crime in Turkey punishable by prison.

It's ironic that the very law against insulting the nation and Atatürk (whose goal was the almost total Westernisation of Turkey), used to prosecute, amongst many others, Nobel Prize winner for Literature Orhan Pamuk, is now one of the greatest sumbling blocks on the road to Turkish membership in the European Union.