Turkey’s Circus in Washington
14th April 2016
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasing Third-Worldish authoritarianism is taking new turns: it is now visible outside Turkey.
At the same time as Erdogan was heading for Washington for a nuclear security summit, the two journalists who he asserted last year “will pay a heavy price” had to stand trial at a second hearing on charges of espionage and terrorism, and with life sentences hanging over their heads. Their “espionage and terrorism” activity concerned a story they ran in May 2015 detailing how Turkish intelligence was transporting weapons to Islamist fighters in Syria.
Free speech is not a Muslim value. (Neither is democracy, really.)