Pluralism in Turkey: A Fairy Tale
28th December 2014
Davutoglu’s Putin-Medvedev-style master, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is notorious for his Sunni supremacist (and anti-Alevi) views. During his election campaign in 2011, he reminded tens of thousands of party fans at rallies in seven different cities that his political rival and main opposition leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, was an Alevi. “You know, he is an Alevi,” Erdogan told crowds in a cynical way while thousands booed “the Alevi Kilicdaroglu.” In that election, Erdogan’s votes in all seven cities rose from the previous election.
Only three weeks before Davutoglu’s speech, a professional German-Turkish footballer, Deniz Naki, announced that he decided to leave his club and Turkey following a religious and racist attack. Naki, who in the past was the victim of abuses and insults for being a Kurdish Alevi and carrying a tattoo revealing his faith, had been attacked by unknown assailants in Ankara and suffered minor injuries. “This is the first warning,” the assailants told him. The footballer said he now feared to go out alone in Ankara and had decided to leave Turkey for Germany.
Tolerance in Islam is an aberration, not a virtue.
December 29th, 2014 at 04:24
Why should I care about barely-controlled government sponsored hatred in Turkey, when barely-controlled government sponsored hatred is wrecking my country? Instead of “Kurd” or “Alevi,” here the haters screen “racist,sexist,homophobe,rapist,fascist…” and have for decades.
Just as Governor Sahin was tacitly rewarded for his hate, so were Sarkeesian, Sharpton;… why bother to listen them individually: almost the entire elite of America could be on the list.