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No
Racism in Turkey?
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"Thank
God, there is no anti-Semitism in Turkey," Deputy Prime Minister
Bulent Arinc (left) told leaders of Turkey's dwindling Jewish community
(right) in a speech reopening the Great Synagogue in Edirne last month.
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Ostensibly, it was a merry event. A week before Passover, hundreds of
Turkish Jews from Istanbul gathered in the western city of Edirne for the
reopening of the Great Synagogue, which had closed its doors in 1969 and
had remained a ruin since then, until it was recently restored.
In the days after the high-profile ceremony, the Great Synagogue would
go back to its quieter days, as there are no
longer Jews in Edirne, and only 17,000 in the whole of Turkey.
Turkey's notoriously anti-Semitic and Islamist government did its best
to entertain the congregation by sending two bigwigs to the ceremony. One
of them, Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc, made
a speech that, otherwise, could have caused bursts of laughter at the
synagogue. "Thank God," he said, "There is no
anti-Semitism in Turkey." His next remarks showed even darker humor.
He said: "There is no racism in Turkey; it has never found a base
for its roots. When we look at Europe and other countries we see how far
behind us they are, and we feel really sorry."
The second official guest at the ceremony, Governor Dursun Sahin, is
no stranger to readers of this journal. Last November, Sahin
threatened to forbid post-restoration prayers at the Great Synagogue and
turn it, instead, into a museum. He said he would not allow prayers at
the synagogue because Israeli security forces had attacked the al-Aqsa
mosque in Jerusalem. Then he admitted
his "huge hatred":
While those bandits [Israeli security
forces] blow winds of war inside al-Aqsa and slay Muslims, we build their
synagogues. I say this with a huge hatred inside me. We clean their
[Jewish] graveyards, send their projects to boards. But the synagogue
here will be registered only as a museum, and there will be no
exhibitions inside it.
Selin Nasi, a journalist from Salom, a Jewish newspaper in
Istanbul, who covered the reopening, wrote
that:
Unfortunately, Turkish Jews, who have
been considered as having organic ties to Israel, are labeled as
foreigners. Thus, they are subject to hate speech and threats almost on a
daily basis whenever there is a crisis between Israel and Palestine ...
The crowds that filled the synagogue genuinely wanted to believe in
Arinc.
How could they? Only a few months ago, a schoolteacher was caught
having hung
a signpost at the gate of the Neve Salom synagogue in Istanbul that
read: "Building to be destroyed." The man was not prosecuted.
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When
African soccer players were subjected to ugly racial slurs at a 2013
match in Istanbul, Ivory Coast native Didier Drogba wrote on Instagram
afterwards, "You called me monkey and forgot that you jumped when
my 'monkey' brother scored twice yesterday."
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So, there is no racism in Turkey. Nice. But Google will produce 12.2
million results if one types "Turkey" and "racism."
Wikipedia has a rich text on "Racism in Turkey," with facts,
figures and a couple of photos. One photo, for instance, shows the slogan
"Long Live Racist Turkey" spray-painted by unidentified people
on the walls of an Armenian church in Istanbul. Another reads, "You
Are Either a Turk, or a Bastard," near the wall of another Armenian
church in Istanbul. In February, banners "celebrating" the
Armenian genocide were spotted in several cities throughout Turkey. They
declared: "We celebrate the 100th anniversary of our country being
cleansed of [Christian] Armenians. We are proud of our glorious
ancestors."
A 2004 dispatch
penned by an official from the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul, leaked by
WikiLeaks, observed that a campaign against a Turkish Armenian journalist
(who would be murdered in 2007) "exposed an ugly streak of racism in
Turkish society."
Just last August, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (then Prime
Minister), in a televised interview on NTV news network, clearly
remarked that being Armenian is "uglier" than even being
Georgian. He said: "You wouldn't believe the things they have said
about me. They have said I am Georgian... they have said even uglier
things -- they have called me Armenian."
There is credible research, too. In 2011, the Pew
Global Attitudes and Trends survey found that only 6% of Turks had a
favorable opinion of Christians, and 4% of them had favorable opinion of
Jews. A few years earlier, in 2006, the numbers had been 16% and 15%,
respectively.
The Pew survey also found that 72% of Turks viewed Americans as
hostile, and 70% of them viewed Europeans as hostile. When asked to name
the world's most violent religion, 45% of Turks cited Christianity and
41% cited Judaism, with only 2% saying it was Islam. Not surprisingly,
65% of Turks said the Westerners were "immoral."
Deputy Prime Minister Arinc may enjoy his time in his make-believe
world where "there is no racism" and "we are sorry for the
Europeans." But facts are facts. And they often ridicule politicians
who speak claptrap.
Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is
a columnist for the Turkish daily Hürriyet and a fellow at the Middle East
Forum.
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