Posts Tagged ‘Moderate secular Turkey™’

The shame of Islam: over 200 so-called 'honour killings are committed in EU-candidate Turkey every year

More human development excellence from Moderate, Secular Turkey™. We really don’t know why the EU just doesn’t drop all formalities and let them in immediately:

The father and grandfather of a 16-year-old Turkish girl will face trial for burying her alive because she had developed friendships with boys.

The body of Medine Memi was found in a sitting position with her hands tied in a 6ft hole dug underneath a chicken coop outside her family’s home in Kahta, south eastern Turkey, 40 days after she had been reported missing.

According to a post mortem examination, a large amount of soil in her lungs and stomach revealed that she had been buried while conscious and suffered a slow and agonising death. Read the rest of this entry »

Islamist Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan delivers a rant to Israeli PM Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum, Davos, last year

Shocked - Shocked! ‘Tell me it ain’t so’ Dept:

The European Court of Human Rights said it issued 2,395 rulings in 2009, an increase of 27 percent from the previous year, with Turkey and Russia as the biggest offenders, according to annual figures released Thursday.

Judges issued 341 rulings against Turkey, more than 200 of them concerning the workings of its national courts and 30 following complaints of inhuman or degrading treatment.

Russia remained in second place with 210 rights violations, including three for torture and 84 for inhuman treatment – mostly from war-torn Chechnya.

Russia is also by far the biggest source of complaints with 28 percent. The foreign ministry in Moscow says many these relate to conditions in jails and abuses committed by government forces in Chechnya.

The Russian parliament has just voted to ratify a key protocol that allows reforms streamlining the Strasbourg court to go ahead.

The protocol had been blocked by Moscow lawmakers in 2006 amid complaints that the court was anti-Russian.

Europe’s top rights court is battling to come to grips with an increasing workload that soared by nearly a quarter last year. The number of pending cases at the Strasbourg tribunal rose by 23 percent to 119,300, the court said in its annual report.

The European Court of Human Rights, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, can be appealed to by 818 million people in the 47-country Council of Europe if they feel their national courts have failed.

From the country whose Prime Minister is currently issuing almost hourly lectures to Israel (a free and democratic country whose large Muslim Arab population enjoys standards of governance and rights completely unheard of in any Islamic country); comes this salutory lesson embodied by the ancient, advisory proverb inolving people, glass houses and stone-throwing.

Taste the sweet irony, Tayyip Bey.

[Source: Hürriyet Daily News]

Endangered species? Orthodox Christian church in Istanbul, often presented as evidence of Turkish 'religious tolerance'

Unbelievable but true: the headquarters of the Secretariat for the entry of Turkey into the European Union is a building confiscated from the Orthodox Christian community in the 90s. The building is located in Istanbul, in the well-known area of Ortakoy, under the first bridge over the Bosphorus. Read the rest of this entry »

The Swiss voted only to ban further minarets - Turkey's 'outrage' conceals severe restrictions on Christian worship itself in force there

Turkish leaders react to Swiss referendum that bans minarets. Muslims are asked to withdraw their money from Switzerland. But some wonder whether the Turkish government should look into its own “nasty little secrets” to see the denied permits to build or restore churches and the promises made but never kept with regards to Saint Paul’s Church in Tarsus and the Orthodox theological school in Halki.

Amidst the noise caused in Turkey by the Swiss referendum on minarets, some courageous voices can be heard questioning how real is religious freedom guaranteed by the Turkish government. Turkish journalist Serkan Ocak, writing on Radikal yesterday, notes with extreme lucidity that whilst Switzerland acted badly, “is the Church in Turkey truly free?” Read the rest of this entry »

Winds of change? Anti-Israel attitudes in Turkey, long unique among Muslim countries for its normalised relations with Israel, are on the rise.

..as Kemal Atatürk’s vision of a secular, West-facing Turkey is steadily dismantled by the AK Party Government:

Although Turks identify themselves as religiously tolerant, they do not behave that way in practice, according to a survey. There has been an increase in the number of people identifying themselves as religious since 1999, which might be related to the political atmosphere in Turkey, an academic says

Turkish people strongly identify themselves as religious and also regard religion as a source of tolerance. But when it comes to religious worship, a significant number are not as tolerant of people from other religions, concludes a survey released Tuesday. Read the rest of this entry »

A word to the wise? Turkish PM Erdoğan speaks with a General

They’ve certainly done it before. This story from the English edition of national newspaper Hürriyet appears to suggest they may be seeking to do it again:

The original copy of a document allegedly prepared by military personnel to topple Turkey’s ruling government is likely to be authentic according to an initial analysis, the prime minister said Saturday.

The analysis was done when the document reached the prosecutor’s office. “The document is now in the hands of justice. We will do exactly what the courts ask of us. We will closely monitor developments,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told reporters Saturday aboard a plane to Pakistan. “The armed forces cannot accept such a blemish [if the allegations are proved to be true].” Read the rest of this entry »