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The pope’s speech denouncing Islam was “no accident,” said Sahin Alpay in Istanbul’s Zaman. After Pope Benedict XVI a few weeks ago quoted a Byzantine emperor who called the Prophet Mohammed’s teachings “evil and inhumane,” he was widely portrayed as a bumbling academic who didn’t realize his words would spark Muslim anger. Unfortunately, he is “not so stupid.” Years before his election as pope, then–Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger called Islam a growing threat to Europe’s “Christian identity.” He was speaking out against admitting Turkey, a majority-Muslim but officially secular nation, into the European Union. The pope no doubt planned his latest provocation, knowing that when Muslims reacted with fury, Christians in the E.U. would see them as fundamentalist crazies who don’t belong in Europe.
The pope isn’t the only one trying to keep Turkey out, said Ibrahim Karagul in Istanbul’s Yeni Safak. European media have gleefully joined the campaign to demonize Islam. The Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammed were part of that trend, and so is the controversy about head scarves on Muslim girls in French and German schools. Even European officials are complicit. They “represent Muslims as being hostile to all foreign societies.” In reality, it was the West that invented “and marketed” the concepts of the “clash of civilizations” and the “war on Islamic terrorism.” Some E.U. bureaucrats have even described the approach of Turkey to the E.U. as a “train wreck waiting to happen.” If that’s true, it’s not our fault.
Maybe not entirely, said Cengiz Candar in Istanbul’s Bugun, but our Islamic-led government has certainly made some stupid choices. It put one of our most famous novelists, Elif Safak, on trial for “insulting the Turkish identity,” on the basis of remarks made by a character in one of her books! She was acquitted, but our image as a modern nation was badly damaged. At this point, we could put the prosecutors on trial for the same offense, because their actions “created the impression abroad that the Turkish legal system is idiotic.”
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