Turkey’s president warns against Islamophobia

Turkish President Abdullah Gul has warned against Islamophobia in Europe and said he considers a modern state a multicultural one.

Gul made the comments in a joint interview with Turkey’s Zaman daily and Germany’s Die Zeit ahead of a scheduled visit to Germany.

He said that the modern state with its democratic and legal principles had developed in Europe and that he found it contradictory to see Islamophobia in this continent.

The president urged integration and said that every culture should be respected. He said it was impossible to reverse Muslim immigration to Europe and that Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and animosity toward immigrants were illnesses with difficult therapies.

Gul said he believed Islam did not play a bigger role in the Arab Spring than communication technologies and that the West was contributing to the uprising with its technology.

According to Gul, the revolution in Egypt was belated and started from the bottom upwards, as ousted Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak had delayed reforms.

Speaking about the uprising in Syria that has caused the death of at least 2,600 people according to UN estimates, Gul said relations between the two countries were close. He said that the Turkish government had warned the Syrian government to make rapid reforms and told them that authoritarian and closed regimes could not exist in this way today.

Gul also harshly criticized Israel when asked why Turkey escalated tensions with Israel in the face of the Arab Spring, and named Israel as the chief culprit in the deterioration of relations between the two countries.

Gul said Israel had attacked a Turkish ship where there were activists from 37 different countries last year, referring to the Mavi Marmara incident when Israeli naval commandos stormed an aid ship and killed nine Turkish civilians. Turkey demanded an official apology, compensation for the families of the victims and the lifting of the Gaza blockade. Israel said the soldiers had acted in self-defence.

Gul said that it was natural to expect an apology from Israel, though they had refused to give one and were behaving as though they were right. “But they violated international law,” he stressed.

Asked if it would be possible to overcome the crisis, Gul said it was possible and that Turkey was openly calling for it. “The important thing for us is that people were killed in this attack on the aid ship. But the [Gaza] embargo is not in line with international law. For this reason, the EU, Russia and the American government asked for the lifting of the embargo,” Gul said.

Asked if Germany could mediate between the two countries, Gul said despite the deep historical relations between Germany and Turkey, he did not believe there was much the EU member state could do in this regard.

Today’s Zaman

via News.Az – Turkey’s president warns against Islamophobia.