{"id":16489,"date":"2009-12-14T21:05:32","date_gmt":"2009-12-14T19:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=16489"},"modified":"2023-04-05T10:45:00","modified_gmt":"2023-04-05T07:45:00","slug":"headquarters-of-turkish-campaign-for-eu-membership-is-a-confiscated-christian-building","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2009\/12\/14\/headquarters-of-turkish-campaign-for-eu-membership-is-a-confiscated-christian-building\/","title":{"rendered":"Headquarters of Turkish campaign for EU membership is\u2026 a confiscated Christian building"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Damian Thompson<\/h2>\n

Damian Thompson is Blogs Editor of the Telegraph Media Group.<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Turkey\u2019s political elite is obsessed with joining the European Union. But senior players in the EU \u2013 in a rare moment of clarity amid their delusional fantasies of a federal Europe \u2013 are reluctant to let in a country which is increasingly hard to distinguish from the rest of the Islamic world. Here\u2019s a tip for Turkish campaigners for EU membership: if you want to win over Herman Van Rompuy, best not set up your headquarters in a building\u00a0confiscated from your country\u2019s oppressed Orthodox Christian minor<\/em>ity<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This how the Un:dhimmi website reports the controversy<\/span>:<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

Before the seizure, the building was used as a primary school for children of the minority Orthodox in Ortakoy. Here once lived a thriving Orthodox community, now non-existent because of past purges against minorities, executed by the \u201csecular\u201d Turkish State.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And some background:<\/p>\n

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Turkey is often portrayed as a \u201csecular\u201d modern Muslim state. This was indeed the founding vision of the Republic\u2019s \u201cFather\u201d, Mustafa Kemal Atat\u00fcrk, when he created the republic out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s.<\/p>\n

However, since late 2002, when Erdo\u011fan\u2019s AK Party came to power, a creeping Islamisation of Turkey has been embarked upon \u2013 and the small Christian community has been subjected to increasing harassment and persecution (a social norm in Muslim countries \u2013 ask any Christian in Egypt or Pakistan, for example).<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not just the government. A recent survey of Turks revealed:<\/p>\n

More than half of Turks oppose non-Muslim religious meetings<\/p>\n

59 percent of those surveyed said non-Muslims either \u201cshould not\u201d or \u201cabsolutely should not\u201d be allowed to hold open meetings where they can discuss their ideas.<\/p>\n

54 percent said non-Muslims either \u201cshould not\u201d or \u201cabsolutely should not\u201d be allowed to publish literature that describes their faith.<\/p>\n

49 percent of those surveyed said they would either \u201cabsolutely\u201d or \u201cmost likely\u201d not support a political party that accepted people from another religion.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The theory that these prejudices will melt away once Turkey is admitted to the EU strikes me as quite fatuous. Ask yourself: has the protective generosity of the welfare state made Islamic immigrants to Britain any more accommodating to our liberal traditions?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Tags:<\/strong> european union,\u00a0Ortakoy,\u00a0Turkey<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Damian Thompson Damian Thompson is Blogs Editor of the Telegraph Media Group. Turkey\u2019s political elite is obsessed with joining the European Union. But senior players in the EU \u2013 in a rare moment of clarity amid their delusional fantasies of a federal Europe \u2013 are reluctant to let in a country which is increasingly hard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":782149,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[835],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16489\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/782149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}