By James D. Zirin<\/p>\n A supporter of world-renowned Turkish pianist Fazil Say holds a cardboard reading ‘Fazil Say is not alone’ during protest held outside an Istanbul court (Image credit: AFP\/Getty Images via @daylife)\n
Turkey\u2019s Prime Minister Tayyip\u00a0 Erdogan will travel to Washington May 16 to meet with President Obama, largely to discuss his country\u2019s relationship with the US and the European community, and most probably Erdogan\u2019s on-again off-again relationship with Israel. Undoubtedly, a strong US alliance with Turkey, with its vibrant economy and geo-political position, is of tremendous strategic importance to the United States.\u00a0 In the run-up to the meeting, however, Obama might well consider Turkey\u2019s human rights record, particularly how many nations are left\u00a0 on this planet where someone could go to jail over a Twitter post?\u00a0 North Korea, Iran, China? Maybe. But Turkey is the latest to win that dubious distinction.<\/p>\n
Fazil Say, 42 years-old, is an internationally recognized Turkish pianist and composer, who has performed with major orchestras throughout the world, including the New York Philharmonic and the Berlin Symphony. His personal style of composition, rooted in the folk music of Turkey, evokes Bart\u00f3k: \u00a0a fantasia-like basic structure; and a variable dance-like rhythm.<\/p>\n
An Istanbul court convicted Say of inciting hatred, insulting Islam and offending Muslims on Twitter. Although not sentenced to jail, he is on probation for five years on condition that he not re-offend Muslims, even if he is just re-tweeting what someone else said. Say could have been sentenced to 18 months in prison. The case renewed brewing concerns about the influence of religion on Turkish politics.<\/p>\n
Say\u2019s \u201ccrime\u201d was a series of tweets posted earlier last year. In one message he retweeted a verse from a poem by Omar Khayy\u00e1m in which the 11th-century Persian poet attacks pious hypocrisy: \u201cYou say rivers of wine flow in heaven, is heaven a tavern to you? You say two huris [companions] await each believer there, is heaven a brothel to you?\u201d In other tweets, he made fun of a muezzin (a caller to prayer), implying that the particular muezzin\u2019s call lasted only 22 seconds because he wanted to go out for\u00a0 a drink. Another retweet by Mr. Say posits: \u201cI am not sure if you have also realized it, but if there\u2019s a louse, a non-entity, a lowlife, a thief or a fool, it\u2019s always an Allah-ist.\u201d Bad taste, maybe, in a country where Muslims comprise \u00a0roughly 98% of the population, but hardly a crime?<\/p>\n
Turkey is not a particularly safe place for artists and intellectuals, or women for that matter, who may wish to criticize Erdogan\u2019s government. In 2007, a journalist Hrant Dink, who had written about the Armenian genocide of 1915, was shot dead on an Istanbul street. A judge last year\u00a0 fined Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel laureate writer, $3,700 for saying in a Swiss newspaper that Turks \u201chave killed 30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pointing to the Say and Pamuk cases, as well as the prosecution of numerous journalists, artists and intellectuals for voicing their views, critics have accused the governing AK Party of undermining the\u00a0 secular values of Turkey\u2019s founder Kemal Ataturk, and pandering to Islamists, who have recently asserted themselves with renewed intensity. Say himself claimed that his prosecution was politically motivated. An atheist, Say had often criticized the Islamist-rooted party, accusing it of having a secret agenda to promote conservative values.<\/p>\n
The European Union, which Turkey seeks to join, admonished Erdogan about the Say conviction. A spokeswoman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said Brussels was \u201cconcerned\u201d by the prosecution, which \u201cunderlines the importance for Turkey to fully respect freedom of expression.\u201d Amnesty International said in a report last month that \u201cfreedom of expression is under attack in Turkey,\u201d calling for legislative reforms to bring \u201cabuses to an end.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dozens of journalists are in detention in Turkey, as well as lawyers, politicians and lawmakers \u2013 most of them accused of plotting against the government or having links with the outlawed Kurdish rebel movement the Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party (PKK). Meanwhile, Erdogan continues with his sultanic project to build at state expense over the Bosporus the largest mosque in Turkey, as Fazil Say calls his conviction \u201ca sad day for Turkey.\u201d<\/p>\n
Madeleine Albright has said that foreign policy is getting other countries to do what you want them to do. \u00a0Obama should use the occasion of the Erdogan meeting to take heed of the clarion call of\u00a0 another British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who said\u00a0 in his \u201cIron Curtain\u201d speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri March 5, 1946,\u00a0 \u201cAll this means \u2026 that freedom of speech and thought should reign; that courts of justice, independent of the executive, unbiased by any party, should administer laws which have received the broad assent of large majorities or are consecrated by time and custom.\u00a0 Here are the title deeds of freedom which should lie in every cottage home.\u00a0 Here is the message of the British and American peoples to mankind.\u00a0 Let us preach what we practice \u2013 let us practice what we preach.\u201d<\/p>\n
Turkey\u2019s\u00a0 human rights record is execrable. When Obama meets Erdogan next month, he should preach a little of what we try to practice.<\/p>\n
via Obama’s Talks With Turkey: Let Us Preach What We Practice – Forbes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By James D. Zirin Turkey\u2019s Prime Minister Tayyip\u00a0 Erdogan will travel to Washington May 16 to meet with President Obama, largely to discuss his country\u2019s relationship with the US and the European community, and most probably Erdogan\u2019s on-again off-again relationship with Israel. Undoubtedly, a strong US alliance with Turkey, with its vibrant economy and geo-political […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":60022,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[8197,57],"class_list":["post-69657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-usa","tag-fazil-say","tag-human-rights-turkey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69657","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=69657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}