Erdoğan warns ‘race of Islamophobia’ by public authorities in the West

ANKARA

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on May 25 warned that Islamophobia was fueled by public authorities and spreading, especially in the Western countries. 

“Although westerners want to soften racism against Muslims [calling it] as Islamophobia, we know that it is enmity against Islam,” Erdoğan said, speaking at the first International Media and Islamophobia Symposium.

Islamophobia is spreading rapidly in many parts of the world, especially in the West, Erdoğan said, resembling it to a cancer cell.

“The Crusades, which were carried out with the dream of conquering Anatolia and Jerusalem, changed the course of world history with destruction. The West has preserved its grudge against Eastern societies, embodied by the Turks, under the name of orientalism,” Erdoğan stated.

“One of the last examples is putting the flag of the terrorist state of Israel on the Austrian prime ministry building,” he said.

There are many examples of the suffering caused by Islamophobia in recent history, from the massacres in Bosnia to the tragedies in Turkestan and Palestine, the president asserted.

“The strategy of “demonizing Muslims” initiated by the American administration after the 9/11 attacks had a function that triggered the virus of Islamophobia that already existed in the cultural structure of many societies,” he stated.

Those who follow the Western media closely can see the efforts to display Muslims as terrorists and Islam as a source of terrorism, the president emphasized.

Erdoğan said that there was a “race of Islamophobia by the hands of the public authority in Western countries.”

Erdoğan accused the Western World of turning its back on the fact that in a place where freedoms have disappeared, well-being cannot exist for long.

Attacks on symbols expressing religious preferences are supported by the states themselves, he said, adding that racist and anti-Islam attacks in the West increased by 250 percent in the past five years, while the rate of those who lost their lives in these incidents increased by 700 percent.

“Western countries, faced with demographic threats due to the decreasing population growth rates, try to pass their public opinion by distracting fascist rhetoric,” the president said.

The Western countries are now rapidly moving in the opposite direction over the embarrassment of antisemitism through their history, Erdoğan stated.

“Those who took the Jewish genocide in a special bracket in the Second World War, this time put Muslims on the target board,” he said.

They have to explain to each of more than 7.5 billion people in the world that Islamophobia is a global threat, not Islam, Erdoğan added.

Even Turkey encounters various manifestations of this understanding, he said.

“We can come across those who cannot tolerate the call to prayer, mosque and headscarf. Behind the decades-long debate on secularism are tensions caused by the intention to ban religious freedoms rather than protecting them. This distorted mentality emerges as one of the biggest excuses for coups,” Erdoğan stated.