Why Erdoğan should not accuse Europe

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said $5.5 billion have been spent so far for Syrian refugees.

Apparently, only $256 million came from abroad, the rest was paid by us, the taxpayers.

That’s why Erdoğan is furious with Europe.

“Currently the number of Syrian refugees living in Europe is 130,000, here it is 2 million. Talk to me about money, you never say anything about money. You never say, I’ll contribute this much.”

It is an interesting situation for a person to blame others for a problem created by their own lack of calculation.

Obviously it is not a question of not accepting people flooding our borders fleeing war and death.
This is a responsibility of humanity; one should help these people and get their lives under guarantee. That’s what Turkey has done.

But Turkey did one more thing!

It made the miscalculation that “Bashar al-Assad will be toppled in six months.” And it added fuel to the fire.

Our borders have become uncontrollable; a new Peshawar has been born in the south of our country.
Refugees were not gathered in the camps; their needs were not provided for. Syrian refugees started dispersing all over Turkey.

We have spent $5.5 billion, but there are a lot of hungry and desperate refugees in our streets and there is no authority who thinks about the problems this will create in the future.

And now the person responsible for this horrible situation bashes Europe.

Are we going to give up on Europe?

İsmail Rüştü Cirit, the newly elected head of the Supreme Court of Appeals, voiced his views on the debates about the death penalty, which were sparked by the brutal murder of Özgecan Aslan:

“We abolished death penalty with law number 4771 in the process of harmonization with Europe. As we had our signature on this subject in the European Commission, we promised to the abolish death penalty and we did so; but after the Özgecan incident, if a simple poll was conducted, I think probably 80 percent would want to reinstate the death penalty.”

Yes, he is right; there might be such tendency in the public opinion.

We live in a land where people tend to say “You should hang 10 of those people with a sign around their neck, reading ‘Look mama, here’s your boy’ and see if they do it again;” we all know this.

But he did not stop at making this simple observation. “On the other hand, there is no death penalty in continental Europe, but there is the death penalty in many other places of the world, in different forms, such as injecting poison. But we put our signature in the process of harmonization with Europe. This needs to be debated. It does not only concern us as the judiciary. It concerns the society, the universities, the executive and legislative; I think this should be discussed.”

I did not understand fully what we are supposed to discuss: Are we supposed to discuss renouncing membership to the European Union, to give up being a part of Europe?

Teachers, parliamentarians all are the same

A teacher who was recently appointed as deputy head teacher in a high school in Antalya (she is being mentioned as F.G. in the news) gathered around her student representatives and gave them instructions.

According to the students who talked about it to other teachers; she said this:

“In this school, girls wear miniskirts and tights; they don’t wear a school uniform. This is a situation open to harassment. If this continues, they deserve to be harassed. I will set up a team of male students in the school. Male students will first warn girls that wear miniskirts. If this continues, then they will be harassed. After being bothered by harassment, they will start dressing up properly.”

This issue was talked about at the teachers’ board. According to the records of the meeting this is what the lady said:

“Yes I did say this. If we turn a blind eye to extremism, who is to blame if there is harassment?”

She said “what I say to my students is private,” to the reporter of Doğan News Agency and did not accept the claims of setting up teams.

İsmet Uçma from the Justice and Development Party (AKP) is member of the parliament’s commission to investigate the reasons behind violence against women.

This is what he said:

“We are cannot solve these problems as long as we do not raise people with education in conformity with the society’s values. We have to educate people according to their trends, psychology, characteristics and temperament.”

May God save Turkey.