However, AKP is organizing two major rallies in Ankara and İstanbul this weekend. In this evening’s Ankara rally, PM Erdoğan repeated the same lies about the Occupiers,already debunked accusations and relied heavily to play with AKP voters’ religious sensitivities. I do not exaggarate, in my life, I have never seen such crude and intense exploitation of religious sentiments. Erdoğan’s last speech trigger many citizens to continue the Protests… Besides, new government provocations continue. More rumors of threats over Twitter users, investigations of doctors who helped wounded protesters etc fuel the unrest among citizens…
Turkey’s protests fuelled by leader’s quest to restore Islam
The respected political scientist Soli Ozel has written a thoughtful essay for the Washington Post about what the uprisings and the government?s reactions mean for Turkey and whether they are really over. An excerpt:
Photographs from the Guardian Eyewitness series
Turkish protesters vow to remain in Gezi Park despite Erdoğan concession
Camp’s representatives say they will continue their resistance, after PM agrees to suspend redevelopment plans
Protesters occupying Gezi Park in Istanbul have vowed to continue their two-week-old sit-in despite government appeals to leave.
Turkey’s challenge: Find compromise before violence expands
Some Protesters in Turkey Disavow Agreement With Premier to End Park Sit-In
Gezi Park remains occupied by defiant protesters who on Friday mostly disavowed a compromise between their self-declared leaders and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
When Davide Martello hauled a grand piano into Taksim Square in Istanbul and started playing, protesters and the police alike shared hours of calm.As academics at the University of Oxford, we would like to express our deep concern about the events taking place in Turkey. In response to the protests in Istanbul, as well as in other towns and cities in the country, rights and freedoms are being severely curtailed. In addition to what seems to be the deployment of excessive police force, we are witnessing a large number of arbitrary arrests, undue pressure being brought to bear on the Turkish media and, in a more general sense, serious infringements on the rights of assembly and free speech. While we recognise that the Justice and Development Party is the elected government and possesses a strong popular mandate, we also believe that, as a democratic government, it should seek to guarantee the civil liberties of all Turkey’s citizens.
Why the Protests Have Changed Turkey Forever
From the Golden Calf to Gezi park: religious imagery and modern protest | Giles Fraser
Religious images have caused conflict for centuries. Turkey is now struggling with a religion too confident in its representations
It is extremely odd that Marc Chagall ? originally Moishe Shagal ? has become the poster boy of Jewish art because his work so spectacularly offends against the fundamental principle of all Jewish aesthetics, the second of the Ten Commandments: “You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image or any likeness of anything that is in the heavens above or in the earth below” (Exodus 20:4). Just because his work, currently on show at the Tate Liverpool, depicts a colourful romanticised Fiddler-on-the-Roof view of Russian shtetllife, that doesn’t make it Jewish. From an orthodox perspective, it counts as idolatry, the No 1 thought crime of the Hebrew Bible. Representations are dangerous, the Bible warns. They collapse reality and come to have an independent life of their own. And when they are representations of the divine, this is especially dangerous. God cannot be pictured. Indeed G-d cannot even properly be spoken.
Kurds Uneasy About Turkish Protests
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