Turkey: ‘I felt freedom when I took off my headscarf’

Shame about the death threats, though.

Turkey: Atheism is a form of autism, says idiot

Autism associations around Turkey have reacted angrily after the head of Adana’s Health and Education Associations for Autistic Children reportedly said autistic children were “atheists due to a lack of a section for faith in their brains.”

Turkey: Composer convicted of ‘blasphemy’

A Turkish court has convicted pianist and composer Fazil Say of blasphemy and inciting hatred over a series of comments he made on Twitter last year.

Turkey: Tuneful Tweeter twits Islam…

…and faces jail for it.

SMH

A TURKISH court has charged Fazil Say, a classical and jazz pianist with an international career, with insulting Islamic values in Twitter messages, the latest in a series of legal actions against Turkish artists, writers and intellectuals for statements they have made about religion and Turkish national identity.

Say, 42, who is also a composer, is accused of ”publicly insulting religious values that are adopted by a part of the nation”, the semi-official Anatolian news agency said.

A trial is scheduled to begin on October 18, and Say faces up to 18 months in prison if convicted.

Turkey: See? You don’t need religion to be an insane tyrant!

…but it helps.

The Economist.

…It was Ataturk’s embrace of rigid secularism and Western reforms that underlay Turkey’s recovery.

But at what cost? A personality cult that carpets the country with busts and portraits of the great man was nurtured by Turkey’s generals, who have used his name to topple four governments, hang a prime minister and attack “enemies of the republic”. The generals also imposed a law making it a criminal offence to criticise Ataturk publicly. (There were 48 convictions last year alone.)

Just what part of ‘freedom of speech’ don’t they understand?

Turkey: Religious marriages sanction child rape

Stonegate Institute

At the beginning of the New Year, as reported in the daily newspaper Haber Türk (Turkish News) of January 6, 2012, E.D., a 25-year old man in the northwestern Turkish city of Bolu, took his 11-year old “wife,” Z.Ç., to the hospital because she suffered pain. The news story identified the couple only by their initials. The doctor diagnosed the girl as eight months pregnant by her “husband.” Whether the girl was in a condition to consent to sexual relations is obviously questionable. One would more probably assume she was raped by the 25-year old.

Marriage to an 11-year old girl is illegal in Turkey, but such cases are a constant in the country’s life…

E.D. and Z.Ç. told the doctor they had been married by an imam. Their neighbors had warned them that if they went to a city and disclosed this fact, they would face legal trouble.

In 1926, the Turkish Republic, founded three years before, adopted a legal code based on that of Switzerland. Civil marriage was introduced and “Islamic marriages” performed by an imam were reduced in status. Articles 230/5-6 of the Turkish Criminal Code prohibit a religious marriage ceremony unless a civil, state-recognized, official marriage has previously been contracted…

Nevertheless, “imam marriages” without civil registration still take place frequently in Turkey.

Turkish laws forbidding such abuses appear to have no force. Further, the minds of ordinary people are trapped in medieval beliefs. The “husband” in the case of 11-year old Z.Ç. believed all was in order because the relationship had been approved by an imam.

Mohammed married a nine-year-old, but now an imam is only prepared to marry someone to an eleven-year-old girl. Who says Islam isn’t making progress?

Israel: 19 killed in Commando attack on Gaza relief fleet

SMH.

Update via TV: The death toll now stands at 19.

Turkey: Teenage girl buried alive for ‘talking to boys’

Telegraph.

Official figures have indicated that more than 200 such killings take place each year, accounting for around half of all murders in Turkey.

Although honour killings are not infrequent in Turkey, the especially gruesome manner of Medine’s death has shocked the nation.

So killing female members of your family is OK, as long as you don’t do it nastily?

I nominate Medine Memi as the first saint of the Church of Unapologetic Atheism.