"Everyone can be proud of own nationality in Turkey. Religious and ethnic discrimination has never existed and will never be present in Turkey, Erdogan added.
Turkey is the native land for everyone, who lives here, Erdogan said.
A 24-year-old street seller assaulted a man on grounds he was proselytizing Christianity, holding a knife to his throat in downtown Istanbul before surrendering to police, newspapers reported Tuesday.
The incident, the latest in a string of religiously-motivated attacks in Turkey in recent years, happened Monday on a busy avenue in Istanbul's Kadikoy district, before the eyes of dozens of passers-by.
The assailant -- identified as 24-year-old pirate CD vendor Yasin Karasu -- wrapped a Turkish flag around the head of Ismail Aydin, 35, put a knife to his throat and shouted "This is Turkey, you cannot distribute Bibles here," the Haberturk newspaper said.
The stand-off lasted for 20 minutes before the police persuaded the assailant to surrender, according to the Sabah daily.
Karasu later told the police he was angry with Aydin for converting to Christianity and engaging in missionary activities, Sabah said, while the Vatan daily suggested the assailant was mentally disturbed.
Last week foreign and local artists put their brushes together to give a church wall and its neighborhood a facelift. Where graffiti once adorned the 27-meter stretch, now a collage of Kadıköy monuments remind passersby to slow down and enjoy all Kadiköy has to offer.
Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew in Istanbul said he was hopeful Turkey would re-open a historic seminary that was shut down nearly four decades ago, the Anatolia news agency has reported.
The Greek seminary, on the island of Halki (Heybeliada) off Istanbul, was the main center of theological education for more than a century before Turkish authorities closed it down in 1971 under a law designed to bring universities under state control. The European Union has long asked Turkey to re-open the seminary to prove its commitment to human rights as it strives to become a member of the 27-nation bloc.
“We are hopeful that the seminary will open, and we are waiting on official news from the government,” the Anatolia news agency quoted Bartholomew as saying late Wednesday. “There has been a lot of talk so far, but no news from Ankara.”
On a crowded street here last week a German businessman died after a Turk with a history of mental problems stabbed him for being a Christian.
Witnesses saw Ýbrahim Akyol, 26, stab Gregor Kerkeling in the chest on July 20 at 10:50 a.m. after following him out of St. Anthony Catholic Church in Istanbul’s central district of Beyoglu. Church security cameras captured the attack on Kerkeling, who regularly visited the church when he was in town for business.
Kerkeling, in his early forties, had just visited the church to pray that morning. Akyol, a Muslim who reportedly had been visiting area churches scouting around for a Christian victim, followed Kerkeling out of the church building and asked him for a Turkish lira. When Kerkeling refused and gestured him away, Akyol repeatedly stabbed him in the heart and chest area before passersby intervened. According to various news reports, an ambulance did not arrive in time to save Kerkeling’s life.
In a statement to the prosecutor, Akyol reportedly confessed that he woke up that morning and decided he would kill a Christian. He took a kitchen knife with him and went to Istiklal Street, a long pedestrian and commercial road where some of the main traditional churches are located, looking for a victim.
“I wanted to kill a Christian that day and was visiting churches for this reason,” he told prosecutors, according to the Hurriet Daily News. “I saw the person and killed him.”
Turkey's government has agreed to extend indefinite permission for Christian worship at an historic church in Tarsus, the birthplace of St. Paul, says the head of the country's Roman Catholic bishops' conference.
"I'm confident the church in Tarsus could soon change from being a museum to a center of spiritual pilgrimage," said Bishop Luigi Padovese, speaking after the close of worldwide commemorations to mark the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of St Paul.
Under the pretext of recovering from medical treatment he received earlier this month, a key suspect in the murders of three Christians in southeast Turkey dodged court for the second time, further stalling the legal process, prosecuting attorneys said.
Journalist Varol Bulent Aral, one of the suspected “middlemen” who allegedly incited five young men to brutally murder Turkish Christians Necati Aydin and Ugur Yuksel and German Christian Tilmann Geske at the Zirve Publishing Co. in Malatya two years ago, again failed to show at a hearing on Friday (July 17).
As the Iranian government cracks down on communication modes following its disputed presidential election, Christian satellite channels have been among its victims.
Terry Ascott, CEO of SAT-7 International, said many satellite channels, including the Christian channel, have been affected by the government crackdown. What is “strange,” he noted, is that the government has found a way to block channels beaming into Iran without jamming satellites that would affect the entire Middle East.
“Somehow they have developed a new technology to simply and simultaneously block access to multiple channels in the major cities – which is the first time we have seen such a thing,” Ascott told The Christian Post on Friday.
Since the presidential elections on June 12, Iran’s government has restricted cell phone and satellite signals in an effort to stop its citizens from organizing demonstrations against hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians and the head of the Russian Orthodox Church put on a united front on Saturday when they met for talks in Istanbul.
They were expected to discuss the sensitive issue of the churches in Ukraine and Estonia during the three-day visit to Turkey of Patriarch Kirill, enthroned in February to lead the Russian Orthodox Church.
Turkey long has been allied with the U.S., seen as a bulwark against both the Soviet Union and radical Islam. However, ties have been fraying in recent years for a number of reasons. The Turkish public has turned hostile to Washington and Americans cannot even count on the friendship of secular nationalists.
Particularly disturbing is evidence tying the so-called "deep state," long viewed as a threat to democratic governance, especially by the moderately Islamic ruling party, to the 2007 murder of three Christians, a German and two Turkish converts. The crime was grotesquely brutal and cruel, yet public officials have seemed almost as willing to criticize the victims as the murderers.
Almost 40 years after it closed down its only training school for Greek Orthodox priests, Turkey is moving closer to reopening the seminary, a step that would remove a high-profile obstacle on the country’s march towards membership in the European Union, statements of two senior government ministers in Ankara suggest.
The fate of the seminary on the island of Heybeliada, or Halki in Greek, in the Sea of Marmara close to Istanbul, has become a symbol for the state of religious freedom in Turkey. US President Barack Obama, during a visit to Turkey in April, joined demands by European officials that Ankara reopen the school, which has been closed since 1971. Because there is no other institution in Turkey that trains Greek Orthodox priests, the clergy in what used to be Byzantium is in danger of dying out.
“My own inclination as well as my general impression are that the school will be opened,” Ertugrul Gunay, the culture and tourism minister and a leading reformer in the cabinet, told the news channel Kanal 24 last weekend, adding that there was “no political problem” with that decision.
Reporting from London -- In an audio message from a hide-out in South Asia this month, an Al Qaeda chief did something new: He sang the praises of an ethnic group that once barely registered in the network.
"We consider the Muslims in Turkey our brothers," said Mustafa Abu Yazid, the network's operations chief. Lauding Turkish suicide bombers killed in recent attacks near the Afghan-Pakistani border, he declared, "This is a pride and honor to the nation of Islam in Turkey, and we ask Allah to accept them amongst the martyrs."
The message is the latest sign of the changing composition of Islamic extremism, anti-terrorism officials and experts say. The number of Turks in Al Qaeda, long dominated by Arabs, has increased notably, officials say. And militant groups dominated by Turks and Central Asians, many of whom share Turkic culture and speak a Turkic language, have emerged as allies of and alternatives to Al Qaeda in northwestern Pakistan.
"We are aware of an increasing number of Turks going to train in Pakistan," said a senior European anti-terrorism official who asked to remain anonymous because the subject is sensitive. "This increase has taken place in the past couple of years."
Turkey's secular tradition and official monitoring of religious practice for years helped restrain extremism at home and in the diaspora. But the newer movements churn out Internet propaganda in Turkish as well as German, an effort to recruit among a Turkish immigrant population in Germany that numbers close to 3 million.
"We are seeing almost as much propaganda material from these Turkic groups as we are from Al Qaeda," said Evan Kohlmann, a U.S. private consultant who works with anti-terrorism agencies around the world. "Turks were perceived as moderate with few connections to Al Qaeda central. Now Germany is dealing with this threat in a community that could be a sleeping giant."
A suspected “middleman” between the alleged masterminds and young executors in the stabbing murders of three Christians here failed to appear at a hearing on Friday (June 19) because of a procedural error.
The state prosecutor’s office failed to set aside funds to transport Varol Bulent Aral to the southeastern city of Malatya from Istanbul, where he is held, the court announced. Aral is the second suspected middleman connecting the five young murderers to “deep state” masterminds who allegedly plotted to kill Turkish Christians Necati Aydin and Ugur Yuksel and German Christian Tilmann Geske.
According to a report on the Hurriyet DailyNews.com Web site, a new Turkish TV show is set to air in September that will challenge holy people to convert atheists to their brand of godliness. The show, which is loosely translated as "Penitents Compete," will feature a "Muslim imam, a Christian priest, a Jewish rabbi... a Buddhist monk" and 10 atheists.
The holy folk will compete to see who can turn the most atheists into followers of their given religion. Their goal is to convert at least one non-believer each week. According to Ahmet Özdemir, Deputy Director of Kanal T which will air the new show, "'The project aims to turn disbelievers into [believers in] God.'"
The premise of the show, according to the report is that "[e]ach week, a different group of atheists will appear in front of the religious leaders. The producers of the show are well aware that there is a chance none of the atheists will be convinced by the arguments presented to them. Yet if an ex-atheist is 'persuaded' to start following one of the religions, he or she will have the chance to travel to that religion’s center, whether Jerusalem for Christians and Jews or Mecca for Muslims or Tibet for Buddhists." The main goal of producers for the show is to teach people about a variety of religions.
İstanbul is home to some of the most amazing churches in the world. The glory of the Hagia Sophia has been marveled at by visitors throughout the centuries, ever since Justinian exclaimed, “Solomon, I have surpassed you,” demonstrating his belief that this new church outshone the Temple of the Old Testament.
