While Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan lives more lavishly than perhaps any other world leader is so offended by foreigners who draw satirical cartoons of him that he demands something be done. In this case, he didn’t like a cartoonist’s depiction of him as a dog appearing in German books.
The Turkish foreign ministry on Monday summoned the German ambassador to protest at the appearance in a German school textbook of a caricature of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a dog.
German ambassador Eberhard Pohl was summoned over the cartoon which appeared in a school textbook in the southern state of Baden Wuerttemberg, a foreign ministry spokesman told AFP.
According the reports, the cartoon had been taken from a 2011 article in the Sunday edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper which showed Erdogan as a guard dog with teeth bared coming out of a kennel marked “Erdogan.”
The cartoon, which had the sarcastic title “Turks in Germany– a success story”, was used in a high school textbook for social studies.
“We strongly condemn the appearance in a school textbook of a cartoon insulting our respected president and all Turks living in Germany,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.
“There is no place in democracies for attempts to incite hatred in society, xenophobia and Islamophobia,” it added, calling on Germany to prevent any re-occurence of the incident.
There is something much larger at work – the “Istanbul Process”. In March of 2011, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) set the wheels in motion for an international ban on any and all criticism of Islam, even in non-Muslim countries. Muslim countries tried to further this agenda years earlier in response to the Danish Muhammad cartoons. It then did so again after the Innocence of Muslims video blamed for riots throughout the Middle East and for the attack in Benghazi that resulted in the murders of four Americans.
It is not a coincidence that the “process” is named after a city in Erdogan’s country. His demands that a non-Muslim country in Europe censor speech offensive to him is PRECISELY what the Istanbul Process is all about.