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Dozens of protesters protested in a central square in Istanbul, urging French President Emmanuel Macron “not to touch the sacred” and criticizing his measures against Islamic extremism. The protesters shouted slogans like “Macron, terrorist” and “racist”, reports the EFE agency, taken over by Agerpres. Although public gatherings are prohibited in Turkey due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the police have not intervened against protesters.
The protest was called in all the provinces of Turkey by the Memur-Sen civil servants’ union, one of the largest in the country and close to the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Although measures against the COVID-19 epidemic in Turkey prohibit any public gathering or demonstration, the police did not intervene, the agency also writes.
“By attacking people’s religions in the name of freedom of expression, by protecting cartoons with a terrorist mentality, Macron is a partner of hate and terror,” said a provincial leader of the union, Talat Yavuz.
The French president said last week at a memorial service for Professor Samuel Paty, beheaded in an Islamist attack after showing his students caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, that France “will not renounce cartoons,” a statement from his Turkish counterpart. questioned his sanity, sparking a diplomatic dispute between Paris and Ankara. Erdogan also called for a boycott of French products on Monday, and actions are already being seen in several Muslim countries.
Two weeks ago, Erdogan had called Macron’s remarks a provocation in a speech announcing the introduction in December of a bill to combat separatism, especially radical Islam. France must “attack Islamist separatism,” a “conscious project” aimed at “creating a parallel order and denying the Republic,” French President Emmanuel Macron said at the time, adding that Islam is “a religion that is experiencing a crisis everywhere today “. in the world”.
