Prime Minister Erdoğan discriminates, and it works for him

Days before the country’s first popular election for the presidency, Prime Minister and presidential candidate Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s speeches increasingly include references to national origins and religious beliefs.

What he said on Aug. 5 could have been considered a slip of tongue, if we did not know Erdoğan. “They have also said a lot of things about me,” the prime minister said during a live interview when he was asked of his recent discriminative remarks.

“One of them came and said I was a Georgian. Then another came up and, I beg your pardon, called me uglier things, saying I was Armenian,” Erdoğan said, adding that he was a purebred Turk and a Sunni.

This was, unfortunately, not the first time Erdoğan used identities other than Sunni-Turk as a tool of discrimination and even an insult.

(As a small note on Erdoğan complaining about being called a Georgian, during a trip to Georgia on Aug. 11, 2004, the prime minister reportedly said, “I’m a Georgian, too, my family is a Georgian family that immigrated from Batumi to Rize.”)

The prime minister in several rallies before the March 30 local elections said, “You know he is an Alevi,” referring to main opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and pausing for a second to allow the crowds to boo the rival.

“There are many books, more than 30 written about us, calling us Jewish, Armenian, excuse my language, Rum [a term used for Greek in Turkey],” he said in an interview on June 10, 2011.

The very small community of Turkey’s atheists had their share of the hate. “We opened a boulevard in Ankara on Feb. 24 despite the [protests of] leftists, despite those...