Turkish Professor Suspended over Tweet
by Robert Jones
June 7, 2016 at 4:30 am
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8213/turkish-professor-suspended-over-tweet
Professor
Bardakcioglu is under a disciplinary investigation launched by the university's
rector for his tweet, in which he criticized the conquest of Constantinople in
1453.
After losing
his job and being condemned and ostracized by his community, Bardakcioglu
defined his deleted tweet as "an ugly and wrong expression that was not my
own view." The professor, sadly, apologized for telling the truth.
Publicly
debating historical events recognized by most scholars in free societies is, in
Turkey, a criminal offense. You can lose your job, your freedom or even your
life.
Turkish
state officials constantly claim there is nothing in Turkey's history that they
should be ashamed of, so they continue persecuting and jailing journalists or
professors who express differing ideas, and slaughtering non-Muslims and
non-Turks.
Erbay Bardakcioglu, a professor at Adnan Menderes
University (AMU) in Aydin Province in western Turkey, was suspended after
posting a tweet, in which he criticized the conquest of Constantinople,
present-day Istanbul, in 1453.
Professor Bardakcioglu's tweet, on May 29, read,
"Today is the anniversary of the invasion of Constantinople, the capital
of the Eastern Roman Empire, a magnificent civilization, by a barbaric and
fanatic tribe."
After the tweet caused outrage on social media,
Bardakcioglu deleted it.
The professor is now under a disciplinary
investigation launched by the university's rector for his tweet. The
university's rector, Cavit Bircan, on his Twitter account, also condemned the
professor and declared that he was laid off from his job.
Describing Bardakcioglu's tweet as
"unacceptable," Bircan wrote:
"After
our terrorism-loving academics, we now have Byzantium-loving academics. Let
them know that the sons of the Hira Mountain [where Muslims believe Muhammad
received his first revelations from Allah] will definitely and once again
defeat the sons of the Olympic Mountain"
The association of veterinary surgeons of the city of
Aydin also issued a written statement that "strongly condemned"
Bardakcioglu, who used to teach at the school of veterinary medicine. The
association's officials said that "they cannot even call Bardakcioglu
their colleague."
After losing his job and being condemned and
ostracized by his community, Bardakcioglu defined his deleted tweet as "an
ugly and wrong expression that was not my own view." He went on to
apologize: "Before the great Turkish nation, I apologize to the people
whose sentimental values I have offended, and to my university."
The professor, sadly, apologized for telling the
truth.
Byzantium (330-1453 AD) was a great civilization. And
the Byzantine ideas on legislation, literature, theology, philosophy, art and
architecture, among others, greatly influenced Western civilization.
Constantinople also did witness barbaric and fanatic
actions at the hands of the invaders after the city fell.
"They slew everyone that they met in the streets,
men, women and children without discrimination," according to the
historian S. Runciman in The Fall of Constantinople 1453.
"The
blood ran in rivers down the steep streets from the heights of Petra towards
the Golden Horn. But soon the lust for slaughter was assuaged. The soldiers
realized that captives and precious objects would bring them greater
profit."
"They looted whatever they considered
valuable," wrote the scholar Constantine Tzanos,
"and
they destroyed or burned whatever treasures could not appreciate including
valuable library books, icons and mosaics.
...
"What was the motive of the conquest?
It was the lust for power and riches by slaughtering, enslaving and taking the
belongings of others.
"Why a people would celebrate today,
and with such a passion, an event like the conquest of Constantinople which not
only by itself was a great human catastrophe, but it was also the precursor to
many such catastrophes up to the very recent past?"
Meanwhile,
at a public meeting in Istanbul on May 29, 2016, to celebrate the 563rd
anniversary of the fall of Constantinople, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan once again shared with his supporters his admiration for the
"conquest":
"The conquest is to climb over
mountains that the West thought were impassable. The conquest is for a
21-year-old Sultan to bring the millennial Byzantium to its knees. The conquest
is the peak of military genius and technology of the time. The conquest is to
take root in a continent, which was thought that it would not be possible to be
permanent there even if one set foot there. The conquest is to escalate the
fire of a civilization, which was savagely put out in Al-Andalus [Muslim
Spain], on the other side of the continental Europe, in the East again."
Apparently,
the norm in Turkey is to praise the "achievements" of the Ottomans,
which included massacres, rapes, plundering and sexual slavery of their
victims. But publicly debating historical events recognized by most scholars in
free societies is, in Turkey, a criminal offense. You can lose your job, your
freedom or even your life.
Discussing
these incidents in a way that contradicts the official ideology of the Turkish
state is a deadly "taboo."
As Turkey
has never faced its history of bloodshed, ethnic cleanings -- and has even
excused these crimes -- they continue to commit them. Turkish state officials constantly
claim there is nothing in Turkey's history that they should be ashamed of, so
they continue persecuting and jailing journalists or professors who express
differing ideas, and slaughtering non-Muslims and non-Turks.
The author
Speros Vryonis Jr. described the 1955 Istanbul pogrom against Christians:
"On the evening of September 6, and in
the early hours of September 7, 1955, the Turkish government carried out the
most destructive pogrom that had been enacted in Europe since the infamous Kristallnacht
which Hitler and the Nazis inflicted upon the Jewish communities, businesses
and synagogues on the eve of World War II.
"The Turkish government had unleashed
the mobs on the Greek community of Istanbul, on its churches, houses,
businesses, schools, and newspapers... This resulted in the ultimate
destruction of Turkey's oldest historical community, about 100,000 Greek
Orthodox Christians who were the heirs of Byzantium."
In this
photo from September 1955, a government-instigated mob of Muslim Turks in
Istanbul is destroying stores owned by Greek Christians.
According to Professor Alfred de Zayas:
"The
Istanbul pogrom can be considered a grave crime under both Turkish domestic law
and international law. In the historical context of a religion driven
eliminationist process accompanied by many pogroms before, during, and after
World War I within the territories of the Ottoman Empire, including the
destruction of the Greek communities of Pontos and Asia Minor and the
atrocities against the Greeks of Smyrna in September 1922, the genocidal
character of the Istanbul pogrom becomes apparent."
What is criminal is murdering and raping people,
destroying their neighborhoods, pillaging their property and driving them out
of their homes.
Robert
Jones, an expert on Turkey, is currently based in the UK.
