It's Shocking, I Tell You. Shocking.

Erdoğan, on Women by Burak Bekdil Hürriyet Daily News November 28, 2014 Originally published under the title, "So we are shocked (again)?" Turkey ranked 125th out of 142 nations in the World Economic Forum's 2014 Gender Gap Index, a drop of 20 places over the last eight years. This columnist is often shocked when others are shocked when President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Islamist-self speaks like an Islamist. What's so shocking about him saying that women cannot be treated equal to men – other than the irony that he said it at a feminist summit? He had said this before. He had also prescribed, numerous times, how many children Turkish wives should make – three, or if possible, four or five. How on earth does the world expect him to speak? Like a liberal? Like a secular Muslim? Like the leader of an EU member state? Or like the leader of a country where an average of three women every day are being killed by men, and where domestic violence, abuse and sexual discrimination is part of the culture?

Letter From Turkey (About "Huge Hatred" and Great Courage)

The Turkish Governor's "Huge Hatred"

by Burak Bekdil
The Gatestone Institute
November 29, 2014

At the beginning of the 20^th century, Edirne, a Turkish province in Thrace, hosted a prominent community of some 20,000 Jews – a larger community than the entire Jewish population of about 17,000 in Turkey today. Most of the Jews of Edirne were forced to leave the city after the pogroms of 1934. In 2000, the Jewish population in Edirne had dropped to 2 (no typo: two) people.

Earlier, in the Ottoman Turkey of 1907, Sultan Abdulhamid had ordered the construction of what would become one of the world's two biggest synagogues (and Europe's biggest), known in Turkish as "Buyuk Sinagog," or the "Great Synagogue", in Edirne. As the Jews left the town, the Great Synagogue turned into a sorrowful wreck.

In late 2000s, the Jewish community in Turkey applied to the governor's office in Edirne to have sermons and wedding ceremonies at the synagogue. Luckily, in 2010, the Great Synagogue was declared a historical site and brought under a $1.7 million restoration program to reopen for prayers and visits – not that the Turks thought the building would serve the (literally) couple of Jews left in town, but that they thought it could lure tourists (and money). The restoration work is almost complete.