Daily Alert Archives

Rising Anti-Arab Hate Reported in Turkey

(Ha'aretz) Esther Solomon - Nasreen Amirah, an aspiring Palestinian artist in her early 20s, arrived in Turkey two years ago from Gaza. But she found that resentment against Arabs is growing at an alarming rate, directed mainly at the many Syrian refugees, but metastasizing into a general hostility toward all Arabs - and Palestinians are caught in the backlash. "The racism. It's extreme. It's a kind of racism I never saw in Gaza," she says. According to UN figures, Turkey hosts the largest refugee population in the world - including 3.6 million Syrians. At the same time, the economy has plunged into recession, with unemployment at its highest rate in a decade - 15%. Since 2017, the Turkish lira has lost 30% of its value. Many Turkish citizens blamed their economic insecurity on the refugees, as in the rallying cry: "Syrians are stealing our jobs." Turkey's Interior Ministry recently insisted that Arabic could not be used on more than 25% of signs on storefronts. Istanbul's new mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, who led an anti-Erdogan coalition to victory, noted, "When you enter some neighborhoods you can't even read the shop signs. This is Turkey, this is Istanbul...they [the refugees] cannot recklessly change Istanbul's color." Popular racism against Arabs is hardly a new phenomenon in Turkey. It starts in school, where textbooks teach Turkish children that the Arabs betrayed them during World War I.
2019-07-16 00:00:00
Full Article