Thank you very much, Red

Great post, Klarceti, nice to see you here.

I have a comment about Akcam, but I'll open a new topic about that. By "acute problem", do you mean the Armenian genocide, or something else?

Thanks Katastrof.
No, I actually meant the situation of the Christian minority in general, which is not very rosy in general.
Especially with the massive islamisation and the rise of racism within the younger generation of Turkey, their situation gets more and more worse.
We have several hundred thousand Armenian workers in Turkey.
Most live illegally there, some even for more than a decade. Making their status clear is a very important issue. Also the situation of the Jewish, Armenian and Greek minority needs to be improved. If these people can be fully integrated into the Turkish society (and with integration I mean integration and not assimilation), they could be a balancing power against rising islamisation aspirations.
Anyway as far as I could see up to now, it was the non-Muslims of Turkey who were much more concerned with the country, the republic and her principles than the average Muslim Turk.

Now the differences between the Turkish populace(in Turkey) vs. the Turkish posters existing in this forum are mainly:

1)every Turk has to know English
2)many Turks here live outside of Turkey in countries much more tolerant

Basically in this thread I tried to provide only a small glimpse with a few sources for how Christian minorities fare in Turkey.

Two Turkish posters responded immediately and confirmed my thread seeder with their responses:
Los Magnados (to say it is true, because they are traitors)
turkkan (to distort everything I said in my post and say it is true because Maronites are all spies when the source presents generally how Christians minorities are treated default as "traitors")

From an old thread:

This fact explains why a fanatic muslim nation like Turkey is able to receive so many tourists. In Turkey the internal "Christian co-citiziens": (mostly Greeks and Armenians, but if they were real citiziens the state would not actively persecute them solely for being of a different religious confession) are actively stereotyped very negatively and are treated horribly by the state and populace at large. If the tourists were treated half as bad they would never come.

Or maybe tourists visiting Turkey can be treated just like "Kurdish citiziens" and made to feel/be/speak Turkish(if they were real citiziens at all the state would not care).

Again, religion divides and breeds hatred and segregation.

The Compass direct News page for Turkey.

This link gives a good glimpse at the recent climate of persecution against the small barely tolerated Christian minority in Turkey which is created by the popular newspapers, TV stations, state officials, nationalist parties.

lol, this is like the 23rd time you've posted this unsubstantiated generalisation.

Once again, young arabas, are you implying that a world without religion would mean none of the above as well as no more wars, poverty or Jerry Springer type of talk shows.

And this coming from a poster who goes on and on about Shamanism and once had a sig that read "Pagan Pride".

Thanks chump, I'll make sure to follow your link on regular basis...

Please allow me to return the favour by sharing some of my bookmarks with you. I think you will find them very helpful. I didn't go to the trouble of finding their direct links to Turkey though, please accept my apologies. <> Zoltan !!! <>

http://thepersecutiontimes.com/
http://www.christianpersecution.info/
http://www.persecution.org/suffering/index.php
http://www.persecution.com/
http://persecutionblog.com/
http://www.christianmonitor.org/

It's a bit late but i'd like share a sentence i liked. Kurds were given only one right in Turkey. The right of being a Turk.

double

Nutuk (Mr. let's "Bomb their whole goddam race") brought this article to my attention from a post of his on WAFF accompanied by his Kemalist bravado.

I made comments of my own surronded by brackets [ ] and boldened, to respond select claims and certain points. Compared/constrasted to how minorities are actually treated in Turkey, this article is just bitching, whining and moaning:

where did you get this sentence from?

what period does it refer to?

Let's compare a little the specific treatment of the Greek community of Istanbul by Turkey with the Greek treatment of the Turkish minority in the Aegean islands.

First the Greek:

Source:
Vryonis, Speros. The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom Of September 6-7, 1955, And The Destruction Of The Greek Community Of Istanbul. Greekworks.com (New York, 2005) p. 15.

Now back the relevant Zaman article:

Amazing, contrary to the main thesis of the article without the heavy intervention of the Turkish government like in Thrace as the article state:

The Greek government overall does match the rotten behavior of Turkey, like when it closed the library of the Hellenic Philological Society of Constantinople, confiscated its books and prevents even to this day any Greek scholar from having access to these works.

Good job on Selahattin Sevi and Zaman for not proving their thesis: "Turkish minorities on Greek Aegean islands deprived of their rights" or the contention that Turks in the Aegean islands suffered from not having minority rights like "West Thracian Turks". In the past such agreements have never stopped a determined Turkey to deprive its Greek minority of its rights even when it contradicted the Turkish obligation according the Lausanne Treaty.

The bias of Turkish courts against Christians can be seen from the below article. My comments are in parentheses () in italic.