RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is extremely difficult for angry, misinformed citizens to distinguish between lies and the truth, particularly when there is much more than a grain of truth to the terrorists’ claims that the Greek legal system is corrupt.

The judiciary has played, and still plays, an active role in the economic and political deprivation of the Greek populace. It is the Greek people’s sense of injustice that is being exploited by far-Left activists, whose real goal is to spread a radical anti-Western ideology, including open hostility to Israel and the United States.

The radical leftist Greek organization, the Group of People’s Fighters (OLA), which claimed responsibility for the December 22 bombing of the Athens Court of Appeal, has been committing terrorist attacks on governmental targets since 2013, when the country entered its serious debt crisis. According to the Greek authorities the OLA has ties with the terrorist organization “Revolutionary Struggle” (EA), and attacked at the past the offices of New Democracy political party, a Bank, the Greek Industrialists Association and the German Ambassador’s home in Athens.

The OLA boasted of this and other attacks on the “bourgeois, imperialist and capitalist” government institutions, the media and businesses in a 4,500-word manifesto published on the anarchist website Indymedia. Among the declarations in its lengthy rant is a message of

“solidarity to the Palestinian people who accept the raging attack of American imperialism and Zionism, after Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. In this context, it is our imperative international duty to sabotage by any means the reactionary axis of Greece-Cyprus-Israel-Egypt, as well as all kinds of Greece’s cooperation with reactionary regimes such as that of Saudi Arabia. The weapons of the Palestinian Resistance organizations, the stones, the knives and the Molotov cocktails of Intifada will win!”

Just like the Christian, Jewish, and Yazidi communities in Turkey, Alevis have also been victims of Islamic supremacism for centuries — both in the Ottoman Empire and in the Republic of Turkey.

In Istanbul, the door of an Alevi family was vandalized with a red symbol. “Get out, heathen” and “Islam” were written on the door.

Turkey’s membership in the NATO since 1952, its negotiations for full membership to the EU since 2005, and its countless military, economic, and diplomatic agreements with the West, have done nothing to reduce the persecution against religious minorities in the country.

Pressures against the Alevi community in Turkey are becoming alarmingly commonplace.

Just like the Christian, Jewish, and Yazidi communities in Turkey, Alevis have also been victims of Islamic supremacism for centuries — both in the Ottoman Empire and in the Republic of Turkey.

Alevis are a religious minority Turkey with a distinct faith, philosophy, and culture that largely upholds secularism and humanism. Turkey’s Alevi community is estimated in the tens of millions — up to 25% of the population, making up the country’s largest minority. But the number is only an approximation, because legally, Alevis in Turkey are “non-existent”. The Turkish government does not officially recognize them, so it does not include them in a census and counts them as “Muslims.”

Recently, officials at the Istanbul airport seized the passport of Fatma Tunç, the wife of a dissident author, Aziz Tunç. Mrs. Tunç was preparing to board a plane to Germany when she was told by officials that her passport has been cancelled because “there are dangerous people in her family” and that for her to travel outside of Turkey, her husband and son would have to return. Aziz Tunç’s passport has also been cancelled due to his being prosecuted at a political trial in Turkey.

Mr. Tunç, a columnist and the author of two books about the 1978 Alevi massacre in the city of Maraş in southeastern Turkey, and his son, have been living in exile in Germany for the past two years, as a result of government persecution. “This is downright hostage-taking,” he said.