The union of press workers, Basın-İş, a member of DISK, the Confederation of Progressive Labor Unions, protested the arrest with a tweet, saying, “Sedef Kabaş has been fed to the justice being directed by the government by the ruling AKP party. She has been arrested for “insulting the President.” This decision is not justice. This is a political decision. Journalism is not a crime and cannot be brought to court.”
Journalist woman detained, then arrested for “insulting the President” in Turkey.
It is dangerous to be a journalist, an artist, or anybody who may be taken as an opposition figure in Turkey. A simple statement that has no significance to anything could get you arrested, as journalist Sedef Kabaş would testify.
Kabaş, appearing at a TV news show a few days ago, repeated a well-known phrase in Turkey. She said,
“There is a famous saying, ‘A head that receives a crown gets wiser.’ However, what we are witnessing is quite the opposite. There is also a saying that contrasts this, but I will not repeat it here. Let’s call it cattle. As that saying goes, ‘When a steer enters a palace, he does not become a king; rather, that palace becomes a barn.’ That is, it contrasts the first saying.”
In Turkey, there is no shortage of journalists and lackeys who get paid by demonstrating how loyal they are to the palace and Erdoğan. They even have a unique name, called lickers. These lickers immediately started a media storm on how a journalist was insulting the president!
Nobody is holding the lickers accountable for immediately relating a cow entering a palace to their president Erdoğan, but this is Turkey. You cannot ask these questions. Everybody knows the answer, but nobody will dare. However, come to think of it, President Erdoğan DOES live in a 1,100 room palace he built for himself, having golden thrones and costing millions of Lira to maintain each day while the people go hungry. But there is no linkage or mention of the president in Kabaş’s remarks. This is how sensitive Erdoğan has become about his image.
Picking up on the media frenzy, the minister of Justice tweeted that he strongly condemns the “ugly, indecent words targeting his president.” And he promised that this hate speech would be brought to justice and condemned in the conscience of the people who have elected the president.
And the woman journalist Sedef Kabaş was detained from her home, then arrested last night, and put into jail.
It was not only the Minister Of Justice, but the Presidential Speaker, the Presidential Communication Director each expressed their horror. And each targeted the journalist, which sealed her fate in Turkey. She had to be stopped, detained, and arrested, as other journalists who committed similar unmentionable crimes have experienced.
The union of press workers, Basın-İş, a member of DISK, the Confederation of Progressive Labor Unions, protested the arrest with a tweet, saying, “Sedef Kabaş has been fed to the justice being directed by the government by the ruling AKP party. She has been arrested for “insulting the President.” This decision is not justice. This is a political decision. Journalism is not a crime and cannot be brought to court.”
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