Turkey’s Role in Fighting Islamophobia
The killing of a Muslim family of five members in a truck accident in Canada has revived the talk about Islamophobia. The Canadian authorities have declared the crime as a terrorist act. It has said that the motives behind this act was to serve Islamophobic objectives.
There is no doubt that this incident is neither the first nor the last of the wave of terrorism caused by anti-Islam rhetoric and politics in the West.
It is necessary to draw attention to the relationship between anti-Islamic forces and the rise of racism, institutional racism, and the far right in the West. What makes it more disturbing, however, is the adoption of racist far-right rhetoric by central parties in Europe and other places for ideological reasons and electoral concerns.
Therefore, it is important that confrontation with Islamophobia must take an institutional form. Islamophobia has already begun to take an institutional form. In this context, the agreement to confront Islamophobia signed between Turkey, Pakistan and Malaysia is of huge importance.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, before the United Nations General Assembly, has called for declaring March 15 as the International Day of Solidarity against Islamophobia.
Turkish point of view is that the confrontation of Islamophobia should be in the form of institutions, beyond just condemnation and denunciation. The focus should be on political and sovereign institutions to enact legislation which can criminalise Islamophobia as a form of racism.
(by Zeliha Eliacik in TRT Arabi)
Who is Naftali Bennett?
At this moment it is worth recalling a small part of the life of Naftali Bennett. He was born in 1972. He served as an officer in the elite unit in the Israeli Army’s General Staff ‘Sirt Matkal’. He is a high-tech star and one of the founders of the Cyota information security firm which was sold to American RSA company for USD 145 million in 2005.
On the political front, he started with the Likud party, which he joined in 2006. In 2007, he served as Netanyahu’s campaign leader for the Likud internal elections. Bennett has opposed freezing of settlements. In 2010, he served as director general of the Judea and Samaria Settlements Council. In 2012, he was elected head of the Jewish Home, the religious Zionism party.
During the Israeli political crisis which has been continuing for more than two years, he and his colleague, Ayelet Shaked, resigned from the Jewish Home party and established the New Right, and then the current Yamina party.
According to what Israeli analysts have also written, both realised that there were not enough Israelis interested in buying the ideological commodity of religious Zionism which is political extremism, messianism, racism, and homophobia. However, this does not indicate that they have become politically moderate or have left the field of the extreme right.
In one of his interviews in 2017, Bennett said that it was his aspiration to make his party more Zionist, so that it can work as an umbrella.
(by Antwan Shalhat in Arab 48)
Compiled and Translated by Faizul Haque