Pro Turkish 'Islamist' AKP Female supporter: "LGBT shouldn't be allowed on the streets"

Pro Turkish 'Islamist' AKP Female supporter: "LGBT shouldn't be allowed on the streets". (BB).

The AKP rejects allegations of divisiveness, saying it represents all of Turkey’s citizens, according to a response to Bloomberg questions from its media office on Wednesday. Criticism of some of the opposition parties’ individual candidates is only meant to point out contradictions and hypocrisy in their campaigns, it said.

In Kurdish regions in the east, Erdogan strode across podiums with a Kurdish-language Koran in hand, a controversial act in a country where the president’s oath binds him to safeguard “the principles of the secular republic.” He warned crowds that opponents are anti-Muslim and worshippers of an ancient religion with origins in Iran.

“We have documents of them teaching Zoroastrianism in the mountains,” Erdogan shouted at a rally in Kars, northeast Turkey, on Tuesday, linking the HDP to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which is outlawed and listed as a terrorist organization. “These people have no relationship whatsoever with Islam. My pious Kurdish brothers won’t get behind them.”

In a speech to bus drivers at the drivers' federation in Ankara on May 28, Erdogan painted the HDP as hypocritical by pointing out that it had chosen an openly homosexual candidate for the western city of Eskisehir.

“I don’t exploit the feelings of my Kurdish brothers in the east and southeast, then clink glasses with White Turks in Istanbul,” Erdogan said. “We’re not the ones running a so-called mufti in Diyarbakir and a homosexual in Eskisehir.”

A mufti is an Islamic scholar, while the term “White Turk” generally refers to secularist, upper-class Turks. Baris Sulu, the HDP’s 37-year-old candidate in Eskisehir, said Turkey had outgrown that intolerance and such remarks were signs that the opposition was on the right path.

“Gay citizens live in this country and have for years,” Sulu, an architecture student who works for a transsexual advocacy group, said in a phone interview last week. “This is not an LGBT issue, it’s a human rights issue,” he said, using the abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.

Yet the AKP message has resonance among some Turks. Cigdem Alpaslan, a home-maker in Ankara who’s the same age as Sulu, said she agreed with the party on homosexuality.

“I swear our president and the AKP are right,” Alpaslan said. “Forget about these types getting into parliament. They shouldn’t even be out on the streets.” Hmmmm.....Has of course nothing to do with Islam.