Has the PM not read these stories?

In Istanbul’s Esenyurt district, two separate mosques have been torched. After the Allahuekber Mosque, which caters mostly for Shiite Caferi citizens, there was an attempted torching of another one, the Muhammediye Mosque. The imam of the second mosque said they were threatened 10 days ago by a bearded person. He said, “We went to the police for a statement and the police told us that it would have been better if there was security camera coverage, and that there was no meaning to following up the case without footage.”

Obviously, the police did not take the threat that was conveyed by the imam very seriously.
If they had taken it seriously, they would have taken precautions in the area, looking for those who made the threats, and could have prevented the mosque from being torched.

After the news stories of the torching of the mosques appeared in newspapers, I wondered what the prime minister would say about them; the same prime minister who cited the name of God 10 times in the first 14 lines of his speech when his presidential candidacy was announced.

But I have not heard him say anything yet; though he had repeatedly uttered the lie “They drank alcohol in the mosque” for days last year.

I was expecting him to show the same sensitivity that he demonstrated to that lie for the mosques of the Caferis that were torched. I was expecting him to condemn the incident and order the security forces to speedily catch the perpetrators.

But he didn’t.

Why didn’t he say anything, I wonder? Can it be because he does not regard a mosque of the Caferis as a mosque? Or could it be that he does not care about the Caferi votes?

The thing that demagogic politicians count on

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan once said, “We wanted to change the Constitution, which is the product of the coups.” He added that he was determined to struggle for a “constitution that would suit the New Turkey.”

One thing that demagogic politicians such as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan count on is the weak memory of the public.

“The people will forget this,” they think. They act based on the logic that, “Even if what I am telling isn’t the truth, if I repeat it many times then the people will believe it.”

As a matter of fact, the words he uttered about the new Constitution are an example of this.

What deadlocked the Parliamentary Commission that was working on the “new Constitution” was the prime minister’s wish to replace Turkey’s parliamentary system with a presidential system.

However, when he asked for votes in the previous elections, he promised a new Constitution, and while he made this pledge he talked about neither a presidential nor a semi-presidential system. His ambition to secure one-man rule has weighed on the promises he gave to the electorate.

Now he holds the opposition responsible for failing to write a new Constitution, as if he’s not the one who asked to change the rules in the middle of the game.

He knows that people forget the past but has the audacity to talk as if he is innocent, although he is among the ones responsible in failing to write the Constitution.