Turkey’s organization of Protestant Churches has prepared its 2016 Rights Violations Report,noting that dislike speech against the country’s Christians has increased in both conventional and social media.
The annual report said dislike speech against Protestants persisted throughout 2016, in addition to physical attacks on Protestant individuals and their churches, and Hurriyet Daily News reports.
The report also noted that churches in specific faced serious terror threats.
It particularly referred to dislike speech incidents around Christmas and New Year’s Eve - conveyed through billboard advertisements,posters, leaflets, and online – including an amateur theatrical act on a street in the Nazilli district of the western province of Aydin,in which a group of traditionally costumed men were recorded holding another man dressed as Santa Claus at gunpoint on December 28, 2016.
The report said such incidents, or backed up by various other news reports,had prompted anxiety among the people during the holiday season, and not enough reaction was shown against these occurrences either by the legal authorities or the public authorities.
Another example the report referred to was the identification of copies of the Bible in some shelters used by terrorist group members, and which portrayed them as formal “organizational fabric in official statements. This caused “deep sadness” among the Christian community in Turkey,it stated.
Source: tert.am