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Turkey Retaliates Against France's Anti-Quran Manifesto

Over the past six years, at least eleven people have been killed in France in crimes that were treated by the police as anti-Semitic.
Sputnik

Emrullah Isler, chairman of the Turkish Parliament's Committee on National Education, Culture, Youth, and Sport, said that the country's Higher Education Board had decided against the admittance of new students in Turkish universities' French language departments.

Al Jazeera cited Isler as saying that the move came in response to last month's manifesto released by 300 French figures who urged the removal of some parts of the Quran and denounced a "new anti-Semitism" sparked by "Islamist radicalization."

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The declaration was harshly condemned by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who wondered, in particular, whether those who issued the document "ever read their books, the Bible or the Torah."

"If they had read them, they probably would want to ban the Bible. You are no different than ISIL [Daesh*]," he said.

Signed by French politicians and celebrities such as former president Nicolas Sarkozy and actor Gerard Depardieu in late April, the manifesto specifically reads, "We demand that the fight against this democratic failure that is anti-Semitism becomes a national cause before it's too late and before France is no longer France."

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"In our recent history, 11 Jews have been assassinated, and some tortured, by radical Islamists because they were Jewish," according to the document.

In August 2017, Thorsten Schmidt, spokesman of the French non-governmental anti-immigrant group Defend Europe, told Sputnik that President Emmanuel Macron does not seem interested in containing migration and stabilizing France, but rather aims to increase migration flows, along with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

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As for the assassination of 11 Jews, the manifesto apparently referred to an array of anti-Semitic crimes that have occurred in France over the past six years.

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In 2012, three schoolchildren and a teacher were shot dead by Islamist gunman Mohammed Merah at a Jewish school by in the southwestern city of Toulouse.

In 2015, four people were killed at a Jewish supermarket in Paris staged by an associate of the two Islamist gunmen who massacred a group of cartoonists at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo earlier that year after the newspaper published a provocative front-page cartoon about Islam.

Two years later, an Orthodox Jewish woman was thrown out of a window of her Paris flat by a neighbor who shouted "Allahu Akbar" [God is the greatest]. Another suspected anti-Semitic crime was committed last month when an 85-year-old Jewish woman was stabbed before being set on fire.


*Daesh (ISIL/ISIS/Islamic state), a terrorist group banned in Russia

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