Epress.am News from Armenia
Resistance to Turkey’s membership in the European Union on grounds that it lags behind fulfilling human rights criteria is not fully unjustified, but, according to Noam Chomsky — the world-renowned US linguist and political scientist — the key reason why Turkey is unlikely to join the EU is European racism, Today’s Zaman reports.
“Europe can claim with some justification that Turkey has not satisfied all of the human rights conditions. On the other hand, I don’t really think this is the reason. …I think it is plain racism,” Chomsky told Today’s Zaman in an interview on Sunday.
He pointed to a recent statement by German Chancellor Angela Merkel – in which Merkel said that Germany’s culture was based on Christian and Jewish values and that Muslims in the country should accept this – and said that, apart from the fact Merkel mentioned Jewish values because of the Holocaust and not because Jewish values really shaped German culture, it was “a pretty extreme and racist statement from a major political figure in Europe.”
According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor, Germany is only one of the European countries where one can see a “rightwing backlash against Muslim immigrants” and: “It is the background reason why Turkey is unlikely to be accepted into the EU, even if it meets all the human rights standards.”
According to Chomsky, who arrived in İstanbul on Friday to attend an international gathering on the freedom of expression, the European Court of Human Rights is justified in ruling on cases regarding human rights violations and insisting on better Turkish compliance with European human rights standards. But this does not conceal the fact that there are worse violators among EU countries, such as Britain, which participated in the invasion of Iraq.
“Has Turkey done anything like that? On the contrary, it refused to participate in the invasion. That’s a much higher level of observance of human rights and even international law,” he said. For Chomsky, “when Europe was homogenous enough, racism was not dramatically evident. But as immigration is coming in to Europe, you see it rising.” He added: “I always felt Europe was more racist.”