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Comment by return0 | Hacker News Reader

Turkey, unlike most of the middle east in the news, descends from a multicultural, religiously tolerant empire (Ottoman). The culture is not far different from Greek. There is a regression to islamism with erdogan, but i don't think that's a permanent thing now. There is definitely some racism here.

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> "descends from a multicultural, religiously tolerant empire (Ottoman)"

Where the terms "multicultural" and "religiously tolerant" apparently mean something quite a bit different from today (just like Athenian democracy from ours, for example).

I don't think they are that different. Even romans had multiculturalism. Tolerance was not invented in the modern West.

Well, Romans, from what I can tell, had better multiculturalism than Ottomans centuries later. They did not split the society into religion-based classes. So "the West" was quite a bit more progressive centuries earlier in some ways.

No, I don't think it's racism. It's islamophobia, specifically a hostility towards the conservative trends within Islam that have become so much more dominant than they used to be. And faith based hostility absolutely goes both ways.

I know this is a taboo subject, but we should stop acting as if religion was a racial attribute. It's not. Religions are opinions, and people will have to accept that others will take those opinions into account when it comes to forming a political union.

The difficult thing is that only individuals can hold opinions but only countries can join the EU. So we are forced by the very nature of this decision to make a summary judgement that ignores individual opinions and therefore will be very unfair to some.

This is something I am personally struggling with when it comes to Turkish EU membership.

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