Turkey tries pianist Fazil Say for insulting Islam

Mehdi Hasan, June 10, 2012 @ The Guardian:

In Turkey the right to free speech is being lost
Erdogan is using a series of alleged plots to justify a crackdown on dissent that threatens basic freedoms

Which country in the world currently imprisons more journalists than any other? The People's Republic of China? Nope. Iran? Wrong again. The rather depressing answer is the Republic of Turkey, where nearly 100 journalists are behind bars, according to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Yes, that's right: modern, secular, western-oriented Turkey, with its democratically elected government, has locked away more members of the press than China and Iran combined.

But this isn't just about the press – students, academics, artists and opposition MPs have all recently been targeted for daring to speak out against the government of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his mildly Islamist Justice and Development Party, or AKP.

There is a new climate of fear in Istanbul. When I visited the city last week to host a discussion show for al-Jazeera English, I found journalists speaking in hushed tones about the clampdown on free speech [....]

Exhibit A: last week, two students were sentenced to eight years [....]

Exhibit B: on 1 June Fazil Say, one of Turkey's leading classical pianists, was charged with "publicly insulting religious values that are adopted by a part of the nation" after he retweeted a few lines from a poem by the 11th-century Persian poet, Omar Khayyam, that mocked the Islamic vision of heaven. Say's trial is scheduled for October, and if convicted the pianist faces up to 18 months in prison. The irony is not lost on those Turks who remember how Erdogan himself was imprisoned in 1998, when he was mayor of Istanbul, for reading out a provocative poem.

Erdogan, re-elected as prime minister for the second time last June and now considered the most powerful Turkish leader since Kemal Ataturk, has become intolerant of criticism and seems bent on crushing domestic opposition.

"He is Putinesque," says Karli, [....]