The leftwing U.S. academic Noam Chomsky has hit back at Recep Tayyip Erdogan after the Turkish President accused him of ignorance and sympathising with terrorists.
Hours after Tuesday’s bomb attack on a tourist area of Istanbul, Mr. Erdogan delivered a sneering criticism of Mr. Chomsky and “so-called intellectuals” who had signed a letter calling on Turkey to lift its siege against Kurdish towns and cities in the south-east of the country.
He invited Mr. Chomsky to visit the area in a defiant televised speech to a conference of Turkish ambassadors in Ankara.
Mr. Chomsky has now rejected the invitation. In an email to the Guardian he said: “If I decide to go to Turkey, it will not be on his invitation, but as frequently before at the invitation of the many courageous dissidents, including Kurds who have been under severe attack for many years.” Mr. Chomsky also claimed Mr. Erdogan was operating double standards on terrorism.
In the open letter to Mr. Erdogan released last month, Mr. Chomsky and hundreds of others accused him of waging war against his own people. It said: “The responsibility for the present self-inflicted crisis in the country must lie squarely with Erdogan, who perceives the Kurds — whether it is the HDP [the pro-Kurdish, left-leaning party which gained 81 seats at the last election], the PYD in Syria or the PKK [the separatist Kurdish Workers’ Party] — as obstacles to his plan to establish supreme rule for the Turkish presidency.
“With the sieges imposed on their communities in the south-east, Turkey has effectively declared war on its own people. This current crisis is manufactured and totally unnecessary. It demonstrates once again that Erdogan is a deeply divisive force.”
— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2016
