On May 6, TV Net, one of the many pro-government news channels in Turkey, aired the weekly show “Deep History.” The show’s usual hosts, popular history writers Mustafa Armagan and Yavuz Bahadiroglu, hosted Suleyman Yesilyurt, who has published several “investigative” books on Turkish history that are full of racist conspiracy theories about the plots of “crypto Jews” or “crypto Armenians.”
These three talking heads, who all fall into the conservative/Islamic side of Turkish socio-politics, probed into a sensitive topic: the private life of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder and first president of Turkey. They claimed that Ataturk had a “hall of lovers,” and Yesilyurt even threw out speculation that Afet Inan — Ataturk’s famous foster child — was, in fact, his “illegitimate wife.” The two hosts seemed to agree, and the editor of the show wrote on the screen that Inan, a most respected female figure of the early republic, could well be “the unmarried first lady of the republic.”
Reactions began to pour in soon after the show aired. The three men were widely condemned on social media for “insulting Ataturk,” which is a serious crime in Turkey (a penal code article states that “anyone who publicly insults or curses the memory of Ataturk shall be imprisoned with a heavy sentence of between one and three years"). Various opinion leaders, including Prime Minister Binali Yildirim and main opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, harshly condemned the commentators. Kilicdaroglu said, “They are traitors; in fact, they are not even human.” A pre-planned speech by Armagan at Istanbul University was canceled, and students there protested, “We are the soldiers of Ataturk.” A secularist lawyer who for many years led the Istanbul Bar Association even condemned the offense against Ataturk as a “CIA project.”
Soon after, an Istanbul prosecutor opened an investigation into the case and ordered the arrest of Yesilyurt, who was detained on May 12. Many people in the press and social media kept asking why the two other men on the show were not arrested as well.
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