[Shannon]

PM’s aide slams Washington Times article as insult to Turks


ANKARA - Turkish Daily News


Egemen Bağış, Turkish parliamentarian and foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, sent a letter to The Washington Times in which he accused a columnist who had urged the European Union to say “no” to Turkey of insulting Turkey and the Turkish government.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as well displayed a harsh reaction to the article calling the columnist “immoral” without referring to him by name.

The EU should say “no” to Turkey's quest for full membership on Oct. 3 to block the Erdoğan government's efforts to “systematically turn his country from a Muslim secular democracy into an Islamofascist state governed by an ideology anathema to European values and freedoms,” Frank J. Gaffney Jr., a columnist for The Washington Times and president of the Center for Security Policy, said in a commentary that appeared in Tuesday's edition of the conservative U.S. daily.

“I regard such [comments] as completely immoral. I consider the person who judges the prime minister of the Turkish Republic in this way to be immoral,” Erdoğan told reporters yesterday in Dubai, where he has been paying an official visit

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