re: Turkish PM: "There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam."

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while the U.S. is the least secular of Western countries.

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Patently false.

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Turkish PM: "There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam."

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Good for him.

The BS arrogance of a supposedly Christian SOS or POTUS attempting to define a different religion is breathtaking. ISIS is as much Islam as is Al Qaeda as is the Turkish PM, as is Sharif El-Gamal and the Park51 effort, are are members of any Mosque anywhere. Any debate about that belongs within the confines of Islam.

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But their government still has certain religious involvement that would be unacceptable in our country.

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Like their ability to turn museums into mosques, to ban the orthodox from owning and opening seminaries, and basically keeping the entire Patriarchate of Constantinople under siege. And that's without discussing the crime of "insulting Turkishness" which can apply to any overt signs of Christianity around Muslim sites, discussing the Armenian genocide, protesting against any of the abuses by the government on Orthodox Christians, discussing the Orthodox history of Turkey or Cyprus, and many, many other things.

That country is not secular. It just scares the West into not talking about anything non-secular that occurs in that shithole of a state.

I don't guess that any of you are aware that former U.S. Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, and former House Majority Leader Dick Gephart are lobbyests for Turkey. Hastert has been soaking up Turkish money for about 6 or 7 years now.

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January 16, 2014 Lobbyist and former House Speaker Dennis Hastert defended the all-expenses-paid trip for eight lawmakers to Turkey last year that he attended and his firm helped arrange.

"What we did was exclusively within the rules—meticulously," Hastert said on Thursday.

Most lobbyist travel abroad with lawmakers was banned more than six years ago in reforms passed in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal. But the trip to Turkey, which National Journal first revealed last week, was planned by the firms of Hastert and Dick Gephardt, another former House leader and current lobbyist, on behalf of Turkey. A loophole in the law allows lobbyists to plan and attend trips overseas if they are paid for by foreign countries, even as similar corporate-funded excursions are banned.

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LINK

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I am aware. What's your point?

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Hastert is another corrupt Chicago politician and has been on Turkey's payroll since before he left office.

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Edmonds reportedly added that the recordings also contained repeated references to Hastert’s flip-flop, in the fall of 2000, over an issue which remains of intense concern to the Turkish government – the continuing campaign to have Congress designate the killings of Armenians in Turkey between 1915 and 1923 a genocide. For many years, attempts had been made to get the house to pass a genocide resolution, but they never got anywhere until August 2000, when Hastert, as Speaker, announced that he would give it his backing and see that it received a full house vote. He had a clear political reason, as analysts noted at the time: a California Republican incumbent, locked in a tight congressional race, was looking to win over his district’s large Armenian community. Thanks to Hastert, the resolution, vehemently opposed by the Turks, passed the International Relations Committee by a large majority. Then, on October 19, minutes before the full House vote, Hastert withdrew it.

At the time, he explained his decision by saying that he had received a letter from President Clinton arguing that the genocide resolution, if passed, would harm U.S. interests. Again, the reported content of the Chicago wiretaps may well have been sheer bravado, and there is no evidence that any payment was ever made to Hastert or his campaign. Nevertheless, a senior official at the Turkish Consulate is said to have claimed in one recording that the price for Hastert to withdraw the resolution would have been at least $500,000.

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LINK

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turks do their best to distance themselves from arabs.

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I was surprised by this, or at least how outward they are about it. I visited Istanbul recently and nearly every local we met made unwarranted snide remarks about Arabs and how the city has turned for the worse since the recent influx of Arabs. In particular, they seemed to really disagree with how Islam is practiced by Arabs.

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Like their ability to turn museums into mosques, to ban the orthodox from owning and opening seminaries, and basically keeping the entire Patriarchate of Constantinople under siege. And that's without discussing the crime of "insulting Turkishness" which can apply to any overt signs of Christianity around Muslim sites, discussing the Armenian genocide, protesting against any of the abuses by the government on Orthodox Christians, discussing the Orthodox history of Turkey or Cyprus, and many, many other things.

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I'm an Orthodox Christian and visited Istanbul 2 weeks ago. The city was magnificent and awe-inspiring, yet also saddening how the historical presence of Christianity/Byzanitum was left to nothing but diminished remnants, seldom highlighted and always hard to find.

I visited the Patriarchal church and while beautiful on the interior, it is a modest building tucked away off a side street, directly representative of how Christianity's presence has dwindled from >30% to <1% in the last 100 years.

At Hagia Sophia, it largely remains a mosque on the inside, as only very few parts have been restored to display the original Byzantine Christian art. A video is played inside to give tourists a historical overview of the building. On several occasions, the video refers to Istanbul or the emperor of Istanbul, rather than Constantinople when speaking about the building during the Byzantine empire. Also, despite being a museum, speakers are attached to the minarets to broadcast the call to prayer throughout the day.