Unconcern at suffering shows West's true face: Erdogan

By Merve Aydogan

ANKARA (AA) - Turkey’s president on Wednesday criticized Western countries’ indifference to humanitarian crises among Muslims, adding that racist and discriminatory ideologies are increasingly displacing democratic values in the West.

"The West’s unresponsiveness to the violence that has been going on in Syria for seven years, to the inhumane treatment refugees are subjected to at border gates, and to the genocide of the Rohingya have revealed the true face of the West,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan told an Organization of Islamic Cooperation economic meeting in Istanbul.

“Islamophobia, neo-Nazism, and racism began to replace values such as democracy, human rights and freedoms more and more” in the West, he added.

Addressing the OIC’s Standing Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation (COMCEC), he said: "As the Islamic world, it is evident that we have been going through a period of hardship in recent years, literally an era of instigation."

"We see that packs of killers such as Daesh, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, the YPG, and FETO have transformed our entire region into a large blood bath," he added.

FETO, or the Fetullah Terrorist Organization, is the group behind last year’s defeated coup in Turkey, which left 250 martyrs and 2,200 people injured.

The PKK/PYD and PKK/YPG are Syrian branches of the terrorist PKK, a terror group which has taken tens of thousands of lives in Turkey.