Istanbul – Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Pope Francis remarks describing Armenians as the victims of “the first genocide of the 20th century” are wrong and encourage racism in Europe.
Pope Francis made the comments at a special remembrance mass in St Peter’s Basilica on Sunday. Turkey immediately recalled its ambassador to the Vatican for consultations in Ankara.
Turkey denies that the mass deportation and killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I was genocide. Armenians say up to 1.5 million people were killed.
The pope’s remarks were “false and nonsensical” and would “contribute to rising racism in Europe,” Davutoglu said late on Sunday, also accusing the Catholic leader of focusing only one side’s suffering.
Turkey, the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, says both Turks and Armenians were killed in unrest during the war and accuses Armenia of inflating the number of people who died. The deportations were said to be for security reasons.
Football’s anti-discrimination group Kick It Out has launched a major exercise to tackle abuse at grass-roots level.
According to The Guardian, the campaign will see a three-month consultation exercise with players, coaches, parents and referees about their experiences of discrimination in grass-roots football, and about the reporting process for cases and how incidents are handled.
The new initiative comes after Kick It Out last month announced a 35 per cent increase in all reports of discrimination in professional football received at the halfway point of the current season.
The number of complaints raised at grass-roots level has remained relatively low however.
Roisin Wood, director of Kick It Out, said: “We are delighted to be launching our grass-roots consultation.
“It is important that people are aware of discrimination and its effects across all levels of the game and this consultation will help us better deliver our messages of equality and inclusion.
“We want to get a greater understanding of how Kick It Out can interact with the hundreds of thousands of people who give up their time to get involved with football at the grass-roots level and help remove discrimination from the game.”
Kick It Out is also looking for volunteers to take part in a three-month pilot scheme at grass-roots level in Birmingham, Essex and West Yorkshire from August.
Anti-Racism Causes Racism
It can be argued that zealous and fanatical anti-racism is doing more than almost anything else to contribute to racism in the United Kingdom and United States. To put that in very basic terms, one of the biggest contributors to racism today may very well be anti-racism policies and statements.
Almost every single day someone or other is put before an anti-racist inquisition or a new — even stricter — law is decreed to fight racism.
Anti-racism has now become another revolution that’s eating its own children.
What we have with much of today’s anti-racism is the same kind of absurdity and extremity which often happened during various historical inquisitions. More specifically, anti-racism is just like the many other political movements that, in time, became corrupted.
Many anti-racists also feel the need to justify their existence and legitimacy by becoming more and more pure (i.e. extreme). And, as a consequence, they will also need to find new targets — more evil racists — to reprimand or even punish.
What partly contributes to all this is that a minority of Leftist activists (though often highly-influential people in the law, councils, academia, etc.) are attempting to create a “revolutionary situation” by deliberately making anti-racism policies and actions more extreme. Thus, in the process, these Leftists — along with their words and actions — are alienating people who aren’t otherwise racist. Such Leftists think that the violence, turmoil or even civil conflict that their words and policies create may be utilized to benefit their own primary cause: revolutionary socialism or the “progressive future”. Thus they see what they’re doing as tapping into anti-racism’s revolutionary/radical potential. (These very same Leftists also — to use their own words — “tap into the
Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/01/antiracism_causes_racism.html#ixzz3WSsIIe5Z
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