The criminal case against Pastor Andrew Brunson has triggered a significant increase in public hate speech against the nation’s small Protestant community, creating what its church leaders called, in late February, a ‘climate of insecurity’ for its congregations and individual members.
According to the Turkish Association of Protestant Churches’ annual human-rights report for 2018, the number of attacks designed to incite hatred of Protestants ‘purely due to their beliefs’ in Turkey’s local, national and social media outlets had seriously increased during Brunson’s arrest, jailing and two-year trial.
The report said that the Protestants’ 150 congregations watched the US pastor’s case closely ‘with great sadness and concern’, disturbed by the media’s repeated practice of linking churches and individual Christians with terror organisations, without providing any substantiating evidence. Instead, the accusations by secret false witnesses against Brunson were ‘reported as if they were true,’ and local and national publications refused to allow the slandered churches and individuals their constitutional right of reply or correction.
