In Turkey, anomaly is the new normal

Not just because this is the land of young men who apologize when they are (physically) slapped by their prime minister, or are insulted by him.

Just last week an Islamist newspaper’s front-page headline explained in big, bold letters why the mining disaster in the town of the slap-fetish happened: The boss’ son-in-law is Jewish!

And since the weekend’s earthquake off the northern Aegean coast social and conventional media have been filled with colorful theories explaining why the earthquake had happened: theories in this category range from “because women at that coast usually wear bikinis,” to “because people in the area have the habit of sinning without regret.”

Facts and figures tell us Turkey is the champion in the entire European continent of workplace fatalities and third in the whole world. Turkish coal mines, for instance, are six-times more fatally dangerous than China’s.

All the same, Labor Minister Faruk Çelik claims “Turkey’s [safety] laws and regulations are more advanced than those of the International Labor Organization’s Safety and Health in Mines Convention.”
No one would probably wish to think about the consequences if Turkish laws had not been more advanced than the safety regulations stated in an international convention. But Soma is safer now: In Turkey, we close down mines after, not before, they kill workers en masse.

Recently, in order to defend Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s obsession about the military coup that toppled his much-beloved Muslim Brotherhood rule in Egypt last year, Finance Minister Mehmet Şimsek explained: “If we condemn military coups abroad, it’s not...