Turkey: satirist jailed for jokes
The arrest of stand-up comedian Deniz Göktaş has caused a stir in Turkey. The Public Prosecutor's Office has accused him of denigrating religious values and insulting the president. A video of Göktaş's last performance reached around ten million views last week. Göktaş rejected the allegations in court, defending his work as satire. His lawyer criticised the investigators for taking certain passages out of context.
A compliant judiciary
A judiciary that turns a joke made on stage into a crime is admitting its own powerlessness, warns Zeynel Lüle in T24:
“We are living in a climate of fear that declares even laughter to be a crime and trembles at the irony of humour. ... When a country's judiciary constructs a crime out of a joke told on stage it is clear that intellectual darkness has set in. ... The day oppression is referred to as the 'law', it is no longer justice that speaks from the courtrooms, but merely the will of those in power. Yet the law is not there to increase the power of those in authority, but to limit it and to protect the individual against the vast state apparatus.”
Blasphemy is not humour
What Göktaş says constitutes a criminal offence, Star counters:
“Göktaş provides a sense of catharsis to his long-standing opponents by making so-called jokes and hurling insults that mock religion during his performances. According to his statement to the Public Prosecutor's Office he was arrested for publicly denigrating the religious values held by a section of the population, but this action was simply a matter of upholding the law. ... Simone Weil [allegedly] writes in her work The Need for Roots that humour is a virtue as long as it takes aim at worldly ambition and arrogance, but as soon as it mocks man's connection to the transcendent, it becomes a crime against justice and the human soul.”