The city council of İstanbul on Friday overwhelmingly voted to remove US President Donald Trump’s name from a pedestrian underpass in the bustling business district of Mecidiyeköy over allegedly Trump’s rhetoric against Muslims.
The proposal was made by members of Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) in the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s Council and received support from those of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which also rules İstanbul.
The city had given Trump’s name to the underpass connecting to the metro line when the nearby Trump Towers, made up of two conjoined landmark residential and business buildings, was opened three years ago. President Erdoğan attended the inauguration ceremony for the towers.
Even before the controversies surrounding Trump’s multiple campaign statements in the runup to the 2017 US presidential election that were widely perceived as openly anti-Muslim, the CHP tried to remove the name on the grounds the council never reviewed the naming process, according to a report by Kurdistan 24.
The official name of the towers, in which the Trump Organization has a licensing partnership, remains untouched for the time being. In 2016, Erdoğan called for changing the towers’ name by saying that “I made a mistake by attending its opening.”
Last month, nationalist İYİ Party had urged President Erdoğan to seize the towers, privately-owned by a Turkish businessman and former media mogul Aydın Doğan, in retaliation to the Trump administration’s sanctioning of two ministers of Erdoğan government over their role in the continued detention of American pastor Andrew Brunson.
The post Turkey’s İstanbul Municipaliy removes Trump’s name from metro underpass appeared first on Stockholm Center for Freedom.
from Stockholm Center for Freedom https://stockholmcf.org/turkeys-istanbul-municipaliy-removes-trumps-name-from-metro-underpass/
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