Turkish Government Mislabels Blocked Church Site as Porn

ISTANBUL, Turkey—Funny business in Turkey, where the website for a church was mysteriously blocked because it was ostensibly porn. Not religion porn, but the real kind. Adding a lather of mystery to the situation, the site was only inaccessible to computers at the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, which got some lawmakers thinking it may have been mislabeled on purpose. "While doing research on Wednesday [May 28] for a trip to Diyarbakir," reported morningstarnews.org, "Aykan Erdemir, a legislator from Bursa with the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), discovered that the website for Diyarbakir Church could not be accessed by members of the TBMM (or Parliament)." Erdemir commented, "And then I realized it was blocked, and there was an interface screen that said the reason why it was blocked was pornography. It’s not an acceptable thing to find out this has been going on.” After Erdemir filed a “parliamentary question” about the censored site, it was quickly brought back online, but "Erdemir suspects that other Christian websites were being filtered from the Internet servers at Parliament." "I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some malicious intent," he said, adding that he was troubled the moment he realized the site was inaccessible, and admitted that the thought crossed his mind, “Oh my God, is this on purpose?” The paper added, "The fact that the question had to be asked, he said, 'shows how toxic the religious freedom environment is' in Turkey." Umut á¹¢ahin, general secretary for Turkey’s Association of Protestant Churches, agreed, saying the ban was “horrible," and commenting further, “It’s a shame. It really pains us at having this kind of accusation when we have a high moral standard.” In fact, following the lifting of the Diyarbakir Church site block, "Erdemir tried to log on to numerous Christian websites from computers in the offices of the Parliament, only to find an error message that read, 'The requested URL was not found on this server' for almost every church website he tried to access." A check of the sites via a proxy server showed them to be live and problem free. á¹¢ahin speculated that someone in Parliament had blocked "everything that had the word ‘Christian’ in it.” By May 30, however, all of the restricted sites were back online. According to Erdemir, the Presidency of Telecommunication and Communication (TIB) has blocked “tens of thousands of websites,” including YouTube. However, those sites are replaced with "a standard screen from the TIB, notifying potential viewers that the sight has been banned," whereas visitors to the church sites were greeted with a "404" error, further indicating some funny business in the hallowed halls of parliament.