Yes, in Turkey, defending free speech can be a hate crime.An Istanbul court has sentenced Turkish-Armenian writer Sevan Nişanyan to 58 weeks in prison for an alleged insult to the Prophet Muhammad in a blog post.
The prosecutor had been seeking one and a half years of jail time for Nişanyan on charges of “insulting the religious beliefs held by a section of the society.”
The sentence cannot be converted to a financial penalty, but Nişanyan has the right to appeal.
He was charged with blasphemy after writing a blog post titled, “[We] need to fight hate speech.”
“Making fun of an Arab leader who claimed he contacted Allah hundreds of years ago and received political, financial and sexual benefits is not hate speech,” Nişanyan said in his post last year. “It is an almost kindergarten-level test of what is called freedom of expression.”
On May 22, the day of the sentencing, Nişanyan retweeted his blog post, writing, “Let’s share the article that was sentenced to 13-and-a-half months at the Istanbul 10th Criminal Court for insulting religious bla-bla.”
In his original blog post that got him in trouble Nişanyan also called out Muslim Jew-hatred, saying that Muslim preachers who say that the tiny number of Jews in the world are part of an "abhorrent race" and behind all the evils in the world are "vomiting nonsense" and this is a classic example of a hate crime.
You wouldn't know that by reading the websites of Amnesty and Human Rights Watch.
(h/t Gidon Shaviv)