Turkish Daily News reports that the Islamists in charge of Turkey and Istanbul, are making life impossible for butchers who butcher and sell pork. As we all know, Muslims do not eat pork. It is not allowed. Therefore, Islamists want to make it impossible for others to eat pork.

Lazari Kozmaoğlu, Istanbul’s last pork butcher, takes a break from a two-hour backgammon session to recall the days he spent slicing bacon instead of rolling dice.

Eight workers used to rush in and out of the cutting room, placing wrapped meat in refrigerators, Kozmaoğlu, 63, recalled in his store in central Istanbul. Today the shop is down to its last two months of stock and attracts only a handful of customers.Turkey’s Islamist-rooted government has clamped down on the pork industry since 2004, closing all but two of the country’s 25 pig farms and revoking slaughterhouse licenses. Kozmaoğlu, unable to add to his meat supplies, spends most of his time shuffling paperwork as he seeks permission to reopen his abattoir.”I don’t know what I can do if they don’t give it to me; this business is my life,” Kozmaoğlu said as he watched a news bulletin on Greek television.He’s one of about 2,000 ethnic Greeks, called Rum in Turkey, remaining in Istanbul. Most Greeks left the city after mobs attacked their homes and workplaces in 1955. Others were expelled in 1964 after fighting between Greeks and Turks on Cyprus.Before the 2004 crackdown, Kozmaoğlu was one of four pork butchers in Istanbul. All of his competitors quit handling pigs after losing their slaughterhouse permits. The state granted Kozmaoğlu temporary licenses to let him kill the swine on outlawed farms, but those have now been cut off, he said.In 2004, the Agriculture Ministry assumed the power to issue livestock handling permits previously controlled by local authorities. The ministry has refused applications for pig facilities, citing a failure to meet sanitary or other standards.A ministry spokeswoman declined to answer questions about pig farms and slaughterhouses.

So how did this all get started? Simple. Erdogan and his merry bunch of Islamists needed an excuse to crack down on pork. Then, in 2004, several people suffered from food poisoning. Investigation showed that they ate pork, and that this pork had made them ill.

That was the excuse the AKP needed.

The ministry used the food-poisoning scare as an excuse to shut down the pork industry, said Tahsin Yeşildere, former head of the Turkish Veterinary Medical Association’s Istanbul branch…

Üstündağ’s farm is 10 kilometers outside Kırklareli city center. He began farming in January 2004 on land inherited from his father, just before the government clampdown began.The Agriculture Ministry seized 90 adult pigs from Üstündağ and sold them to Kozmaoğlu, then banned him from selling his remaining pigs, he said.As debts mount, Üstündağ is having trouble caring for his livestock. Striding across a field fenced by scraps of metal and plastic tied together, Üstündağ points to a piglet suckling its mother. The rest of the litter died the night they were born because the sow didn’t have a properly heated barn, he said.Back in Istanbul, Kozmaoğlu said sales have fallen to less than a 10th of the 50,000 liras ($39,000) a month he brought in four years ago. He employs just three workers.The shop, next to a gas station in the Dolapdere neighborhood, doesn’t have a sign out front because Kozmaoğlu doesn’t want to attract attention from ultra-nationalists.

It’s just one of the many signs that the AKP is slowly but surely Islamizing Turkey.

UPDATE

Mehmet Y. Yavuz comments that, although pork butchers are rare nowadays in Turkey, Kozmaoğlu is not the last pork butcher in Istanbul: there are two more.

That does not, of course, mean that all is well; the story that pork butchers are taken down by the AKP is based on the facts. The AK Parti is busy trying to get all people to become… well… like them.