Turkey summons German envoy over ‘Erdogan as dog’ cartoon in textbook

The Turkish foreign ministry on Monday summoned the German ambassador to protest at the appearance in a German school textbook of a caricature of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a dog.

German ambassador Eberhard Pohl was summoned over the cartoon which appeared in a school textbook in the southern state of Baden Wuerttemberg, a foreign ministry spokesman told AFP.

According the reports, the cartoon had been taken from a 2011 article in the Sunday edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper which showed Erdogan as a guard dog with teeth bared coming out of a kennel marked “Erdogan.”

The cartoon, which had the sarcastic title “Turks in Germany-- a success story”, was used in a high school textbook for social studies.

“We strongly condemn the appearance in a school textbook of a cartoon insulting our respected president and all Turks living in Germany,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.

“There is no place in democracies for attempts to incite hatred in society, xenophobia and Islamophobia,” it added, calling on Germany to prevent any re-occurence of the incident.

Erdogan has in the past drawn criticism for his intolerance of cartoonists poking fun at him, taking them to court on several occasions.

Musa Kart, a cartoonist for the anti-Erdogan Cumhurriyet daily, was last month acquitted on charges of insulting the president that could have landed him in jail.

His case prompted several cartoonists outside Turkey to publish caricatures mocking Erdogan, under a Twitter hashtag campaign #Erdogancaricature.

While still prime minister in 2005, Erdogan sued a magazine called Penguen (Penguin) after it caricatured him as an elephant, a giraffe, a monkey and several other animals under the title “The World of Tayyips”.

That case was thrown out by an Ankara court in 2006.