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.
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