ISTANBUL – Drunkards, extremists, foreign agents and even Twitter – Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan is heaping blame on everyone except himself and his ruling party for an outbreak of violence involving a broad spectrum of Turkish society.
"He's not been behaving rationally at all," said Gareth Jenkins, an Istanbul-based researcher with the Silk Road Studies Program at John Hopkins University. "He appears to be becoming almost delusional and refusing to accept the reality that these protests are mainly spontaneous and are being organized by small groups of people who've never engaged in politics before."
Dismissing the thousands of demonstrators confronting police in cities across Turkey, the prime minister has labeled them "looters" and "bums."


Officials report that since Friday there have been more than 1,700 arrests and hundreds of injuries as protesters confronted police armed with tear gas and water cannons. In Istanbul, an Ottoman-era mosque near the prime minister's office has been converted into a makeshift field hospital where volunteer doctors are treating the wounded.
The demonstrations follow decisions made by Erdogan's government to introduce tighter restrictions on alcohol, to wade into social debates like reproductive rights and to boast about its attempts to raise a devout generation of Muslim youth.

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