There can be no rationalizing on excusing today’s terror attack on the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo. To blame satirists for terrorism and murder is like excusing rape because the victim wore a bikini. And yet, that is just what the Turkish government did today, not once but twice. From Hürriyet:

[Foreign Minister Mevlüt] Çavuşoğlu said terrorism is the first of two elements that Europe must fight. The second problem, he said, “is racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia, which is on the rise in many regions of Europe.” He suggested that terrorism and Islamophobia “affect and trigger each other.”

Nor was it just Çavuşoğlu who embraced a twisted moral equivalence. Turkish Culture and Tourism Minister Ömer Çelik also condemned the massacre, but added “Muslims were also hurt” regarding the paper’s criticism of the Prophet Muhammad.

This is not the first time that Turkish officials have placed themselves on the wrong side of terrorism and its victims. Against the backdrop of the Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s rampage through Mali, Turkish Ambassador Ahmet Kavas wrote that Al Qaeda was not a terrorist group, and it was really the French who represented true terrorism. When the leader of Turkey’s secular opposition questioned Turkey’s relationship with the Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, Ahmet Davutoğlu, then foreign minister and now prime minister, blamed any linkage between jihadism and terrorism on the propaganda of “American neocons and Israelis.”

Turkey is no bastion of free press. For a journalist to stand up for religious tolerance, political pluralism, or the environment is to risk their job, their freedom, their bank accounts or all three. But Turkish outlets with which President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan agrees can publish unmolested. And so it is quite telling that two Turkish Islamist papers, which consistently and staunchly support Erdoğan’s agenda, appeared to justify the violence.

Turkey has long been described, as a bridge between Asia and Europe, and Turkey remains, in theory, an applicant to the European Union. Crises, however, can expose a government’s true character better than any polished diplomatic summit or position paper. As Erdoğan’s regime appears to justify, if not side with, terrorists then there should be no longer any question: Turkey has no place in Europe. Indeed, no country that justifies terrorism has any place in civilized society.