The letter sent to Jennifer Lopez by the Efylakas.com Editorial Team. Can serve as an excellent template for you to add your own arguments.
Also, make sure you post the photographic design below to your Facebook wall's and tag your friends on it! (click to enlarge)
Also, make sure you post the photographic design below to your Facebook wall's and tag your friends on it! (click to enlarge)
Dear Jennifer Lopez,
Our news site is being read by hundreds of Greek and Greek-Cypriots everyday. With this letter, we believe that we represent the views of a large majority of those readers.
We outreaching to you as fellow human beings and as people who take great pride and have tremendous passion in one’s cultural heritage to respectfully request that you cancel your visit to Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus to attend the opening of the Cratos Hotel & Casino on July 20, 2010 - a day that is ironically the 36th “black anniversary” of Turkey’s illegal invasion and subsequent occupation of 37% of the Republic of Cyprus.
The Cratos Hotel & Casino is located in the city of Kyrenia, which the Turkish occupying forces have renamed into "Girne". Actually, the hotels in occupied northern Cyprus are built on stolen Greek-Cypriot land, the rightful owners of which have been brutally expelled at gunpoint from their properties in 1974. The families of nearly 200,000 refugees of Cyprus, cannot return to their homes in Kyrenia, Famagusta, Lefkosia, Morphou, Karpasia and so on. The names of all these places have been also changed into Turkish. Why did the Turkish army and the Turkish state have the need to do that if the island was rightfully theirs?
Why did they have to destroy ancient Greek monuments of incalculable historical importance, desecrate Christian churches by turning them into toilets, stables, bars and hotels, vandalizing and razing to the ground all the Orthodox, and even the few remaining Jewish, cemeteries? Because they wanted to forcefully eradicate the real history of this land and make it Turkish by force. By that same military force that they have invaded in July 1974, they pillaged, murdered, raped over 800 Greek-Cypriot women, executed POWs and civilians, and forced 200,000 people to flee their ancestral homes in fear, making them refugees in their own country. Turkey has been doing this because she has been strictly following the racist policy of ethnic-cleansing devised back in 1954 with the infamous Nihat Erim reports and continues updated today through Davutoglu's fascist dogma of Neo-Ottomanism. The destruction of the cultural and religious heritage of Cyprus due to Turkey’s illegal invasion and occupation is well-documented by leading authorities, including the United States Helsinki Commission (CSCE), and you, as a person of art and culture should have been aware of this fact.
It is therefore sad and disheartening to see a celebration of this grandeur taking place in Kyrenia, a city where countless human rights violations including, murder, rape, and the forced movement of population, occurred 36 years ago. A city from which all rightful citizens where expelled in 1974 and are still alive and fight to go back.
We have no bad feelings for our Turkish-Cypriots co-citizens, despite the fact that many of them have been participating in the Turkish war crimes. In fact, as legal citizens of the Republic of Cyprus today they fully enjoy all benefits bestowed to them, including free healthcare (without them even paying taxes), education allowances for studying at the best institutions abroad and unfettered movement between the illegally occupied areas and the non-occupied areas of Cyprus. But the pseudo-state of the north violates every human rights convention and international humanitarian law ever set on paper. What we want is a just and viable solution to the division of Cyprus under high-level UN agreements and Security Council resolutions, restoration of democracy and freedom by the removal of Turkey’s 40,000 illegally stationed troops, the return to Turkey of 180,000 illegal settlers in occupied Cyprus (an act of war itself by the Geneva Convention), and the restoration of property illegally taken from their rightful owners, as countless court decisions demand. It is so simple!
Ms. Lopez, everybody sincerely appreciates your professional accomplishments. Actually, you are a big celebrity in both Greece and Cyprus and amongst the enormous Hellenic Diaspora all over the world. It is understandable that business commitments of a person of your immense talent do not always take into consideration the political climate and the social context they happen in. But in this situation you have to appreciate that the wounds are still open, 37% of Cyprus is still occupied, there are still families expecting missing persons to return, there are still POWs which Turkey refuses to acknowledge their whereabouts and many of them are found executed in abandoned wells and mass graves all over Cyprus, there are still refugees who do not have their own house because all their properties lies in the hands of the Turkish army, 1/3 of the Greek-Cypriots are still refugees and there are countless children that grew up orphans because the invading forces executed their parents.
You can see yourself that the international outcry has been tremendous. At the time of writing, more than 13,000 people (Greeks and non-Greeks) have been members of just the Facebook groups dedicated to this: http://www.facebook.com/pages/
More groups appear on Facebook all the time. Due to the actions of activists all over the world, your name and your good reputation of is already at a very high risk of being irreparably tarnished by letting yourself being so blatantly used for the political ends of Turkey and the Turkish occupation forces. In social networking websites and blogs the uproar has been enormous, and the issue has been widely discussed in mainstream Greek and Cypriot media, including major newspapers, TV and radio shows, and has been featured in such international media outlets as The Guardian, Telegraph, Sydney Morning Herald, One India, AFP, Digital Spy, Eleftherotypia, Improper, Toronto Sun and so on.
Besides, it is hard not to notice the huge contradiction between you working with Amnesty International for rightfully bringing to the attention of the world the femicide and the rapes of 350 women in Mexico, and at the same time you turning a blind eye to the rape of 800 and more Greek-Cypriot women during the Turkish invasion in 1974!
Jennifer Lopez! Please don't allow yourself to ge used as a tool of Turkey's propaganda! Please don't tarnish your good name by celebrating with the rapists, the invaders, the occupiers and the murderers of the Cypriot people! Turkey wants to use you, along with other stars and celebrities, in an attempt to purchase a false “normalcy” and false “legitimacy” for the bandit pseudo-state that has been deemed illegal with two UN Security Council Resolutions and is being recognized by no-one but Turkey.
Jennifer! Please don't embellish fascism and ethnic cleansing for a mere business contract! For humanity's sake, it is really not worth it!
With all due respect,
Editorial Team / efylakas.com
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