PM Erdogan: Graduates of all high schools, religious or not, are our treasures

In a speech yesterday to the Justice and Development (AKP) Party's "First Regional Education Program," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stressed that no one had the right to divide the youth of Turkey according to where they had gone to school. Said Erdogan, "You are valuable to us whether you went to the Imam Hatip (religious) schools, or a private secular school. Anyone who judges and divides on this basis is committing treason to the country."Legitimacy from the people  In response to accusations of late that the AKP Party is bringing only AKP members into government positions, Erdogan said this in his speech: "What does this mean? We hire government officials on the basis of the KPS test. If there is another method that the opposition would like to propose, let's hear about it......We are a legitimate democratic administration. We get our legitimacy from neither the media nor the opposition, but from the people."  Erdogan: You can't have it both ways On the subject of the controversial Imam Hatip high schools, Erdogan had this to say: "On the one hand, the complain that missionaries are overrunning the country, that they've spread across Anatolia, that they're handing out copies of the Bible. On the other hand, they are afraid to hand over the direction of a mosque to one of this country's imam hatip or religious faculty graduates. What kind of logic is this? Are the Imam Hatip high schools illegal? Are the graduates of these schools this country's third and fourth class citizens? I say with pride that I was a graduate of an Imam Hatip school, as were all four of my children."  They still haven't learned respect for the headscarf And on the subject of the ever controversial head scarf, some of PM Erdogan's comments at Istanbul's Green Park Hotel were as follows: "Why have they not learned to respect the head scarf in this country? Do women in this country have to dress as they dictate? We don't take this stance. We don't say to anyone 'Why did you dress like that, why did you cut your hair like that? Why did you wear a jacket and pants?' And we don't have the right to say these things. So where do they find the authority to say these things? We are the people. We live in the middle of the people. We are not extreme. We are neither extreme left nor extreme right." Â