“If you want European Membership raise your hand”. This was the question I put to a meeting of civil servants teachers and university students. I am met by silence. Not a single hand is raised. But this is not London and I’m not sitting with British voters about to embark on the historic Brexit vote to determine their place in or distance from the European project. I’m in a union office in Samsun a port on the Black Sea. It was here on the northern coast of Turkey that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk landed by boat from Constantinople in May 1919 making what local memory defines as the ‘first steps’ in the Turkish War of Independence.

Politicians here are hyper-aware of the uniting and dividing issues between this strategically significant nation and current Euro-Western political trends. President Erdogan and his team are clutched in an awkward tango with EU officials; two steps forward towards unity two steps back towards age old and mutual suspicion. The question arose this week of whether Turks are seen as our ‘equals’ in the West in life or in death. The Ankara and Istanbul terror attacks were significantly underplayed by the mainstream media in Europe and the US compared to the rolling 24 hour news coverage which the Brussels airport and train attacks received.

No one I’ve met on my tour here so far finds this prejudice surprising. ‘This is not Europe’ they say in cafes and (behind hands) in civic buildings. The Turkish Foreign office web page asserts the official line that Turkey is ready and waiting to enter Europe. Yet the language used even here is hardly a passionate poem expressing some great political desire. ‘As in the past the destinies of Turkey and other European countries are intertwined. We face the future together…our goal to become an EU member is a strategic choice.’

On the other side anti-Turkish rhetoric online in the West is symptomatic of the rising Islamophobia and refugee-fear increasingly normalised by parliaments social media and national press. Mainstream sites dedicated to ‘debate’ on Turkish entry to the EU pop up routinely reminding us that: ‘97% of its (Turkish) territory lies in Asia not Europe.’- short hand for the potent fear that an expansion of the Schengen Zone to include Turkey would mean the EU effectively sharing borders with Syria Iran and Iraq.

The Muslim hordes are at the gates of our civilised world - they must be kept at bay! How about this from debatingeurope.eu: ‘As an overwhelmingly Muslim nation Turkey’s cultural traditions are fundamentally different from that of Christian Europe. Turkey’s historical interaction with Europe has always been as an outside invader.” The irony is that if you ask Muslim Turks about joining Europe they will agree with that statement (almost) entirely.

Turkish people expressed sympathy with Belgium after their terror attack. Sympathy for the civilian injury and loss has been counter-balanced by a political memory which has resurfaced. An article in the Turkish National Newspaper reminding Turks of Istanbul’s own first ever terror attack a hundred and eleven years ago is of timely interest.

On July 21 1905 the last Ottoman Empire King Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1842-1918) survived an unsuccessful assassination attempt. An eighty kilogram bomb was taken by carriage to Yldz Mosque containing iron and steel nails. The Sultan himself was unharmed arriving later than usual for the Friday prayer forcing the attacker to a last minute change of plan. The explosion killed 26 people and injured more than fifty.

The Armenian Revolutionary Federation claimed responsibility.

Istanbul is again living through an age of explosions and espionage. One moment wined and dined by foreign interests the next ignored or worse pressured by subtle - and less subtle ways - to bend to a multitude of demands.

Meanwhile Belgium’s government acknowledged it mishandled President Erdogan’s warnings about the Belgian extremist who blew himself up in Brussels airport.

Turkish officials had deported Ibrahim El Bakraoui from Turkey in July after he was picked up near the Syrian border dutifully warning Interpol.

As a result of not acting on the information Jan Jambon the Belgian Interior Minister said he and the Justice Minister Koen Geens have submitted their resignations.

The Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel has not accepted them. Bokir said countries should not think that “some terrorist organizations are less harmful than others”- an aside presumably about the glaring silence with regard to the violent actions of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the south eastern Provinces.

Turkey remains at the crossroads of ideas and ideals at the crux of dangerous borders and hopes for greater international cooperation. We would do well to pay greater attention to news from here including security advice. What unites Turkey and Europe is a shared history of mistrust- a timeline of western interventionism on a state that holds the risky and yet wealth-filled opening to Asia. By the way the man who put together the first ever terror attack on Istanbul was a professional anarchist and agitator. He made the bomb which aimed to murder the Emperor of the Muslim world at that time. His name was Charles-Edouard Joris and he came from Belgium.

The writer is a journalist broadcaster and media consultant: www.laurenbooth.org Twitter:LaurenBoothUK