#Gülen Movement

[thealim01-blog]

Dünyanın öküzün boynuzunda olduğuna dair hadis nasıl anlaşılmalıdır?

Fethullah Gülen Hocaefendi Cevaplıyor...

[justforbooks]

Fethullah Gülen

Imam who sponsored dialogue between Christians and Muslims but was accused of terrorism by the president of Turkey

In 1962, a 21-year-old imam, Fethullah Gülen, arrived in the southern Turkish port of Iskenderun to finish his military service. He also gave sermons in the town’s main mosque. This was the heyday of secular Turkey, and he quickly ran into difficulties from a secularist commanding officer who, seeing his sermons as a threat to the republic, ordered that he should be detained for two weeks.

Another officer, however, had a different approach. Spotting that the young soldier was highly intelligent and well-read in Islamic religious texts, but with almost no formal education inside the conventional school system, he recommended that Gülen should start reading western literary classics as well. The young recruit began to read, and enjoy, Dante, Camus and Dostoevsky, eventually developing a taste even for the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

This was perhaps the moment when the career pursued by Gülen, who has died aged 83, began to deviate sharply from that of most Turkish imams. In the next six decades he became internationally famous, feted especially in the US, while writing about 50 books, sponsoring dialogue between Christians and Muslims, and heading a global religious brotherhood with a great number of schools in five continents and a vast international business network. However, this trajectory would end in mortal conflict with the Turkish state, with Gülen accused of terrorism by the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and tens of thousands of his followers in jail, stripped of assets or in exile.

To his admirers, including US members of Congress and Christian theologians, Gülen remained a virtual saint, a Muslim cleric on friendly terms with the western world. In Turkey, among many Turks other than his own following, Gülen was a deeply sinister figure whose efforts to capture the state culminated in 2016 in a botched military coup in which more than 200 people died.

One of eight children, Gülen was born in the village of Korucuk in north-eastern Turkey at a time of severe wartime hardship. His father, Ramiz, was a village imam connnected with the conservative Naqshbandi Sufi brotherhood, while his mother, Refia, combined raising livestock and a family with teaching Qur’an classes for girls.

Gülen had only three years of formal primary schooling. However he knew parts of the Qur’an by heart at the age of four and the whole of it when he was eight. At 13 he became a pupil for five years at an underground theological school at the Kurşunlu mosque in Erzurum. In his mid-teens he joined a new brotherhood, the Nurcus, who supported the adoption of western science while vehemently opposing the republic founded by Kemal Atatürk and its westernising reforms. Gülen worked with the Nurcus until he set up his own brotherhood in the early 1970s.

In 1959, Gülen received his icazetname (Islamic studies diploma) as a preacher, making him an official of Turkey’s presidency of religious affairs, a state Sunni organisation, which posted him to a mosque in Edirne. He remained a government imam until 1981. His powerful emotional sermons quickly won him a wide reputation, and he was known as “the weeping imam”. His followers wept with him. He began organising teaching and discussion meetings, usually before prayers. These marked the first beginnings of his global movement.

Around 1966, Gülen was transferred to a mosque in Izmir on the Aegean, and it was there that his career took flight. In 1971 he suffered a severe setback when the military threw out Turkey’s civilian government and he was arrested and imprisoned for seven months. By the mid-70s, though, Gülen had become a well-known lecturer as well as preacher, travelling across the country to talk on topics such as the gift of prophecy, the Qur’an and science, and Darwinism.

Nevertheless, he learned to live discreetly and to disguise his actions. Even though he publicly supported Turkey’s 1980 military coup because it crushed communism and opened the way to religious education, he lived under cover for six years because some in the pro-military establishment saw him as an Islamist.

“You could say I was protected by high friends in Ankara,” he told the Turkish journalist Mehmet Ali Birand in 1998. After a tipoff during a pilgrimage to Mecca, he returned to Turkey by hiring a smuggler to take him over the mountains, minefields and barbed wire of the Syrian border. Another time he was detained and taken to a military barracks, to be released only after then prime minister Turgut Özal held a midnight cabinet meeting about the case.

Gülen’s teachings extracted universal values from Islam, accepted their commonalities with those of other cultures and religions, and promoted the study of western science. His genius lay in doing so without being so specific as to offend pious Muslim values. “I tried to show the way. It’s as if a crystal broke into little pieces, scattered left and right. I’m trying to bring this society’s pieces back together again, to provide education, and as much as I can, to advise people to serve what I believe in,” he said.

His rise was assisted by the steady growth in the numbers of Turkish students studying in Islamic vocational schools, partly as a result of moves by the military after the 1980 coup to stem the growth of leftist movements by encouraging religious education. In towns across Turkey, businessmen joined the brotherhood, prayed with it, and paid up to a fifth of their income to it, apparently in return for a promise that they would never be allowed to fail commercially.

The movement was eventually a founding influence on more than 1,000 schools in Turkey and abroad as well as several universities of its own. Some had high academic standards and were especially popular in under-served countries in Africa and Central Asia. For a time they were even standard-bearers of expanding Turkish commercial and cultural influence. However, the Gülenist movement is also suspected of using the schools as a means to recruit high-performing new members.

The way in which these various activities were organised and financed remained very mysterious. Though there seem to have been “imams” in charge of different parts of Turkey and “abis” (big brothers) issuing strict orders at the local level, no hierarchy or plan was ever revealed. Gülen himself claimed that he had only set up a few model institutions, which were copied and spread spontaneously. The Gülenist movement has long preferred to call itself “Hizmet”, or service.

Gülen lived modestly as a celibate cleric beside a teaching centre and mosque. He maintained that the Prophet Muhammad had come to him in a dream and told him not to marry. By the 90s his health was failing because of diabetes and heart problems, but he had become an internationally leading figure in Islamic-Christian dialogue, even meeting Pope John Paul II in 1998.

In March 1999, he received a tip-off, apparently from sources within the government of Bülent Ecevit, that the security forces and the country’s intelligence services were about to arrest him, and he escaped in haste to the US. In Turkey the military put him on trial in his absence.

The most damning piece of evidence produced by the security services was a clandestine video of Gülen telling his followers to capture state power by waiting and “moving within the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centres”. The accusations against him did not prevent Gülen from being given a green card to reside in the US, in 2002.

At the end of that year, Turkey’s Islamists finally took power in Turkey and Erdoğan’s Justice and Development party (AKP) formed a strong government. Gülen stayed in the US, despite sharing much of the AKP’s religious-nationalist world view and repeated invitations to return to Turkey. He declined to do so even after the court charges against him collapsed.

Meanwhile the influence of his followers grew steadily. The Gülenists had very few ministers in AKP cabinets, but they increasingly dominated the police, the ministry of justice, parts of the foreign ministry, and many government agencies, as well as much of the press. Their main obstacle was the army, until then supremely powerful in Turkey.

In 2008 prosecutors from Gülen’s movement began a series of arrests against army officers, journalists and others, on what proved eventually to be completely bogus terrorism and conspiracy charges, relying on faked evidence. By 2011, the crackdown had forced into submission the old military elite, long dominant as the country’s self-appointed guardians of Atatürk’s secularist legacy.

In 2012 Gülenist prosecutors attempted to question the head of the security services over secret truce talks with Turkey’s Kurdish terrorists. The incident rang alarm bells in the government, and in 2013 relations between the ruling AKP and Gülen and his followers turned into undisguised conflict. In a bid to impede Erdoğan’s government in December that year, Gülenist prosecutors ordered two rounds of arrests of figures close to ministers on corruption charges.

Erdoğan and Gülen were locked in a power struggle, but by the end of 2014 the government had broken the power of the movement in the police and the judiciary. Many senior Gülenist officials began fleeing abroad and Gülen’s press and media empire came under pressure.

One institution where the Gülenists retained secret supporters was the armed forces. This is why Erdoğan’s government blamed Gülen’s movement for the bloody but curiously clumsy attempt at a military takeover on 15 July 2016. Gülen denied the accusations against him, claiming that Erdoğan set up the coup as a false flag event in order to seize sole control of the country.

Whatever the real cause, Erdoğan has ruled supreme since then. The Gülenist movement has never recovered. Gülenists were purged throughout the country. Even in villages, followers were detained, lost jobs, saw property confiscated, suffered discrimination from state institutions or were ostracised. Ankara moved sharply to seize control of or close down as many of the Gülenist schools as possible.

The Turkish government issued a “red” international arrest warrant for Gülen and made numerous attempts to have him extradited to Turkey, but all were rejected by the US authorities. Though stateless, he continued to live in Pennsylvania.

He is survived by some of his seven siblings, and many nephews and nieces.

🔔 Mohammed Fethullah Gülen, religious leader, born 27 April 1941; died 20 October 2024

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[humanrightsupdates]

UN Body to Examine Türkiye’s Record on Torture

This week, the United Nations Committee against Torture will review Türkiye’s record on preventing torture and ill-treatment. Human Rights Watch is among numerous civil society groups that have submitted evidence to the committee that Turkiye’s record on torture has deteriorated greatly since the committee’s last review in May 2016.

In the aftermath of the 2016 military coup attempt, there was a steep rise in reports of police detaining people en masse and torturing them for allegedly having connections to the Fethullah Gülen movement, which the government accuses of leading the coup attempt.

Eyup Birinci, a former school teacher in the southern town of Antalya, was among those tortured, and Human Rights Watch documented his case at the time. Beaten so badly that he required emergency abdominal surgery, Birinci made numerous complaints of torture that were repeatedly rejected. Only now, after the completion of a new investigation 8 years later, will three police officers and a doctor face trial: two police officers for alleged torture, a third officer and a doctor for ignoring it. Birinci’s case is a rare exception since the Turkish authorities fail to investigate the vast majority of cases of alleged torture, let alone bring them to trial.

Human Rights Watch has also highlighted the Turkish authorities’ failure to investigate a pattern of enforced disappearances including reports of torture. While some of these occurred in Türkiye, other cases occurred overseas and the intelligence services have publicized and celebrated the forced repatriation to Türkiye of individuals they allege are connected with the Gülen movement .

The Committee should also examine Türkiye’s poor record on protecting refugees and migrants against ill-treatment in deportation centers, and the documented cases of torture and shootings of asylum seekers at its borders.

[voluptuarian]

"New Turkey" Introductory Reader

I did so much research for my paper that the final product barely scratched the surface of what I've read or looked up in the course of writing it. As such, I feel like the scope of my paper is very basic compared to the depth of the issue. (And considering how quickly I wrote it, frankly I'm not that sure of its actual writing quality.)

My research topic was current Turkish politics, centering on recent policies of President Erdogan and his party, the AKP, who have dominated the country since the mid-2000s. In particular I wanted to look into the roots of, and meaning behind a sort of party motto/discourse/policy umbrella which started in 2014 when Erdogan became president and announced the arrival of a "New Turkey."

This motto has frequently been compared to "Make America Great Again," and is just as bold and lacking in specific meaning. It is also the mission statement behind much of what's happening in Turkey's social and political climate right now, so for anyone interested in what's been going on in Turkey in the recent past, or curious about where the country's current direction is leading, the "New Turkey" idea is central to everything.

Rather than just delete all my references I thought I would share them here for anyone who's interested. Consider this a bit of "New Turkey" intro. It includes most of what I used in my bibliography and some other sources I looked at but didn't get to include.

I'm including some newspaper articles here-- these are all very introductory-- they're helpful for people with no background at all on Turkey, as well as for anyone who's interested and doesn't want to go through an entire paper's worth of books and articles. All these should be accessible for most people, I think.

“Erdogan Elected Turkey’s President, Promises ‘New Era.’”

"21st Century Will Be the Century of Türkiye: Erdoğan."

"Recep Tayyip Erdogan Sworn in as Turkish President; Swearing-in Ceremony Caps Monthslong Campaign."

"Erdoğan's split personality: the reformer v the tyrant"

"Turkey, lavish new presidential palace proves divisive."

"Turkey Rages at Shoddy Construction of 'Earthquake-Proof' Homes."

(Also looking up information on the Gezi Park protests from 2013 or Fethullah Gülen and his movement will be helpful for newbies as well.)

Behind the cut is all the more scholarly stuff. I've included entries in citation form so all the info you could need is there; I've also included links to everything but I don't know how many will be accessible everywhere, or to people without accounts, or even usable (I had a couple links stop working during the process of writing this.) Hopefully even if you can't access them all through the links provided, looking up the article information or even reaching out to the author will get you access. Happy reading!

The progression and consolidation of erdoğanist authoritarianism in the New Turkey - Bilge Azgın https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14683857.2020.1764277

Bâli, Aslı Ü., 'The “New Turkey” At Home and Abroad', in Amal Ghazal, and Jens Hanssen (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History, Oxford Handbooks (2020; online edn, Oxford Academic, 9 June 2015), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199672530.013.29‌

Bourcier, Nicolas. “Erdogan, the Enduring Reinterpreter of Turkish History.” Le Monde.fr, October 29, 2023. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/10/29/erdogan-the-enduring-reinterpreter-of-turkish-history_6212761_4.html.

Cagaptay, Soner. “Making Turkey Great Again.” The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 43, no. 1 (Winter 2019): 169–78. https://doi.org/https://www.jstor.org/stable/45289835.

Çevik, S. B. (2024). Grandiose dreams, mega projects: Ottoman nostalgia in ‘new Turkey’. International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 21(1), e1846. https://doi.org/10.1002/aps.1846

Heper, M., & Toktas, S. (2003). Islam, Modernity, and Democracy in Contemporary Turkey: The Case of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The Muslim World, 93(2), 157-185. http://proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/islam-modernity-democracy-contemporary-turkey/docview/216437044/se-2

ERDOGAN'S GRAND VISION: Rise and Decline - Hillel Fradkin, Lewis Libby (2013)https://www.jstor.org/stable/43556162?searchText=&searchUri=&ab_segments=&searchKey=&refreqid=fastly-default%3A07607ba3d65e40f3231e2694b7b6b306&seq=2

Eissenstat, Howard. "Recep tayyip erdoğan: From 'illiberal democracy' to electoral authoritarianism (born 1953)" in Dictators and Autocrats: Securing Power Across Global Politics, ed. Klaus Larres (Abingdon, Oxfordshire, U.K: Routledge, 2021) https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003100508-25/recep-tayyip-erdo%C4%9Fan-howard-eissenstat

Cinar Kiper, “Sultan Erdoğan: Turkey’s Rebranding into the New, Old Ottoman Empire”, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/04/sultan-Erdoğan-turkeys-rebranding-into-the-new-old-ottoman-empire/274724/

Kocamaner, Hikmet. “How New Is Erdoğan’s ‘New Turkey’?” Middle East Brief, no. 91 (April 2015): 1–9. https://doi.org/https://www.brandeis.edu/crown/publications/middle-east-briefs/pdfs/1-100/meb91.pdf.

‌McKernan, Bethan. 2019. “From Reformer to ‘New Sultan’: Erdoğan’s Populist Evolution.” The Guardian, March 11, 2019, sec. World news. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/11/from-reformer-to-new-sultan-erdogans-populist-evolution.

Populism, victimhood and Turkish foreign policy under AKP rule - Mehmet Arısan https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14683849.2022.2106131?src=recsys

Development of the 'New Turkey' Media Image: Substantive Aspect - N. E. Demeshko; V. A. Avatkov; A. A. Irkhin https://eds.s.ebscohost.com/eds/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=ea94c4bc-4632-4ee4-a8c2-df8b9f5973bf%40redis&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#AN=edsdoj.

Smith Reynolds, Aaron. “The ‘New Turkey’ Might Have Come to an End: Here’s Why.” giga. https://www.giga-hamburg.de/de/publikationen/giga-focus/the-new-turkey-might-have-come-to-an-end-heres-why.

Solomon, Hussein. “Turkey’s AKP and the Myth of Islamist Moderation.” Jewish Political Studies Review 30, no. 3/4 (2019): 128–35. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26801121.

Yavuz, M. Hakan. “Social and Intellectual Origins of Neo-Ottomanism: Searching for a Post-National Vision.” Die Welt des Islams 56, no. 3–4 (November 28, 2016): 438–65. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700607-05634p08.

Media in New Turkey: The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State - Bilge Yesil https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=w3tMDAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=%22new+turkey%22+origins+erdogan&ots=iqHojS41ci&sig=KC201icwuSS6tseeNml_IFMnZWU#v=onepage&q=%22new%20turkey%22%20origins%20erdogan&f=false

Yilmaz, Ihsan. "Islamic Populism and Creating Desirable Citizens in Erdogan’s New Turkey." Mediterranean Quarterly 29, no. 4 (2018): 52-76. muse.jhu.edu/article/717683.

The AKP and the spirit of the ‘new’ Turkey: imagined victim, reactionary mood, and resentful sovereign- Zafer Yilmaz https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14683849.2017.1314763

[cavenewstimes]

Self-exiled Turkish spiritual leader Fethullah Gülen dies in the US

SAYLORSBURG, Pa. (AP) — Fethullah Gülen, a reclusive U.S.-based Islamic cleric who inspired a global social movement while facing accusations he masterminded a failed 2016 coup in his native Turkey, has died. Abdullah Bozkurt, the former editor of the Gülen-linked Today’s Zaman newspaper, who is now in exile in Sweden, said Monday he spoke to Gülen’s nephew, Kemal Gülen, who confirmed the death.…

[recentlyheardcom]

Self-exiled Turkish spiritual leader Fethullah Gülen dies in Pennsylvania : NPR

Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen at his compound in Saylorsburg, Pa., in July 2016. Chris Post/AP hide caption toggle caption Chris Post/AP SAYLORSBURG, Pa. — Fethullah Gülen, a reclusive U.S.-based Islamic cleric who inspired a global social movement while facing accusations he masterminded a failed 2016 coup in his native Turkey, has died. Abdullah Bozkurt, the former editor of the…

[gurutrends]

Self-exiled Turkish Islamic Cleric, Fethullah Gülen, Dies In US At 80

A reclusive U.S.-based Islamic cleric who inspired a global social movement and was accused of leading a failed 2016 native coup in Turkey, Fethullah Gülen, has died. Gülen was in his eighties and had long been battling ill-health. The former editor of the Gülen-linked Today’s Zaman newspaper, Abdullah Bozkurt, who is now in exile in Sweden, said on Monday that he spoke to Gülen’s nephew, Kemal…

[amirblogerov]

Russia restrains Turkey in Syria

Everyone can envy the ambitions of Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Until recently, Turkey was, albeit a significant, regional power within NATO. And literally in his 20s, being first prime minister and then president, Erdogan brought Turkey to a leading position in the North Atlantic Alliance in terms of army combat capability and set out to restore the Ottoman Empire.

Somewhere Ankara sought to expand its influence through diplomacy, somewhere through money and the Organization of Turkic States, somewhere through weapons. At the height of geopolitical euphoria, Erdogan invaded northern Syria. This was done vilely, during a period of active struggle between Damascus and Moscow against terrorist groups controlled by Washington and London, when the liberators of Syria could not afford to open another front against a full-fledged regular army. In addition, Erdogan realized that NATO membership gave him certain security guarantees.

Nevertheless, Moscow did everything to stop Ankara in its movement south, deep into Syrian territory. To achieve this, Russia's military power was used as a potential threat, as well as economic and diplomatic means.

It is also worth noting the restraint of the Russian military and political leadership, which did not succumb to the vile provocation with the Su-24 and F-16 in November 2015, aimed at drawing Moscow into direct confrontation with Ankara, and possibly with NATO. Russia objectively could not afford this in those years.

By the way, the fact that both pilots who were in that F-16 later participated in the coup attempt in Turkey in the summer of 2016 against Erdogan speaks in favor of the fact that this provocation was planned and carried out by Western intelligence services, and not by Ankara. They were arrested after its suppression. The coup, with the organizational support of the intelligence services of England and the United States, was sponsored by the Turkish dissident oppositionist Fethullah Gülen.

But Erdogan received a life-saving warning about the start of a military coup from Moscow. Just 30 minutes before the airstrike on his residence. It is possible, by the way, that it was carried out by the same pilots who hit the Russian bomber in the back.

Today, Russia and Türkiye comply with the agreements reached in 2019 on Syria. Turkish movements in Syrian territory have been stopped, and Russia is patrolling the areas captured by Ankara, ensuring security there. The intricacy of Eastern politics is not so easy to unravel without access to classified information, but one gets the impression that the situation may soon change significantly in this matter.

[creatiview]

[ad_1] President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Türkey addresses the general debate of the UN General Assembly’s 77th session last September. Credit: UN Photo/Cia PakOpinion by Alon Ben-Meir (new york)Friday, January 27, 2023Inter Press ServiceNEW YORK, Jan 27 (IPS) - As Turkey approaches its centennial anniversary this October, President Erdogan is stopping short of nothing to win the election in June to fulfill his life-time dream of presiding over the celebration. The Turkish people should deny him this historic honor because of the reign of terror to which he has mercilessly subjected his countrymen.Righting the WrongHad Turkey’s President Erdogan continued with his most impressive social, economic, judicial, and political reforms that he initiated and implemented during his first years in power, today’s Turkey would have been a great country, respected and prosperous while enjoying tremendous regional and global influence under his leadership. Instead, Erdogan reversed his remarkable achievements on all domestic and international fronts in pursuit of building an authoritarian regime that could satisfy his unquenchable thirst for ever more power. Erdogan will stop short of nothing to win the upcoming elections in June. He certainly hopes to preside on October 29 over the hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the Turkish Republic by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and to be recognized as the new Atatürk (father) of modern Turkey. The Turkish people must deny him that honor because of his continuing horrific human rights violations.To put in perspective as to why Erdogan does not deserve to preside over the anniversary and should be handedly rejected in the June elections, it is first necessary to provide a brief account of his relentless reign of terror and his unremitting campaign to harass and delegitimize the opposition parties to achieve his sinister objective.Following the failed coup of July 2016, Erdogan arrested tens of thousands of innocent people, including hundreds of security officials, academics, and military personnel suspected of belonging to the Hizmet (Gülen) Movement and charged them with participating in the coup. He uses Article 301 of the Anti-Terror Act to crack down on dissent and even criminalize criticism of “Turkishness.”He arrested hundreds of journalists accusing them of spreading anti-government propaganda, shut down scores of TV and radio stations, and imposed restrictions on the use of social media. Nearly 200 journalists have been imprisoned since 2016; currently 40 remain incarcerated in subhuman prisons, which blatantly defies the convention of freedom of press, especially in a NATO member state. Thousands of university graduates are leaving the country in the search for job opportunities and to free themselves from Erdogan’s shackles. Leaving their country behind is causing an alarming brain drain, which is affecting just about every industry.The Council of Europe and the University of Lausanne reports that Turkey has the largest population of prisoners convicted on charges related to terrorism. As Turkish journalist Uzay Bulut notes, “The report, updated in April 2021, shows that at the time there were a total of 30,524 inmates in COE member states who were sentenced for terrorism; of those, 29,827 were in Turkish prisons” . As Leo Tolstoy observed in War and Peace, “One need only to admit that public tranquility is in danger and any action finds a justification… All the horrors of the reign of terror were based only on solicitude for public tranquility.” To that end, Erdogan proclaims to be a pious man, but he cynically uses Islam as nothing but an evil political tool to project a divine power to assert his dictatorial whims unchallenged.The World Organization Against Torture (OMCT) reports that Erdogan conveniently uses Anti-Terrorism Law No. 3713, which was enacted by his AK Party-led, rubber stamp parliament to stifle freedoms and silence the voices of those who defend human rights. The law allows him to label peaceful human rights defenders as ‘terrorist offenders’.

OMCT states that “Official data show that in 2020, 6551 people were prosecuted under the anti-terrorism law, while a staggering 208,833 were investigated for ‘membership in an armed organization,’” typically those involved with the Gülen movement.Erdogan continues his crackdown on his own Kurdish community which represents nearly 20 percent of the population, depriving them of basic human rights. His systematic persecution of the Kurds seems to have no bounds, as he accuses thousands of being supporters of the PKK, which he considers as a terrorist organization and which successive Turkish governments have been fighting for more than 50 years at staggering human and material cost.He consistently demands that various Balkan and EU states extradite Turkish nationals whom he accuses of being terrorists to stand trial in his corrupted courts, denying them due process and subjecting them to ferocious torture in order to extract confessions for offences they never committed.He is preventing Finland and Sweden from joining NATO unless Sweden extradites about 130 political refugees, mostly Turkish Kurds, to stand trial in Turkey. Sweden has rejected his demand knowing that once they reach Turkish soil, it will be tantamount to the kiss of death. To be sure, the rule of law in Erdogan’s Turkey has been effectively dismantled.To improve his chances of being re-elected, Erdogan wants to ensure that the Kurdish political parties are denied representation in the Parliament. He has incarcerated many of the 56 members of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and removed its remaining members from the legislative process; he is determined to close the party altogether. In addition, he arrested many members of the Democratic Regions Party (DBP), accusing them of unfounded terrorism-related offenses and illegally replacing them through government-appointed trustees.Erdogan is asking the Biden administration to issue a statement in support of his policies to help him in his bid for reelection when in fact he is at odds with President Biden on a host of critical issues, including his egregious human rights violations, his refusal to allow Sweden and Finland to join NATO, his purchase of the Russian-made S-400 air defense system, his money laundering, and his ceaseless corruption. And in 2019, he tried to block NATO’s plan for the defense of Poland and the Baltic states unless NATO identified the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces as terrorists.One would think that if he is so desperate to be re-elected come June, he would make significant concessions both domestically and in his relations with the US and the EU. Why not offer amnesty to all political prisoners, free the journalists, stop harassing and jailing leaders of opposition parties, and fully adhere to human rights and the rule of law?Why not drop his opposition to Sweden’s admission to NATO? Why not rescind his purchase of a second batch of S-400s and decommission those currently in use, which are totally incompatible with NATO’s air defense systems? Finally, why not restore the democratic principles which every member state of NATO is required to uphold?But then, Erdogan’s obsession with absolute power has blinded him from seeing and feeling the plight of his own people, which only demonstrates his ignorance and shortsightedness. As Jorge Luis Borges aptly observed, “Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.”A number of years ago, Erdogan’s former prime minister Davutoglu told me that by the year 2023, Turkey will have restored the glory, the global influence, and prestige that the Ottoman Empire enjoyed in its heyday. Needless to say, Davutoglu’s prophecy has not come to pass. To the contrary, today, Turkey’s economy, social and political order, and democracy are in complete disarray; Turkey is far from having “zero problems with neighbors,” and remains estranged from the US and the EU.

If Erdogan manages to be re-elected through cheating and by disenfranchising the opposition parties, he will celebrate the centennial anniversary while presiding over a country in retreat, with a disillusioned and despairing citizenry and diminishing regional and international stature. He will not be the new Atatürk even though he so frantically wants to portray himself as a great reformer leading a constructive and great power on the world stage.Instead, Erdogan will be remembered with scorn and contempt for having squandered Turkey’s huge potential while degrading the anniversary that could have been Turkey’s greatest celebration in one hundred years.Dr. Alon Ben-Meir, a retired professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University (NYU), taught courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies for over 20 years.IPS UN BureauFollow @IPSNewsUNBureauFollow IPS News UN Bureau on Instagram© Inter Press Service (2023) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press ServiceWhere next?Related newsBrowse related news topics:Latest newsRead the latest news stories:Hate speech: A growing, international threat Saturday, January 28, 2023The Value of Insects: Why We Must Act Now to Protect Them Friday, January 27, 2023Destruction of Ukraine's Healthcare Facilities Violates International Humanitarian Law Friday, January 27, 2023Erdogan's Desperate Bid to Become the New Atatrk Friday, January 27, 2023The Year of Debt Distress and Damaging Development Trade-Off Friday, January 27, 2023Guterres strongly condemns attack at Jerusalem synagogue which left at least seven Israelis dead Friday, January 27, 2023Mali: ‘Critical year’ begins in country’s return to constitutional order Friday, January 27, 2023Syria: WFP chief calls for action now, as hunger soars to 12 year high Friday, January 27, 2023Holocaust remembrance: beware ‘siren songs of hate’ – UN chief Friday, January 27, 2023Systemic racism within UK criminal justice system a serious concern: UN human rights experts Friday, January 27, 2023In-depthLearn more about the related issues:Share thisBookmark or share this with others using some popular social bookmarking web sites:Link to this page from your site/blogAdd the following HTML code to your page:Erdogan's Desperate Bid to Become the New Atatrk, Inter Press Service, Friday, January 27, 2023 (posted by Global Issues)… to produce this:Erdogan's Desperate Bid to Become the New Atatrk, Inter Press Service, Friday, January 27, 2023 (posted by Global Issues) [ad_2] Source link

[archacovercosine]

isn't the turkish military traditionally an ideological stronghold of atatürk secularism, the movement that gülen opposed for most of his political career?

Fethullah Gulen, the Turkish cleric accused of masterminding a bloody attempted coup in 2016, has died aged 83, according to Turkish media reports and a social media post by a movement close to him. The cleric, who had been living in self-imposed exile in the US, died after being admitted to a Pennsylvania hospital, the reports said.

Arrested Eric Adams too late I guess, he accomplished his mission after Micheal Flynn failed

[justinssportscorner]

Jen Kirby at Vox: 

The Portland Trail Blazers still have to win four games to reach the NBA Finals. So do the Toronto Raptors.

But if that happens — and that’s a big if, as the Trail Blazers are already down a game to the reigning NBA champs the Golden State Warriors — the NBA playoffs could suddenly have some geopolitical implications.

That’s because Enes Kanter, the center for the Portland team, is currently the target of an Interpol “red notice” — basically, an arrest warrant — put out by the Turkish government.

Kanter is an outspoken and longtime critic of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğanand his increasingly authoritarian policies. Kanter’s Turkish passport was revoked in 2017, and though he’s a reportedly a US green card holder, if he travels to Canada to compete, he could open himself up to arrest.

Again, the Trail Blazers are still a long way from reaching the NBA finals (as are the Raptors). But the potential matchup has already prompted Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) to write to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to ask him and Canadian officials to “facilitate Mr. Kanter’s safe passage to and from Canada” if Portland and Toronto meet in the finals.

“I also urge your government to state publicly that it will not comply with any Interpol red notice meant to interfere with Kanter’s livelihood and to intimidate him and his family back in Turkey,” Wyden wrote.

A spokesperson for Canada’s minister for immigration told the Associated Press that it couldn’t comment on specific cases because of privacy reasons, but that “we are committed to ensuring that every case is assessed fairly, on its merits and in accordance with Canada’s laws.’’

But Kanter’s saga began long before the prospect of a playoff matchup at the end of the month — and his status as an NBA player has elevated his protest against Erdoğan’s anti-democratic crackdown, even as he finds himself a victim of it.

Who is Enes Kanter, and why is he battling with Turkey?

Enes Kanter, 26, is a Turkish basketball player (though he was born in Switzerland) who’s played professionally in the United States since 2011. He joined the Portland Trail Blazers in February 2019.

Kanter is a Muslim — he’s been very open about fasting during Ramadan during the NBA playoffs — and a devoted supporter of Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish cleric who preaches a moderate form of Sunni Islam. Education is a huge part of Gülen’s movement, and he and his adherents have helped establish schools in Turkey and abroad that preach his teachings.

Gülen has lived in Pennsylvania since 1999. But Erdoğan has accused him of orchestrating the failed July 2016 coup against him and his government. After the coup, Erdoğan demanded that the US extradite Gülen to Turkey to stand trial, despite little evidence that Gülen and his followers instigated the coup attempt.

Even so, Erdoğan purged thousands of suspected followers of Gülen from the armed forces, civil service, and the judiciary in the wake of the coup — and then continued to try to stamp out pretty much any form of dissent within the country.

In the nearly three years since the coup attempt, Erdoğan has awarded himself additional powers, which has effectively turned Turkey into an autocracy. He continues to quash any challenges to his authority; in March, an opposition candidate was elected Istanbul’s mayor, in an embarrassing blow to Erdoğan, whose ally lost the race. But in May, Turkey’s electoral commission voided the election and declared a new contest to be held in June.

Given all this, it’s not that surprising that Kanter’s ties to Gülen, and his criticism of Erdoğan’s power grab in recent years, have turned him into a target for Erdoğan.

Kanter vocally criticized Erdoğan after a terror attack in Ankara in 2016 and has continued to publicly blast the leader for his crackdown, calling him a dictator and the “Hitler of our Century.”

In May 2017, Kanter said he was detained in Romania after authorities told him his passport was invalid. He said that Turkey rescinded his passport because of his “political views.” He was eventually released and was able to get to London and then New York, reportedly with the help of the State Department.

n December 2017, the Turkish state-run news agency said prosecutors sought a four-year sentence for Kanter for insulting Erdoğan over Twitter in 2016. Kanter was also reportedly indicted in 2018 for making “hurtful and humiliating” comments about the head of the Turkish basketball league, who happens to be an ally of Erdoğan’s and has, incidentally, said some hurtful things about Kanter.

Kanter’s family also became a target for the Turkish leader, including his father, mother, and sister, who are still in Turkey. Kanter told the New York Times in January that he stopped communicating with them directly after his family home was raided in 2016.

But in the summer of 2018, the Turkish government indicted Kanter’s father on charges of being a member of a terrorist group. In an op-ed Kanter wrote for Time in September 2018, he said his outspokenness had directly endangered his father and the rest of his family. 

[...]

In Turkey, Kanter’s activism is effectively nonexistent. Erdoğan tightly controls the media, which repeatedly accuses Kanter of terrorist ties. It also censors his on-court performance. Earlier this month, the NBA cut ties with a Turkish company that ran the league’s Turkish Twitter account after it completely omitted any mention of Kanter’s performance (15 points, nine rebounds) in a playoff game against Denver in a recap tweet.

And Turkey’s S Sport station, which airs NBA games in Turkey, hasn’t broadcast any games since his indictment, according to Reuters. That’s one thing if it’s a Knicks game, but that’s now including Kanter’s Trail Blazers playoffs games against the Warriors. And if the Trail Blazers make it to the NBA finals, Turkish TV just won’t air those games either.

[thealim01-blog]

| Fethullah Gülen Hocaefendi

Mezheb nedir? Mezhebler nasıl oluştu? Neden farklılıklar var? 

[ssbprep]

The Fate of Turkmenistan’s Gülenists

The Fate of Turkmenistan’s Gülenists

The Diplomat has learned that two political prisoners in Turkmenistan have died of unknown causes in the last year, both of them among the graduates of the country’s Turkish schools who were arrestedin 2016 and 2017. The schools, taken over by the government in 2011, have a long history in Turkmenistan which corresponds with the influence there of the movement led by Turkish Islamic cleric…

[mertnews]

KÖTÜLÜK MÜNFERİT DEĞİL!

MertReport Feb 13

Takip ettiğimden değil, @YouTube’da önüme düştü. @verandamedia’dan bir röportaj. Merak ettim, izledim. İnternette kaydı duran, milyonlarca kez izlenen bir açıklamayla ilgili büyük bir cesaretle @IlhanGokalpTR alenen yalan söylüyor.

Önder Aytaç ile İlhan Gökalp: Fethullah Gülen, Türkiye Siyaseti ve Cemaa…

@FGulencomTR’in #17/25Aralık operasyonlarını yapan polislerle ilgili açıklamasını, #15Temmuz’la ilişkilendiriyor. Konuğu @OnderAytacProf durumun vahametini anlamıyor. İnternette herkese ayar verirken burada meseleyi geçiştiriyor.

En fenası ise durumu fark eden ve kendisini uyaran bir takipçiye @verandamedia‘dan gösterilen tepki! Yalan beyana şahit olarak @AhmettDonmez’i gösteriyor. Şıracının şahidi bozacı!

Aynı durumu başka konularda da yapıyor. Açıklamaların siyakı ve sibakına bakmadan “cımbızlama” yapıyor. İktidarla aynı dili konuşuyor. Fethullah Gülen’in yıllar önce yaptığını söylediği açıklamaları bağlamından koparıyor. Aleyhine kullanıyor. Ardından kendisinin vakıf olduğu bir sürü özel bilgi veya açıklamayı sıralıyor.

Mevzu Fethullah Gülen ve Gülen Hareketi olunca,

İyi niyet yok!

Ahlak yok!

Vicdan yok!

Kamuya açık bir konuda alenen yalan söyleyen başka konularda neler demez! Kötülük, yalan @munferitfikir değil. İftiracılar, @verandamedia, organize!

[goldpeninsula]

Zaman International Schools, flagged by Turkish officials for its alleged connections to the Fethullah Gülen movement, innocuously changed names and hands at the year’s end, after Turkey promised to boost bilateral trade with Cambodia beyond $1 billion.

The international school system, which is one of the more established and most expensive in Cambodia, was recently bought in full by Chea Sophakanny, a Cambodian business owner with deep connections in the government. Both the grade school and university still go by Zaman on their website and Facebook page, but the registered name changed to Paragon as of November 13, according to Commerce Ministry records.

Sophakanny assumed full control over the school system at the end of 2018, after becoming the majority shareholder in 2016. She is the daughter of Cambodia’s Land Minister Chea Sophara and wife of Eang Sophalleth, an adviser to Prime Minister Hun Sen. The school shares its new name — Paragon Education Co. Ltd. — with Sophakanny’s collection of construction, property development, and mining services, Paragon Professional Services.

When contacted this week, Sophakanny and Paragon International University Rector Deth Sok Udom would not comment or clarify on the change in ownership, and instead pointed to a letter published at the end of December claiming the school has no association with any illegal organizations. However, reports from a Turkish education organization claim the restructuring aimed to dissolve alleged connections between the international school and a movement labeled a “terrorist organization” by the Turkish government.

[apas-95]

[Paraphrased from: here, with better format here]

So! Enes Kanter. This Guy.

Makes ugly shoes. You’ve probably seen them. Until now, I, like I assume a lot of you, thought he was just some sellout who (cynically or not) figured it was pretty profitable to sell asinine regime change merch. Turns out, it actually goes a bit deeper. A lot deeper, in fact, and it has quite a bit to do with this incident a while back:

This is a pretty recognisable hand sign for a Turkish fascist paramilitary org. Kanter made the claim that he was doing... the Grinch sign(?), but it’s a very lousy excuse, as weak as ‘no, I wasn’t doing a Nazi salute, they just caught me... pointing at a bird’.

They Grey Wolves are a far-right terrorist organisation, who have no lack of ties with the west’s push on Xinjiang, but hey, maybe it really was just... the Grinch sign... and an honest mistake. So, why am I mentioning it? Well, as it turns out, Kanter does have ties to the Grey Wolves - through Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen.

Gülen is perhaps best known in the US for his charter schools. Education is a big part of the Gülen Movement (also known as Hizmet, and referred to as FETO [Fethullahist Terrorist Organization] by the Turkish government), which runs schools throughout the world. Kanter himself attended one of these schools from a young age, where he first got involved with the Gülen movement, and became one of its most famous followers in the US.

This isn’t an unusual story, and certainly not one unique to Kanter. The schools have been accused on many occasions of grooming and recruiting the ‘best and brightest’ students to the movement - including, for instance, a teenage basketball prodigy. In turn, the Gülen Movement does everything they can to place these exceptional individuals they’ve recruited through their schools into critical bureaucracies, like the military, police and intelligence services. 

The movement itself, if it weren’t obvious enough from the ‘secretly installing its members at the levers of political power’ thing, is very shady. It’s structured in a very... recognisable way. The movement is made up of cells, each of which lead by a commander, who is the only one who has knowledge of, or communication with, other cells. At the highest level, these leaders communicate with codenames, all organised around a central circle and leader. In short, it’s textbook covert cell structure, as used by - just an example - the CIA.

The movement, with its hands on all the important parts of state power in Turkey, was able to facilitate a certain right wing politician’s rise to power, that being Erdoğan. Through a somewhat complicated bout of parapolitics, involving assasinations and a mass killing, Erdoğan and the Gülen movement were able to push out political rivals and consolidate power in Turkey. After a few too many scandals, Erdoğan apparently lost the movement’s favour, and they orchestrated a full-on attempted coup in 2016.

So, what does any of this have to do with Kanter selling terrible shoes (and meeting with US presidents to push the Xinjiang narrative)? Well, the Gülen Movement isn’t exactly unrelated to that - with Gülen saying in 1997: “Turkey […] today encompasses 60 million. Together with the Turks in Central Asia it is 120-130 million. If it manages to break down the Chinese wall and to unite with the Turks there, it will be 300 million”, and Gülen himself being instrumental in lobbying the US government to recognise the ‘East Turkestan Government in Exile’ in 2003.

Saying “their activities [...] are based on a report entitled “the Xinjiang Project” drafted by Graham Fuller” is, in fact, understating things. Fuller, a RAND corporation fellow, former CIA Kabul Station Chief, and Vice Chairman of the National Security Council, was actually instrumental in getting Gülen into the US, lobbying immigration authorities into ignoring the billions of dollars he was moving clandestinely around the globe, funding who-knows-what. In fact, the US State Department itself asserted the Gülen Movement was funded by the CIA.

The fact that the two people who helped him gain residence in the US - in Pennsylvania - were Fuller, ex-CIA; and George Fidas, the head of the CIA’s university outreach; probably doesn’t help things. It’s likely Fuller was Gülen‘s handler, and a warrant for his arrest was put out by the Turkish government in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt.

So, Gülen and Fuller both have a keen interest in Xinjiang. The president of the Uyghur American Association, Kuzzat Altay, actually is an open follower of the Gülen Movement (and just so happens to live in Virginia). The UAA was actually founded in the same year that Fuller started The Xinjiang Project for RAND, which, as mentioned before, was used to lobby the US government into recognising the ‘East Turkestan Government in Exile’.

Kuzzat Altay, the president of the Uyghur American Association, and follower of the Gülen Movement, is also the CEO of an education company - recalling that the reason Gülen‘s entry into the US was opposed was his ability to move money through his shady networks of, you guessed it, mostly schools. He’s the nephew of the former World Uyghur Congress president (at one point one of the top 5 richest people in China, and a convicted spy), but the really interesting part is his brother, Faruk Altay, who you might already have heard of!

He runs Altay Defense, where US Special Forces provide paramilitary training to key members of Uyghur separatist groups, all in lovely Virginia, USA. I don’t think I even have to say it, but it’s incredibly reminiscent of any number of US regime change operations, like Operation Gladio.

It is funny to note how most US liberals probably wouldn’t like openly associating with these plainly far-right groups in other circumstances... but, since they’re pushing against China, it’s all swept aside.

Anyway, circling back to Kanter, who has open and clear ties with this whole warren of intelligence agency fronts, far-right terrorist groups, and regime change ops, I think it’s clear that his support for ‘#freeuyghur’ and merchandising of it is a lot more suspect than just opportunism. Maybe the Grey Wolves symbol wasn’t so disconnected from it after all.