Turkey: forget the EU!

While Turkey is saying that they continue sufficiently fulfilling the Copenhagen political criteria, they think that they are honest and sincerely while in the meantime they are lying like no one's business. That Turkey and their ridiculous bourgeois press (hello, we live in 2007, not 1957) are criticizing everything what is going one in Europe (why should you criticize all the time future co-members even before being a member) makes it more interesting. It looks like that they think: 'as long as we make noise and scream at them, in the end they will listen". For sure they will listen and react accordingly.
The hot potato in the EU mouth is 'freedom of expression'. And that is what no country should give up. So why still negotiating with a country where these rights are interpreted on a way such as North Korea: On November 9, a judicial investigation was initiated against a 17 year-old girl who, while doodling in a school textbook, drew a clown’s hat on a picture of Ataturk (Radikal, November 15).
What makes this so hypocritical is that the same people who are in favor of these kind of investigations are the same people who put on their blogs all kind of cartoon's of Angela Merkel, Bush, Barroso, Sarkozy, the same people who are burning foreign flags, the same people who demonstrate against cartoons in Sweden and Denmark, the same people who are proud to heck in one day 5000 Swedish web sites, the same people who are angered when they hear that the new Minister of Justice in Turkey has a British passport too (and had to give that up) but when a Dutch minister with a Turkish passport in the Netherlands, these same people became angered when some MP's in the Netherlands criticize her for not giving up her Turkish citizenship (which she also didn't). We call this 'Double Standards'.

At the same time I hear Turkish friends telling me that Turkey can do things all on their own. But deep in their hearts they know that they are not telling the truth with their pride as justification for their behavior. We live in a knowledge society, and therefore dependent on each other. And one of the things I learned, after 5 1/2 year working in Turkey, is: they don't know how to implement new technologies, concepts, invention's etc.

That the Turkish government introduced a new set of regulations for ISP's is a step closer to a police state rather than being a member of the EU. It's Turkey's right to do what they want to do, but don't cry like a baby if someone in the EU commission say on a soft tone 'please reform'. The time that the EU set double standards for Turkey must be over. Turkey has to adapt the Copenhagen criteria, not the EU has to adapt to Turkish norms and values.

What in particular makes me outrages in the new set of regulations for Turkish ISP's is that for example all websites which oppose the 'official Turkish ideology' (what that might be) but that hard-line Turkish nationalist websites, including those that call for the murder of liberal intellectuals such as the novelist Orhan Pamuk, have not been outlawed.
So, if Turkey wants to turn into a police state, soit! But the EU has to take a firm stance now.
Here you can read the new set of regulations for Turkish ISP's.

Black holes

Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Iran, Libya, Maldives, Nepal, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam are the 'black holes'.
These fifteen countries are the enemies of free circulation of news through Internet. Nonetheless they are shamefully gathered together in Tunis.

Wordpress ban became worthless!!

Plateau who runs a critical Iranian blog told me that if you want to have access to a wordpress blog in or outside Turkey, you simply have to replace the word 'wordpress' by 'wordprexy'.
For example, Michael has a blog at wordpress. But if you click on his blog you get this, but if you replace the word 'wordpress' by 'wordprexy' you get this...!!
Time to hack the sites of Adnan ...))

The AKP watch and Wordpress

Sean, who is living in Lower Saxony sent me a link. The creepy involvement of these idiots is scary. Here is the link.
Wordpress and the lawyer of this Adnan O. boggy guy, are not twisting in courts, it's a status quo: no solution expected soon.
After almost four weeks, no progress is made and I don't expect any solution soon.
Unless the Ombudsman, which was proposed by the AK party, but vetoed by former
President Sezer, becomes a law, then... only then, we can maybe expect something. And I am sure that the AK party has to show its true face.
It's now up to the AKP government to show how genuine they are...

As the sage continues

Joost Lagendijk, Chairman of the Turkey-EU Joint Parliamentary Committee.

...Wordpress blogs are still blocked in Turkey.

Here is an update by Matt of wordpress. And here are some good comments (especially the comments of Nihat).

One suggestion is to write to my fellow Dutch man Joost Lagendijk, who is Chair of the Turkey-EU Joint Parliamentary Committee. You can reach him at joost.lagendijk@europarl.europa.eu

Success

Inquisition in Egypt

According to many Egyptian writers, intellectuals and bloggers, there is a real witch hunt going on in Egypt. Lawyers like Nabih el-Wash, try to prosecute everybody and everything who is not praising Allah and see the poems of the Egyptian poet Abdel Moati Hegazi (picture above) as sacrilege. He, Abdel Moati, compared the arch conservative 'sjeikh' Yusuf el-Badri not as a scholar but opportunist, who wants to make easy money. Yusuf el-Badri is one of the the people who filed complaint after complaint. In the mean while he is getting rich with the money he gets by the court decisions.

Yusuf el-Badri after a court case with one of his fans.
The lawyer El-Wash sees the highlight of his career when an Egyptian movie producer was convicted to 80 whip layers when she stated that many girls were not virgin anymore.

Ten years ago, the academic Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid and his wife were forced to divorce since he was not a 'Muslim' anymore, so he can not be married to a Muslim wife. One of the complainants was Yusuf el-Badri. In the end, Abu Zeid and his wife asked for political asylum in the Netherlands. Currently he works as a Professor at the university of Leiden and Utrecht.


Kareem is imprisoned since he discussed and criticized the Egyptian government.

Adnan Oktar, Intelligent Design and Wordpress

Charismatic? Yes.
Lust for Money and Power? Yes.



Adnan Oktar, the Turkish cult leader, thinks that he knows what Intelligent Design means, or 'Creationism'.

Through the ages many of these cult leaders appeared and disappeared, over and over again. You can recognize these fake 'prophets' by 3 things:
'Their Lust for sex';
'Their Lust for Money';
and 'Their Lust for Power'.

Always they turned out to be fake. Go to the Southern Belt of the USA, the Amazon in Brazil, Haiti, Philippines and so on.

Besides this, they always change history according to their own interpretations and are using religions for their benefits. In this case Adnan Oktar is using Islam in his fight with all kinds of religions: and with a little knowledge he explains the whole world.

For him and his followers, Intelligent Design (ID) is something new...but it is as old as Rome. Only it had a different name...as the Greeks already made a link between the Universe and Mankind...

Following these cults for 30 years, I am astonished how many of them can freely operate in countries like the USA, Brazil, and in Turkey. But more astonishing is how they can influence the legal systems. See how wordpress was shut down.

First of all: ID is dealing with 'conscience science', introduced a long, long time ago.
Adnan Oktar and his followers need first some lessons in philology.

Regarding the law ban on wordpress: it's only the defendant who can do something.

Regarding A.O. and anti-Semitism; there is the ECHR ...

A.O. acts in a grey area of the law...but I would like to face him in a live debate!

More about Wordpress

Why Wordpress.com was banned in Turkey- reason unveiled

Aug 20th, 2007 by turkishdigestEdit

As many of you may have heard, last Friday the 17th, it was revealed that access to all Wordpress.com sites from Turkey was banned. When I first heard about it, I asked my friends to check my own website We are the Turks hosted by Wordpress, to determine whether this was true. They told me the following was coming up on the screen:
"Access to this site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2007/195 of T.C. Fatih 2.Civil Court of First Instance"

I did some research and did not find much over the weekend regarding the reason, but finally this morning the mystery curtain was lifted.

Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress made this announcement, where he's asking the opinion of Wordpress community as to what they think should be done?
Apparently this is what happened: the attorneys of the cult leader Adnan Oktar aka Harun Yahya, a 51 year old former interior design student known in Turkey as "Adnan Hoca", who founded in 1990 the foundation known as BAV (Bilim Arastirma Vakfi-Scientific Research Foundation), had applied to Wordpress for removal of what they described as "unlawful statements regarding their client". "As most of our attempts were unanswered" alleged the attorneys, they applied to Turkish judicial courts "to stop the defamation executed through Wordpress services". Hence, by the decision of Fatih 2nd Civil Court of First Instance, number 2007/195, access to Wordpress.com was then blocked in Turkey by TTNET, an Internet network that covers all Turkey.

We learned that the sites which Adnan Oktar's attorneys wanted removed are run by an Islamic Reformer Edip Yuksel, who wrote an article criticizing Oktar and his movement where he seems to be trying to expose Oktar and his followers as a fundamentalist movement with dark secrets. Edip Yuksel published this message of rebuttal.
Started as a religious cult that preyed on wealthy members of Turkish society, the BAV has appeared in lurid media tales about sex rings, a blackmail prosecution and speculation about its charismatic leader. But if BAV's notoriety has been burnished by a sensationalist Turkish media, the secretive group has earned its reputation as a prodigious publisher of inexpensive ideological paperbacks. BAV has put out hundreds of titles written by "Harun Yahya" (a pseudonym) on various topics, but most of them are Islamic-based attacks on the theory of evolution. His book, Atlas Of Creation, decrying evolution is now aggressively promoted well beyond the borders of Turkey to the Middle East, Europe, and even the United States. The book is turning up, unsolicited, in the mailboxes of scientists and members of the US Congress, and at science museums around USA. In France, the Harun Yahya book offensive led the government to issue a warning for schools to be on the look out for the "Atlas" before it makes it into their classrooms. Meanwhile, the increasing European activity of BAV, as well as of Christian creationist groups, recently prompted a committee of the Council of Europe – a 47-nation group that acts as a kind of continental watchdog – to issue a report strongly warning about its dangers to education.

The lavishly illustrated 800-page book is one of the most significant creationist challenge to Charles Darwin's theory, which Yahya calls a feeble and perverted ideology contradicted by the Koran. The books are slick, but BAV has had plenty of help. Creationism in Turkey got key support in the 1980s and 1990s from American creationist organizations, and BAV's Yahya books resemble the same sorts of works put out by California's Institute for Creation Research. Except in Yahya's books, it's Allah that's doing the creating. Unlike fundamentalist Christian creationists, Oktar does not claim the earth was created only a few thousand years ago. Instead, he argues that fossils show that creatures from millions of years ago looked just like the creatures of today, thus disproving evolution. Also, Oktar's brand of creationism is not only religious, but political and even messianic, seeing most of the world's ills – terrorism and fascism among them – as stemming from Darwin's theory of evolution. In 2001, Science magazine called BAV "one of the world's strongest anti-evolution movements outside of North America".
Edezu'scomment to Matt's post, really sums the man and his works:

Greetings.

I'm writing from Turkey and thought that some info on this person may be helpful.
Adnan Oktar is a religious zealot who launched a campaign against the Darwinian theory of evolution, maybe a decade ago. He has written a number of books, which, despite being worthless and even funny by scientific standards, attracted the attention of religious people. In those fundamentalist circles, he is revered as the "destroyer" of evolutionary theory as the majority of islamists consider Darwinian evolution as a refuted theory thanks to his books.
As expected, his books and the ideas in them are worthless, mistaken, false, consisting of arguments refuted even by Darwin himself 140 years ago. Alas, he is a wealthy and powerful person, thus capable of reaching many people, by sending free copies of his huge books to every school, teacher, and university. Sadly, as the public he tries to reach is mostly uneducated, his words are taken to be the truth.
As a result of this, Turkish intellectuals and those of us lucky enough to get a secular education, with an understanding of what science is, and what an argument is, are giving his ideas what they deserve. He is respected in religious circles, but ridiculed in the Internet.
This person's current strategy is to block all the sites which attacks him and his ideas. A few months ago, he made a similar move and blocked "eksi sozluk", an open dictionary which is, in my opinion, a bastion of free speech in Turkish online media, with more than 10.000 writers and about 2.000 entries each day.
Adnan Oktar is taking advantage of the gaps in Turkish laws on the Internet, which are sadly on their infancy, to silence all the voices against him. Internet poses a real threat to people like him, where ideas are exposed, and people read them!
As a philosophy graduate who take active interest in evolution-creationism debate, and as a Turkish citizen with the ideal of freedom in the online world, I suggest NOT to cooperate with this person.

We will reach our blogs anyway

All similar fundamental movements are run by extremely wealthy men, which leads to
speculations as to the source of their wealth. Another such character is Fethullah Gulen, but we'll look into his activities in another post. Incidentally, all these Islamic fundamentalist movements gained importance after AKP came into power. More reason for secularists like myself to worry about the future of Turkey.

Turkey bans Wordpress blogs

Turkish Internet users have been blocked from accessing sites on the Wordpress.com hosting service after a court in Istanbul ordered the site be blocked after lawyers complained that a number of blogs hosted by Wordpress were libellous of Islamic creationist author Adnan Oktar.
Here more.