Unidentified individuals have graffitied offensive remarks on a wall of the Turkish Cultural Center (TCC) in the city of West Haven, Connecticut.
The graffiti echoes Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s hate speech against the Hizmet movement inspired by Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, with which the cultural center is affiliated.
The TCC has been serving the Turkish-American community in Connecticut for seven years. Mehmet Elmacı, the coordinator of the organization, told Turkish media outlets that the incident was unprecedented. “We are a cultural center that does not take part in politics. Our goal has been to share Turkey’s cultural heritage with our community. We condemn those individuals who are inspired by Erdoğan’s hate speech toward the Hizmet movement to write offensive remarks on our walls,” he said.
Despite the obstacles he has orchestrated for those pursuing the investigations, Erdoğan has never been able to gain enough traction to shift the debate away from corruption since Dec. 17. He must now be running on fumes.
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Erdoğan has been trying to dodge the damaging impact of the corruption scandals by using Hizmet as a scapegoat. Gülen, an ardent supporter of transparency and accountability in government, was critical of Erdoğan government’s efforts to stall the corruption investigations. Speaking to the BBC on Monday, Gülen said that the massive corruption investigations that have shaken the government cannot be covered up no matter how hard the government tries to derail the probes — not even by blaming the scandal on what the prime minister has called the “parallel state,” a veiled reference to the Hizmet movement inspired by Gülen.
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