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.
We are experiencing a period of turmoil in which we strongly need the supremacy of law, the presumption of innocence and the individuality of criminal offenses. A grave campaign instead is being carried out to insult and denigrate millions of people. Why would the Hizmet movement consider forming a parallel state within the state given that its members hold no intention other than Allah’s will? Considering that democratic options are available for seeking positions within the state, why would people within the bureaucracy strive for greater political power?
Australian NGOs support Gülen against PM Erdoğan’s insults
Erhan Bozkurt, a director at AUF, spoke at the press conference, which representatives from the federation’s 38 NGOs, which have been operating all over Australia for 25 years, attended. The Turkish community in Australia, Bozkurt said, was deeply wounded by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s insulting language toward both Gülen and the members of his movement, stating that no other religious scholar has been targeted by this many acts of defamation in recent history.
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Prime Minister marketed the historic graft investigation as a “coup against the government” and he targeted the Hizmet movement by voicing this claim first in the pro-government media outlets and then in the election rallies along with a host of unthinkable lies and slanders.
Intellectual deviations
Mahçupyan’s analysis of the Hizmet movement’s perspective on the Kurdish issue is wrong. When the settlement process was launched, the Hizmet movement announced its full support for the solution, with Gülen saying, “Peace is in itself goodness, and peace brings happiness.” It advocated non-violent social actors competing with each other freely and under democratic conditions. It openly declared that the right to education in one’s mother tongue is one of the fundamental human rights.
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A 28-year-old man of Turkish origin has been handed down a prison sentence of eight months and a fine of 23,000 euros by a French court after he attacked several institutions affiliated with the faith-based Gülen movement in the country.
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The man, who ran a nonprofit that provided humanitarian aid, doesn’t want to be identified because he fears for the safety of the wife and two children he was forced to leave in Turkey. They are hidden in a different city, he said, not far from his hometown. They’ve thrown away their cellphones and erased their social media accounts for fear of being tracked down by a government that no longer welcomes them.
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