Guests Rub Elbows With Senators, Mayors At 2012 Greenville Dialogue Dinner
Date posted: September 26, 2012
TRIPP MESSICK, GREENVILLE, S.C.
Close to one hundred guests turned out at the Embassy Suites in Greenville Monday night for the 2012 Dialogue Dinner, entitled “Empathy: Walking in Another’s Shoes.” Guest speakers included Dan Waldschmidt, CEO of Waldschmidt Partners International, S.C. Senator John Wesley Matthews, and Furman Professor A. Kadir Yildirim.
Towards the end of the program, there was a live calligraphy demo by Turkish calligraphy artist, Aydin Cayir.
Erdogan at UN urges global action against preacher
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday demanded at UN speech international action against the US-exiled preacher Fethullah Gulen, whom he accuses of orchestrating an aborted coup d’etat against him. Gulen, who fled Turkey for Pennsylvania and has been active in religious dialogue and charity, strongly denies Erdogan’s charges that he organized the July military coup attempt, which quickly collapsed.
Deporting Gülen would undercut NATO
Sacrificing Gülen, however, will not bring Turkey in from the cold. While the pretext might have been rooting out Gülen’s followers, the reality is that Erdogan has used the purge to target secularists, liberals, and those officers whose training and experience in NATO he believes make them prone to oppose his vision and goals for Turkey.
What’s Friendship Got to Do With [Mr. Gulen’s] Extradition?
On a visit to Washington to lobby for Gülen’s extradition, Nationalist Action party parliamentarian Kamil Aydin expressed his belief that “America is going to refuse losing Turkey as a good partnership in the region.” But even if Turkish politicians do not believe that America operates according to the rule of law, they should at least be aware that most Americans are proud to think that it does.
‘Mr. Gülen is to me simultaneously both incredibly modest and a visionary’
I’m inspired by the Hizmet Movement. I didn’t realize that until I came in contact with the Movement, but all of my life, education and service and dialog have been transformative to me. … This is the work that all of our hearts should be doing. So it remains a source of inspiration for me in my work.
Iftar Dinner at Manhattan’s Riverside Church
Islands Institute New York, The Riverside Church, Union Theological Seminary and Interfaith Center of New York organized a wonderful Iftar Dinner at the Riverside Church. The Iftar had more than 250 guests from very diverse cultures and religions. The program began with a welcome speech by Reverend Chloe Breyer and representatives of each organization.
Erdoğan to US: What verdict? What court for terrorists?
Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan said during a reception before his departure from New York on Thursday that a court trial is not necessary for US-based Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, whose teachings have inspired the Gülen movement, designated a terrorist organization and accused of plotting a failed coup in Turkey on July 15.
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