Pro-government Yeni Şafak daily fires critical columnist
Date posted: December 30, 2013
İSTANBUL
Pro-government newspaper Yeni Şafak has fired journalist Osman Özsoy after the columnist hinted government pressure on the newspaper to let him go on his Twitter account on Monday.
After announcing that he was notified by the newspaper about the decision to quit his column, Özsoy said that “it is not difficult to guess that a will that goes beyond the newspaper administration led to this.”
He said that defamation of former companions does not suit his character just because their ways parted due to a disagreement, a behavior he said belongs to the prime minister.
Özsoy said these kind of incidents are not “period but a comma” and that the most important thing is that the “nation is walking towards the future.”
Özsoy wrote a column on Dec. 24 in Yeni Şafak, trying to justify Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen‘s “conditional curse” on those who are trying to cover up the corruption investigation.
He also posted several tweets in the past few days, criticizing the government’s intervention in judiciary and slamming the defamation of Gülen.
The problem is not about the failure of the members of the Hizmet movement to obey orders from their superiors in the public service but about the claim that the prosecutors and police chiefs who conducted the graft and bribery investigation are members of the Hizmet movement — a claim which has yet to be proven.
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News reports trying to create a perception that the faith-based Gülen movement is cooperating with the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) are ill-intentioned, according to Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen’s lawyer, Orhan Erdemli. In a statement he released on Gülen’s website, www.tr.fgulen.com, on Monday, Erdemli pointed out that certain media outlets’ “incriminating” attitude toward his client […]
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