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 Hizmet movement’s Journalists and Writers Foundation (GYV) released a statement on its website on Thursday in which it said it is worried about the profiling of citizens, civic groups and public employees. It demanded that all the legislation that is reminiscent of the old, anti-democratic Turkey must be revised to ensure their full compliance with fundamental rights and freedoms.
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Will Gülen movement become a political party?
Esteemed Fethullah Gülen frequently underlines: “Forget getting a share of political power. We cannot accept control of the world even if it is presented to us on a gold tray because this would create disappointment among those actively supporting our cause. And people would think ‘They’ve also been deceived by the love of position and sense of interest. All these [voluntary] efforts were for the sake of getting a share in the political power’.”
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