Plans to abolish “prep schools” in Turkey have sparked a huge feud between two of the country’s most powerful forces on the micro-blogging website Twitter.
Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AK party have proposed eliminating the schools, which provide private tuition classes to help high school children prepare for university entrance exams.
This has angered supporters of the Gulen movement, which finances and runs many of the schools. Numerous hashtags about the row have been tweeted millions of times over the past week.
#BBCtrending reports that the row points to deeper tensions between Mr Erdogan and the Gulen movement.
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.
The Encyclopedia of Islam and hate speech
Erdoğan’s obvious target was Fethullah Gülen, but it is clear that he also attacked anyone who doesn’t think like him with phrases such as “false prophets,” “fake mystics” and “so-called scholars.” This denigration is problematic especially in terms of secularism. Indeed, the prime minister hurls gross insults at religious interpretations that diverge from his own. In his capacity as a prime minister, he imposes his beliefs and acts onto those who do not think like him. One step beyond these remarks would be the prime minister’s supporters’ resorting to violence against those he places on the bull’s eye.
Outspoken lawyer barred from taking up Gulen-linked cases
Outspoken lawyer Kemal Ucar has been restrained from taking up defending people suspected of ties to the Gulen movement.
Samanyolu TV celebrates its 20th year
Samanyolu TV celebrated the 20th anniversary of its foundation with a ceremony featuring a concert and several activities at the İstanbul Congress Center as hundreds of guests from the media, political world and business world thronged the hall to witness the night.
Gülen files criminal complaint over smear campaign
Gülen’s lawyer Nurallah Albayrak said Yusuf Ünal crossed beyond freedom of speech by launching defamation campaign against the Turkish Islamic scholar, attacking his personality.
Fethullah Gülen: Turkey is being dragged into a civil war
Issuing a press statement following the latest terrorist attack in Turkey on Saturday, Muslim scholar Fethullah Gülen claimed that Turkey is being dragged into a civil war but underlined that sympathizers of the movement sometimes called after him would always remain peaceful no matter how they are treated.
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