
During a press conference held on Monday, the GYV, whose honorary chairman is Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, stated that a hate crime is being carried out against the Hizmet movement in Turkey and called on President Gül to take the initiative to investigate the executive branch’s recent attempts to render the judiciary dysfunctional.

The minister said the schools active in his country offer an excellent education model. “My fellow citizens have embraced these schools,” he said. Speaking of the long-established, brotherly relations between Turkey and Pakistan, “I can explain these heart to heart relations in many ways. We can feel the love from whoever comes here from Turkey. It is hard to put in words. This is brotherhood, this is friendship,” Rahman said.

The BfV, which is in charge of domestic intelligence in Germany, acknowledged that it analyzed certain articles by Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen. According to the BfV, this analysis was based on their legal prerogative to check the compatibility of certain documents with the free and democratic constitutional order.

The Law and Democracy Platform, which includes 60 CSOs in İzmir province, held a press conference to protest the polarizing language used by government officials. The representative of the platform, Ömer Mustafa Aytekin, said there have been very unpleasant developments that risk democracy and the rule of law in Turkey.

İstanbul branch chairman, Aziz Babuşcu, who said the removal of Hizmet movement sympathizers from state institutions started long before the corruption scandal broke on Dec. 17 of last year. Babuşcu’s remarks drew condemnations, with many accusing the AK Party of removing public servants that the party dislikes from duty and filling state institutions with party supporters.

The government’s massive purge of members of the police and judiciary following the eruption of a corruption and bribery scandal continued across the country on Tuesday, with dozens more police officials being removed from their posts.

Distortions of the truth and outright lies by Erdoğan regarding the economy, the Gezi protests, the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK), prosecutors and investigations by prosecutors, the graft investigation and the Hizmet movement are some of what is making Erdoğan’s rhetoric questionable.

Gülen’s lawyer Nurullah Albayrak said on Monday that Erdoğan moved beyond borders of freedom of expression and used excessively harsh insults against the Islamic scholar. Gülen is demanding TL 100,000 in compensation for the allegedly denigrating remarks.

Yeşil said the GYV is calling on Gül to take action to prevent these risks to the constitutional order, the separation of powers, checks and balances, the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law. He said: “The public expects him [Gül] to use his powers and authorities under the Constitution to investigate the interventions that sought to render the law dysfunctional, in terms of the graft and bribery investigations.

Maintaining that the reassignment of thousands of people in the police force and dozens in the judiciary since the breaking of the corruption probe, in which four former ministers of the AK Party have also been implicated, should not be considered routine reassignments, Babuşcu said

In the video footage, the young man is seen stealing three Zaman newspapers placed in the mail boxes of an apartment building. When asked by the subscriber who was filming why he was stealing the newspapers, the thief said his father was the AK Party’s Beylikdüzü provincial chairman and that his father had initiated the campaign against Zaman because it is defaming the party.

“We call on the president to observe his duty to prevent the constitutional order, the independence of the judiciary, and the rule of law from being put at risk,” Journalists and Writers Foundation (GYV) Chairman Mustafa Yeşil said in a press statement.

In a written statement to Today’s Zaman, the veteran British politician Andrew Duff, who is also the president of the Union of European Federalists, underlined that during the interview with Sabah, he also praised the “charitable works of the Hizmet movement and the fact that many honest businessmen and decent democrats were members of the movement” while also stressing the need for more transparency.

The Akşehir Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association (AKSİAD) has condemned an ongoing defamation campaign being conducted against the Hizmet movement inspired by Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, calling on government officials to refrain from the hate speech and polarizing rhetoric that are damaging the society.