Date posted: May 2, 2016
International Festival of Language and Culture – IFLC 2016
Remarks by Congressman Mike Honda (Representing California)
IFLC Washington DC
April 28, 2016
DAR Constitution Hall
Source: IFLC International Festival of Language and Culture , April 29, 2016

Turkey is continuing to invest in Afghanistan’s future by building schools countrywide. The most recent of them, a high school built by the Turkish Cooperation and Development Agency (TİKA) in the town of Kızılayak in Sheberghan province, was opened on Wednesday. The ceremony was attended by Mohammad Hashim Zari, Sheberghan’s governor, Özgür Arman, Turkish consul […]

Fundamental human rights and freedoms have been suspended in Turkey, people’s right to work, freedom of the press, the right to property ownership, the right to a defense in a court of law, the right to travel and the right to a fair trial have all been annulled while the principle of presumption of innocence has been totally disregarded. People have been subjected to collective punishment through the practice of “enemy law.”

A Kyrgyzstan court on Tuesday overturned a decision by the country’s Prosecutor General’s Office to extradite two people to Turkey to face charges of membership of the banned Gülen movement, The Diplomat reported.

Gülen will not return to a society that is expecting him as the Savior or the true representation of Turkishness or the antidote to current political failures. Although it is true that Gülen’s imminent return would cause tensions, it would only be tensions created by political interest groups which would use his presence for their […]

Taraf began publishing a string of confidential documents suggesting that the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government and MİT had collected information on a large number of individuals through 2013 at the request of the MGK. The targets were reportedly members of the Hizmet movement, a faith-based community inspired by Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen.

In an interview with the Atlantic magazine in August 2013, Gulen stated that “I had a chance to get to know practitioners of non-Muslim faiths better, and I felt a need to revise my expressions from earlier periods. “I realized and then stated that the critiques and condemnations that are found in the Quran or prophetic tradition are not targeted against people who belong to a religious group,” but “can be found in any person.”
