Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has over time turned out to be wrong or self-contradictory in his allegations over a number of issues in the past few years, which has cast doubts on his credibility as well as the credibility of his Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government in the eyes of the people.
Since the Dec. 17 corruption and bribery probe, Prime Minister Erdoğan has threatened to order an “operation” against certain civil society organizations and business groups that have voiced demands for the prime minister and his government to be held accountable in the face of alleged irregularities.
As [Sunni scholar] Bediüzzaman Said Nursi aptly noted, we should combat the arch-enemies of the Umma (the Islamic community)—namely ignorance, poverty and disunity—with reasonable middle- and long-term projects for promoting education, science, art, trade, democracy, human rights, women’s empowerment, tolerance and dialogue. Any quest for democracy may fail if it does not stand on a firm foundation. The Hizmet Movement has long been trying to do this. with schools, universities, business associations, charitable foundations, dialogue institutions and media outlets.
Indeed, the word genocide brings to our minds mass killings and relocations of members of a race, usually under war-like conditions. Yet, genocide is not a war crime. It is not a type of crime committed against a specific race. Rather, it has wider connotations. This crime may be committed against a specific group, without massacring them and in a peaceful setting.
Having stayed largely silent in the face of relentless attacks amounting to hate speech by beleaguered Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was incriminated in a massive corruption scandal, Fethullah Gülen spoke to Today’s Zaman and provided his account of how he sees the recent events in Turkey in his first interview with the Turkish media since Dec. 17.
Mustafa Yesil is the president of the Journalists and Writers Foundation (GYV), which is known as the Gulen community’s institutional representative. He has addressed a wide range of issues, among them the Gulen movement, eavesdropping, the arrest of Aziz Yildirim (chairman, Fenerbahce soccer team), the National Intelligence Institution’s (MIT’s) head Hakan Fidan’s query.
My fourth criticism is the lack of empathy. We haven’t empathized enough with Kurds, Armenians and Greeks. In 2011, Journalists and Writers Foundation said to the commission of Constitution in the parliament that, besides Turkish, using Kurdish as a language of education should be considered a human right.
The in-depth interview with Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, who has inspired the popular civic and social movement called Hizmet, and was published this week in a five-part series by both Zaman and Today’s Zaman was received well by people from all walks of life including intellectuals, academics, politicians and human rights activists.
The German government, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, has said an extensive assessment of the organizations and foundations of Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen’s movement in Germany failed to identify any evidence of illegal activity, daily Zaman reported.