
The former head of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey’s (TÜBİTAK) Research Center for Advanced Technologies on Informatics and Information Security (BİLGEM) has said he was forced to make changes in a report as part of an investigation into a “bugging device” found at the prime minister’s office.

Given the fact that Gülen is the foremost advocate of nonviolence and the only promoter of dialogue with different segments of society, including Jews and Christians, it was surprising for many political observers to see Gülen’s movement being labeled as hashashins.

A journalist at the Ankara branch of the daily Bugün has claimed that he received a threatening phone call which he describes as “insulting and discomforting.” The threat follows recent similar claims by Cüneyt Özdemir, a writer at the newspaper Radikal and anchor of the 5N 1K program broadcast by the CNN Türk TV station.

A public sector employee selection process using personal data to create “color lists” that profiled and separated the candidates into acceptable and non-acceptable categories, as was recently maintained by the Taraf daily, is a violation of the Constitution, analysts have agreed.

Around 700 police officers, including four deputy chiefs and 70 high-ranking officials, were removed from their posts at the İzmir Police Department and reassigned to different positions on Thursday morning and removals continued later in the afternoon with 207 more officers

The Hizmet is based on the idea of a “modern Islam compatible with democracy” that has been disseminated by Fethullah Gülen since the 1960’s. Gülen, now 75 years old, is a former imam, writer, thinker and teacher. He has been living in the US in volunteer exile since 1999, when he left Turkey due to successive military coups. Even from afar, Gülen keeps influencing thousands of Turks and Muslims around the world.

The writers, intellectuals and the journalists close to the Hizmet movement have, from the very beginning, called on the government to take legal steps against those whom he constantly labels the “parallel state” so that they could also know who they are.

Seasoned journalist Cüneyt Özdemir has said he was threatened by two members of pro-government media outlets and pressured to jump on the bandwagon by lashing out at the Hizmet movement and hosting a commentator who Özdemir said is a staunch supporter of conspiracy theories.

The Taraf daily published a document on Wednesday in supports of its allegations that the government recruits public sector employees using “color lists” to avoid people affiliated with groups such as the Hizmet movement.

Socialist Group leader and one of the most veteran politicians of the European Parliament Hannes Swoboda harshly reacted to the new law on the HSYK. Swoboda said the law was an outright attack on the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law.