Turkish police on Friday detained Prof. Dr. Mehmet Kanter, father of NBA Oklahoma City Thunder player Enes Kanter, who the government seeks to arrest over links to the Gülen movement. “HEY WORLD MY DAD HAS BEEN ARRESTED by Turkish government and the Hitler of our century He is potentially to get tortured as thousand others,” tweeted Enes Kanter on Friday.
Dr. Mehmet Kanter, father of NBA player and Turkish government-critic Enes Kanter has been arrested in Instanbul. This comes days after Turkish officials issued an arrest warrant for the US-based basketball player and seeked assistance from Interpol to extradite him to Turkey.
Oklahoma City Thunder center Enes Kanter expressed his desire to become a US citizen and underscored a previous claim that Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is the “Hitler of our century” on Monday in New York in his first comments since his detainment at a Romanian airport over the weekend.
Appearing on “CBS This Morning” Monday, Kanter said the trouble began while he was in Indonesia: “I was sleeping around 2:30 or something and my manager knocked on my door. He said the Secret Service and the Indonesian army were looking for me because the Turkish government told them I was a dangerous man.
The curious thing about the Flynn-Turkey connection is that it was a very badly-kept secret. Details of Flynn’s connection to a firm that worked on behalf of the Turkish government were known at least by mid-November, and there were hints that something fishy was going before that when he began singing Erdogan’s praises and demanding Gulen’s extradition.
One of the Trump administration’s first decisions about the fight against the Islamic State, ISIS, was made by Michael Flynn weeks before he was fired – and it conformed to the wishes of Turkey, whose interests, unbeknownst to anyone in Washington, he’d been paid more than $500,000 to represent.
If nothing else, the timing of this is certainly interesting. Yesterday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrived in Washington for his meeting with President Trump scheduled for later today. It’s an encounter which I already described as problematic at best, given Erdogan’s new status as a strongman and tyrant, and it doesn’t seem to hold the promise of much benefit on our part.
The exiled cleric accused by Turkey of orchestrating last year’s attempted coup charged President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with seeking to silence critics, as the Turkish leader prepared to push for the preacher’s extradition in a White House meeting with Donald Trump.
In the aftermath of the failed coup — and the subsequent purge of thousands of workers accused of being dissidents — Canada has seen a spike in asylum claims from Turkey. The 55,000-strong Turkish-Canadian community has also become increasingly polarized, with distrust and accusations of witch hunts against anyone deemed to be a sympathizer and supporter of the Gulen Movement.
The Turkish Culture Center of Brooklyn feted a bevy of Brooklyn elected officials tonight as part of their eighth Annual Friendship Dinner & Award ceremony celebrating cultural diversity with the theme of the evening being “Hate Crime.”
The Erdogan government jails its citizens without due process, severely curtails freedom of speech by jailing journalists, and ignores the plight of vulnerable minorities. They are the least credible messengers to warn Americans about their civic duty. The Turkish Consulate’s attempt to use McCarthyite tactics to spread fear and unduly influence American civic life is simply abhorrent and deserves condemnation.