
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s son Bilal allegedly urged his father to trigger an operation to detain prominent figures of the Hizmet movement in response to an ongoing graft and bribery investigation implicating Erdoğan, his family members and a number of ministers and businessmen close to him.

The businessman Kalkavan said that the government’s way of dealing with the corruption allegations has been “incomprehensible,” and that he had difficulty explaining to his foreign associates about recent purges of hundreds of police officers and dozens of investigators.

The problem is not about the failure of the members of the Hizmet movement to obey orders from their superiors in the public service but about the claim that the prosecutors and police chiefs who conducted the graft and bribery investigation are members of the Hizmet movement — a claim which has yet to be proven.

Mahçupyan’s analysis of the Hizmet movement’s perspective on the Kurdish issue is wrong. When the settlement process was launched, the Hizmet movement announced its full support for the solution, with Gülen saying, “Peace is in itself goodness, and peace brings happiness.” It advocated non-violent social actors competing with each other freely and under democratic conditions. It openly declared that the right to education in one’s mother tongue is one of the fundamental human rights.

In order to defame the Hizmet movement, A Haber — a member of the government-designed “pool media,” created through funds raised by various businessmen to protect the government’s interests — has described a Felicity Party (SP) election campaign conducted by women in the province of Hatay as “black propaganda” against the Justice and Development Party (AK Party).

The main goal of the black propaganda raised against Gülen is to fabricate evidence for a case against Gülen and members of the Hizmet movement. The ultimate goal, he further argues, is to ensure that the movement is classified as an organized crime syndicate. The black propaganda reports will be used as evidence to substantiate the allegations.

Close relations between the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which began with a settlement process over the Kurdish issue, have deepened with a new alliance aimed at destroying the Hizmet movement.

Apparently, not every Justice and Development Party (AK Party) member and minister is on board with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s hateful and insulting rhetoric against the Hizmet movement and Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen and his followers.

Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) has suspended 20 TV shows of the Samanyolu Haber TV news channel, its Editor in Chief Metin Yıkar announced via his Twitter account on Saturday. The RTÜK penalty came days after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan vowed to finish off the Hizmet Movement and its affiliates, including the Samanyolu Haber TV.

Hizmet movement gets its strength from this independence. Because the movement gets money from no other sources than its own volunteers, it does not take orders. No doubt this is why certain people are made so uncomfortable right now by the Hizmet movement.