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Satirical Turkish site on trial for insulting religion

Feb 7, 2014 10:17 am By Robert Spencer

EksiSozluk

This is yet another sign of the erosion of Turkish secularism and its galloping re-Islamization, but what is noteworthy here is that the complaint was brought by Adnan Oktar (pictured above). Under the name Harun Yahya, Oktar has published a huge amount of Islamic apologetics material, including some “moderate” Muslim explanations of why jihad violence and suicide attacks aren’t justified in Islamic teaching, and so non-Muslims need not be concerned about them. But he seems to have no problem with the Sharia denial of the freedom of speech and enforcement of the prohibition on any criticism of Islam.

“Satirical Turkish site on trial for insulting religion,” from Al-Monitor, February 5 (thanks to Jerk Chicken):

One of Turkey’s most popular websites, the satirical Sour Dictionary (Eksi Sozluk), is on trial for insulting religion. Forty contributing writers have been charged following a complaint by popular Islamic figure Adnan Oktar. The trial kıcked off Jan. 14 with 27 of the defendants in attendance.

Oktar, in his complaint to the prosecutor, claimed that some entries in the dictionary included comments that amounted to insults of religion and prophets. The entries he cited and for which the prosecutor eventually pressed charges include jokes that the Prophet Muhammad and Allah had “sent money” to Turkey’s Housing Development Administration and that Jesus Christ and religious people were of low intelligence. Other examples include an entry on suggestions for a 100th name for Allah in addition to the 99 names Muslims have for their god and another titled “Allah’s official sponsors.”

The prosecutor is seeking jail terms of six to 12 months for the Eksi Sozluk writers. The defendants disputed the charges against them at their first hearing, arguing that they had no intention of insulting religion and that their comments fell within the scope of freedom of expression. A second hearing was scheduled for Feb. 17.

A string of similar legal cases in recent years indicate that accusations of insulting religion, especially Islam, is being used with increasing ease and frequency to press criminal charges. Emma Sinclair-Webb, a Turkey researcher for Human Rights Watch, says that the trials point to a new trend. What was once an epidemic of cases of “insulting Turkishness” are now being replaced by those of “insulting religion.”

Al-Monitor readers will recall that world-famous Turkish pianist Fazil Say was sentenced to 10 months in jail for insulting Islam and its prophet on Twitter. His sentence was eventually suspended but remains, dangling over Say’s head.

Another prominent figure convicted of the same charges is the Turkish-Armenian intellectual Sevan Nisanyan, for making the following remarks in a television program: “I don’t believe that Muhammad was a prophet. I don’t believe in the existence of a prophethood institution. I find it absurd that anyone could claim receiving special revelations from god. To me, that’s impertinence. Muhammad must have either lied or had hallucinations.”

Nisanyan was given 13 months in jail. Although he is yet to begin serving his sentence, Nisanyan was sent to prison in January to serve a two-year term over a small structure he built in violation of construction laws on his own land in the village of Sirince, in Izmir province. As explained in Al-Monitor, many in Turkey are convinced that construction regulations were used as a pretext to punish Nisanyan for his outspoken views on the Armenian genocide and critical opinion of religion.

Other cases demonstrate that even people who refer to religious figures in a critical context can end up in court on charges of insulting religion. Take, for instance, Canan Arin, a lawyer from Antalya who was charged after she said that the Prophet Muhammad had married an underage girl. Her trial was suspended conditionally, but she will find herself back in court if similar charges are brought against her over a period of three years.

Cartoonist Bahadir Baruter was also charged and faced a year in jail over a cartoon he drew of a mosque wall with the inscription “There is no Allah, religion is a lie.”

The zealous pursuit of “insults to religion” extends beyond the courts, with media outlets facing administrative sanctions. The Turkish CNBC-e channel, for instance, was fined by the Higher Board of Radio and Television over an episode of “The Simpsons” deemed offensive to religion.

Even though no one ended up behind bars in the above cases, the mere fact that people stand trial and risk jail sentences no doubt seriously intimidates the defendants as well as anyone with critical views on religion. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has come under fire for promoting “religious chauvinism.” It appears that prosecutors who endorse the AKP’s views or vie to win the government’s favor are working hard to come up with such cases.

The prosecutors use the seemingly general wording of “insulting religion,” but all the cases pursued thus far have concerned comments deemed to be offensive to Muslims. Insults and hate speech against Jews or Christians clearly do not merit similar vigilance.

In this charged context, the case against Eksi Sozluk is likely to produce a serious bullying effect on social media. It is an alarming trial that calls for close monitoring.

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Filed Under: free speech, Turkey Tagged With: featured


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Comments

  1. joeb says

    Feb 7, 2014 at 10:56 am

    I thought that was George Galloway after a professional make-over…

    • Champ says

      Feb 7, 2014 at 6:57 pm

      lol!! 😀

  2. tjhawk says

    Feb 7, 2014 at 12:15 pm

    Islam destroys diversity of thought and opinion. There is no multicultural tolerance to be had once orthodox islam takes hold politically.

  3. Coke says

    Feb 7, 2014 at 5:21 pm

    Islam making the whole world more idiot

  4. dumbledoresarmy says

    Feb 7, 2014 at 10:56 pm

    From the article – “Other examples include an entry on suggestions for a 100th name for Allah in addition to the 99 names Muslims have for their god and another titled “Allah’s official sponsors.””

    Y’know, both of those ideas have legs, so to speak.

    Perhaps jihadwatchers might like to think up the 100th name. Quite a challenge, to sum up the malevolence – or, for that matter, the pettiness – of the arab ‘god’ of blood and war in just one lethal epithet.

    As for sponsors…any ideas?

    • gravenimage says

      Feb 8, 2014 at 10:58 pm

      For the “100th name”, I’d like to suggest “The Most Perverse” and “Abuser of Children” to start, DDA.

  5. Clare says

    Feb 7, 2014 at 11:00 pm

    But Ergoden is now at the Sochi games – so are several other Muslim leaders. Turkmenistan, I think Kazakhstan, yes, Afghanistan. So what’s up with that? Female hockey teams, swimming, high tech tight clothes, fireworks, fun, laughter, singing, and smiles. Prosperity, industry. Looks like censorship has it’s place in totalitarian Islam; it doesn’t apply to the Muslim elite.

  6. Charli Main says

    Feb 8, 2014 at 3:22 am

    yer ain´t seen nuffing yet, folks !!!!!
    the joys of 75 million Muslim Turks in the EU, yet to come.
    OH, happy days !!!!!

    • Carmen Sporidis says

      Feb 8, 2014 at 10:39 am

      they will never join the Europaen Union, not in the million years. People in Europe gradualy wake up

  7. Semeru says

    Feb 8, 2014 at 10:12 am

    Adnan Oktar (born 1956), also known as Harun Yahya and a little what Wikipedia has to say

    Since 2007 Oktar has successfully had the Turkish government block public access to several websites. In April 2007, Oktar filed a libel lawsuit against the owners of Ekşi Sözlük, a virtual community similar to everything2. The court reviewed the complaint and ordered the service provider to close the site to public access. The site was temporarily suspended so the entry on Oktar could be expunged and locked. Then access to Süper Poligon, a news website, was also restricted following Oktar’s complaint. In August 2007, Oktar got a Turkish court to block WordPress.com in all of Turkey. His lawyers argued that blogs on WordPress.com contained libelous material on Oktar and his colleague, which WordPress.com staff was unwilling to remove.

    In addition, Edip Yuksel, a Turkish writer who knew Oktar in the 1980s and is now critical of him, had his website banned in Turkey from Oktar’s complaints. In addition, Yuksel wrote a Turkish-language book about Oktar called The Cult of the Antichrist, but he has yet to find “a publisher willing to brave Mr. Oktar’s lawyers.”

    On September 19, 2008, a Turkish court banned Internet users in Turkey from viewing the official Richard Dawkins Web site after Oktar claimed its contents were defamatory, blasphemous and insulting religion, arguing that his personality was violated by this site. The ban was lifted on 8 July 2011. Also in September 2008, a complaint by Oktar led to the banning of the internet site of the Union of Education and Scientific Workers (Türk Eğitim Sen). This was followed by a block of the country’s third-biggest newspaper site, Vatan, in October.

    Now A deeper look into this creep we will find he first book he wrote was Harun Yahya,. Yahudilik ve Masonluk (Judaism and Freemasonry,) published 1986.

    The book contains images from the Algerian Civil war, but the book claims it is crimes committed by Israel.

    One of the photos is of the young girl that was raped before being slaughtered, next to it is another photo of several children, this photo is from the El Halia massacre Algeria August 20, 1955 which was part of the Battle of Philippeville

    While the main assault was going on, there were also side actions in the countryside around Constantine. One was an attack on El-Halia, a sulphur-mining community where 130 Europeans had lived with about 2,000 Algerian Muslims in peace. The Muslims were encouraged to rise up against the Europeans after the FLN told them there would be no risk, because Egyptian and American troops were landing that day to expel the French from Algeria.. Led by the FLN, babies were chopped into pieces and smashed against walls, while women were raped, disemboweled and decapitated. The men were off working in the mines when the fellagha attacked. Their weapons were locked up because the person in charge of the key had gone to the beach

    Here is the offending page

    http://www.oocities.org/ibretlikresimler/index3.htm

    And to see the page in it proper context scroll down about half way

    http://www.risaleforum.com/serbest-kursu/32271-yahudilik-ve-masonluk.html

  8. gravenimage says

    Feb 8, 2014 at 11:28 pm

    Satirical Turkish site on trial for insulting religion

    This is yet another sign of the erosion of Turkish secularism and its galloping re-Islamization…
    …………………………………………..

    Yes, it is—and it is good to see that they EU has cooled on extending membership to these barbaric Mohammedans.

    But Muslims will still extend this censorship to the West if they are able.

    More:

    …but what is noteworthy here is that the complaint was brought by Adnan Oktar (pictured above). Under the name Harun Yahya, Oktar has published a huge amount of Islamic apologetics material, including some “moderate” Muslim explanations of why jihad violence and suicide attacks aren’t justified in Islamic teaching, and so non-Muslims need not be concerned about them. But he seems to have no problem with the Sharia denial of the freedom of speech and enforcement of the prohibition on any criticism of Islam.
    …………………………………………..

    No real surprise here. Just because Oktar is a Taqiyya artist doesn’t mean that he isn’t a true believer in all the barbarism of Islam.

    And this isn’t the first time that he has been instrumental in censorship in Turkey—here he was five years ago, getting Richard Dawkins’ site blocked there:

    http://randomprocessed.blogspot.com/2008/11/no-freedom-of-speech-in-turkey.html

    There’s a certain amount of witless moral equivalence in this article; still, it covers the issue.

    More:

    “Satirical Turkish site on trial for insulting religion”
    …………………………………………..

    “Insulting religion”—so they can pretend that this isn’t all about Islam.

    More:

    Oktar, in his complaint to the prosecutor, claimed that some entries in the dictionary included comments that amounted to insults of religion and prophets.
    …………………………………………

    Which religion might that be, hmmmm?

    And note that none of these jokes would cause much of a stir in any civilized part of the world—only in Dar-al-Islam.

    More:

    The prosecutor is seeking jail terms of six to 12 months for the Eksi Sozluk writers. The defendants disputed the charges against them at their first hearing, arguing that they had no intention of insulting religion and that their comments fell within the scope of freedom of expression.
    …………………………………………

    Of course, even if they *had* intended to “insult religion”, they should have had every right to do so.

    More:

    A string of similar legal cases in recent years indicate that accusations of insulting religion, especially Islam, is being used with increasing ease and frequency to press criminal charges…
    …………………………………………

    “Especially Islam”—really, this is *all* about Islam.

    More:

    What was once an epidemic of cases of “insulting Turkishness” are now being replaced by those of “insulting religion.”
    …………………………………………

    There’s a reason for that. “Insulting Turkishness” was often a veiled way of saying “Insulting Islam”—in today’s fast re-Islamizing Turkey, the mask has largely come off.

    More:

    The prosecutors use the seemingly general wording of “insulting religion,” but all the cases pursued thus far have concerned comments deemed to be offensive to Muslims. Insults and hate speech against Jews or Christians clearly do not merit similar vigilance.
    …………………………………………

    Yup. How long before the pretense goes by the wayside, as well?

    Really, what these are are Blasphemy laws—and the penalties are likely to become more draconian as time goes on. In places like Pakistan, victims can be sentenced to death.

    I wish the writers at Eksi Sozluk good luck—in today’s Turkey, they are going to need it…

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