Brights News Feed

Abdullah Gul has been elected to the Turkish presidency by parliament today.

His candidacy provoked military threats and mass secular protest back in April. He has said that he will not contravene the country’s secular constitution, and he has won kudos in Europe during negotiations for Turkey’s EU membership, but secular opposition and many secularist campaigners remain unconvinced that the new President Gul will not use his powers of veto in the direction of an Islamist agenda.

Only time will tell…

(See Guardian, Al Jazeera.)

Around 700,000 Turkish secularists rallied in the streets of Istanbul yesterday, campaigning against Islamist presidential candidate Abdullah Gul. Gul is the presidential candidate of the ruling party, has deeply Islamist political roots, and the protestors to not believe the pro-Western “makeover” that he has undergone, nor his assertions that if elected he would stand by the country’s secular constituion. The opposition are challenging the constitutional legitimacy of the presidential election process, which sees parliament electing the president, rather than a peoples’ vote. The secular protesters are making the same demand, as well as coming out against the army. The army have already hinted (or threatend) the possibility of a military coup if Gul is elected by parliament, a move which has not generally been to the protesters’ liking and has caused Turkish stocks to plummet.

(See The Guardian UK)

Schools across France have received several thousand unsolicited copies of an “atlas” which advocates Islamic creationism theories, according to the Education Ministry. Stuff.co.nz says:

The lavishly illustrated Atlas of Creation by Harun Yahya, a shadowy figure who runs a large Islamic publishing operation from Istanbul, was sent to schools and universities over the past 10 days. The Turkish original of the 768-page book, which rejects evolution, first appeared in Turkey late last year when it was also sent unsolicited to schools. It sees Charles Darwin’s theory of the “survival of the fittest” as the root of many of today’s ills, including modern terrorism.

The large-format, lavishly illustrated book, is meant to show that current animal species look exactly like the fossils of their ancestors. It appears to have been mailed from Turkey and Germany to schools all around France, a project of Harun Yahya, otherwise known as the Islamic teacher Adnan Oktar.

The Atlas of Creation puts an Islamic twist on criticism of the theory of evolution, a cause usually associated with conservative Christians in the United States.

The Independent calls Hrant Dink “the 1,500,001st victim of the Armenian genocide”.

An educated and generous journalist and academic - editor of the weekly Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos - he tried to create a dialogue between the two nations to reach a common narrative of the 20th century’s first holocaust. And he paid the price: two bullets shot into his head and two into his body by an assassin in the streets of Istanbul yesterday afternoon.

Turkey has been struggling to change the perception of itself, with the EU demanding that it relax censorial laws before it can enter the Union. Writers like Hrant Dink himself have previously been accused and found guilty of the crime of “insulting Turkishness”. The nationalists who are in all probability behind the assassination may at the same time have dealt a further blow to Turkey’s bid to join the EU.

The so-called “Islamic Iraqi state”, an alias of terror group “Al-Qaeda in Iraq”, - today published a statement online denouncing Josef Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) for his widely publicised visit to Turkey, saying:

This visit of the pope has the aim of preparing a Crusade against Muslim countries following the failure of Crusade heads such as Bush, Blair, Berlusconi and Howard to extinguish the flame of Islam lit by Muslim brothers in Turkey.

The pope’s trip is aimed, they say, at “cancelling Islamic tradition and cutting Islamic roots … to send them [Turkey] into the arms of the European Union and stop the Islamic wave.”

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