Turkish creationist Adnan Oktar: Catching up here with my notes - 2:

This originates from Nature, March 3, 2009, paywall:

The main Turkish government agency responsible for funding science has provoked outrage by apparently censoring a magazine article on the life and work of Charles Darwin.

The article was stripped from the March issue of the widely read popular-science magazine Bilim ve Teknik (Science and Technology) just before it went to press.

A friend writes to say,

There was a street protest meeting of the Darwinists carrying banners "We don’t want Harun Yahyas in Scientific Institutions"

Well, I am not paying a tonne to Nature to read the article protesting the fact that Darwin was not declared a saint in Istanbul.

I wonder why they think he would be.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Adnan Oktar: Catching up here with my notes 1

Apparently, Richard Dawkins refused to meet with Turkish creationist Adnan Oktar (Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2009). Andrew Higgins reports in "An Islamic Creationist Stirs a New Kind of Darwinian Struggle") that Dawkins claimed that Oktar was not knowledgeable about zoology and biology.

Well, whoever wrote Evolution Deceit is knowledgeable, and I'd be interested to hear some reasonable answers. Would Dawkins agree to meet with a zoologist who thinks that that book makes reasonable points?

Meanwhile, let me take this op to say that Higgins's article is just the usual baff that explains why so few North Americans pay much attention to troubled "local" media - begging to be rescued by the US Prez at taxpayer expense - any more.

How many times do we have to say it, High Price Media?: We don't believe what you write any more. We can't. It's too unlike what we know is true.

Many of us realize that the universe did not get started purely by chance.

Oktar may be right or wrong, or a good man or a bad man. I am told that he sponsored a book that minimizes the Holocaust, which - in my part of the world - would pretty much terminate an acquaintance.

My father was a veteran of World War II. We'd love to believe the Holocaust didn't really happen, but we can't. We must live with the knowledge of the unspeakable evil of which humans are capable. Used rightly, that warning about the irredeemable past can lead to future good.

I am not Oktar's defense lawyer and make no case one way or the other for him. However, I want to know what is going on over there in Turkey, and it won't be my fault if I don't find out.

Surprising as it may be to some tenured profs, many of us are pretty good at figuring out what is just not true. So we keep on investigating.

The newspapers that quote the tenured profs spouting "evolutionary psychology" with great respect can just ruddy well go under.

They never bother to question what everyone else questions? Fact is, we no longer have the tax money to support the bailouts they will need.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Well-known Turkish creationist sentenced to prison - not ID-related source says

Creationist Adnan Oktar (better known as Harun Yahya was sentenced to three years in prison for "creating an illegal organization for personal gain", according to a Reuters report, which also notes

Oktar's publishing house has published dozens of books that have been distributed in more than 150 countries and been translated into more than 50 languages. He has a wide following in the Muslim world.

But Turkish commentators say the group's books, numbering more than 200, are probably written by a pool of writers, a charge the author denies.

I asked my Turkish journalist friend Mustafa Akyol what role his advocacy of creationism played in his fate (Turkey is governed by an aggressive secular elite), but Mustafa says, no, "not for creationism or for any other idea but because of other legal issues relating to his group."*

*Update May 13, 2008: This sentence is slightly rephrased from the original, as Mr. Akyol has contacted me to say that it better represents the situation.

Mustafa provides many insightful articles on Turkish politics, which can itself seem murky. Here, for example, as in many other columns, he offers the lowdown on the "secular" party in Turkey - atheist bluestockings with concealed weapons, so far as I can see:

In his speech at Oxford University on May 1, Mr. Rehn said that the political tension in Turkey is between “extreme rather than liberal secularists” and “Muslim democrats”. And Mr. Lagendijk, at a speech at İIzmir’s Eylül University, said that headscarves should be free in universities, and, as a “leftist,” that he feels “shame” about the illiberal stance of Turkey’s so-called-social-democrat-but-actually-Kemalist main opposition party, the CHP.

[ ... ]

The fact is that Kemalism is becoming a more and more reactionary and isolationist force, which sees the EU membership as a threat to its existence. If Turkey’s becomes an EU member, Kemalism will inevitably cease to be the official ideology, and become just one of the many competing ideas in the public square. But for its devotees, apparently, this is just too big a risk to take.

I'm no fan of face veils or sackwear but, at the same time, I have never understood the notion of forbidding women to wear scarves on their heads, if that's the custom they are used to.

How would Canadian women like it if we moved to a country where women customarily went about bare breasted and were informed, "Well, in order to fit in, you must do it too. It is modern and progressive. In fact, wearing blouses is a crime here."

Believe me, I know lots of women who are modern and progressive who would respond by catching the next plane back to Toronto International.

Anyway, Mustafa knows the Istanbul scene pretty well, and it seems safe to say that that Yahya's case is more like Kent Hovind's (American creationist jailed on tax fraud charges) than Guillermo Gonzalez's.