Turkey Police press charges against man with NYT’s Erdoğan caricature
Police have pressed charges against a man in Turkey after he held a sign containing a New York Times caricature featuring President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan cutting döner kebab — a Turkish dish — which was pictured as a Turkish flag that read “democracy,” in a demonstration on Friday.
Ali Bayram Hanedar was outside of the Samsun Courthouse among a crowd protesting the Dec. 14 media crackdown that resulted in detention of journalists, including Zaman daily Editor-in-Chief Ekrem Dumanlı. Hanedar was holding aloft a banner with a caricature recently published by The New York Times, which shows Erdoğan trimming “Turkey’s democracy,” depicted as a döner kebab, with a blade in his hand.
According to a news report by the Bugün daily, after the demonstration Hanedar was stopped by a policeman, who asked his identity and said there would be charges pressed against him. The policeman explained that the protester’s banner would be examined to see if its display fits the crime of “insulting the Turkish flag.”
NY Times urges Turkish authorities to ensure safety of its reporter
The New York Times responded to attacks on its Turkey reporter after it published a report focusing on the alleged recruitment of Turks by the Islamic State of Iraq and the 
Levant (ISIL) in an Ankara neighborhood, calling on Turkish authorities to ensure her safety. report TodayZAMAN
Ceylan Yeğinsu came under attack by the pro-government media and on social media platforms after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan lashed out at a report she wrote for The New York Times that was published on Sept. 15. Erdoğan particularly was angered by the photo that was published along with the story, picturing him and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu leaving a mosque in the same Ankara neighborhood, Hacı Bayram. “This is shameless, ignoble and base,” Erdoğan said in a speech on Wednesday.
Later that same day, The New York Times removed the photo and issued a correction, saying the photo was published in error and clarifying that neither the mosque in the photo nor the president’s visit were related to the recruiting of ISIL fighters described in the article.
The New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet said that even though the correction had been issued, the reporter came under an “unacceptable” attack.
“Despite this published correction, some Turkish authorities and media outlets have mounted a coordinated campaign to intimidate and to impugn the motives of the reporter who wrote the story,” Baquet said in the statement released late on Thursday. “She has been sent thousands of messages that threaten her safety. It is unacceptable for one of our journalists to be targeted in this way.”
“We expect the Turkish authorities to work to ensure the safety of our journalists working legally in the country and we would ask these authorities to use well-established procedures for reaching either myself or other top editors of The New York Times should further communication regarding this matter be necessary,” he also said.
Yeğinsu has been targeted in pro-government newspapers and websites, which have published defamatory articles that feature her photo.
“Ceylan wrote that story,” read a front-page story in the Takvim daily on Thursday. Two other pro-government media outlets, Star newspaper and A Haber television, also ran stories on their websites “exposing” The New York Times reporter as a Turk. “A Turk turned out to be behind the New York Times’ perception operation,” read the headline of a story on the website of Star newspaper, again with a photo of Yeğinsu.
Takvim continued to target Yeğinsu on Friday, running another front-page story featuring her photo and titled: “Hear this, Ceylan.” The story offered a compilation of accounts from people it said were residents of Hacı Bayram, criticizing Yeğinsu for her report and dismissing the ISIL recruitment operation described in it.
New York Times’ Exposé: Imam Gulen’s Charter Schools
Report By: boilingfrogspost.com/tag/fethullah-gulen/Is the Media Catching Up with the Turkish Imam’s US Operations?
For the last two years I have been pounding on Imam Fethullah Gulen’s web of organizations and his charter schools empire in the US. For years I have been marveling about the consistent media blackout on the Turkish Imam Fethullah Gulen’s past and present nefarious activities and highly suspicious partnerships with various US government agencies and elected officials. And of course for almost two years I have been writing and discussing Gulen with you over here at Boiling Frogs Post. Now the New York Times appears to be catching up; at least with a fraction of this notorious Imam’s multi billion dollar network of organizations and businesses. Yesterday, the Times ran a fairly detailed and long exposé on Gulen’s dubious and highly secretive penetration of US school systems via his rapidly growing charter school operations; let’s start with the attention grabbing intro:
TDM Contracting was only a month old when it won its first job, an $8.2 million contract to build the Harmony School of Innovation, a publicly financed charter school that opened last fall in San Antonio. It was one of six big charter school contracts TDM and another upstart company have shared since January 2009, a total of $50 million in construction business. Other companies scrambling for work in a poor economy wondered: How had they qualified for such big jobs so fast?
The secret lay in the meteoric rise and financial clout of the Cosmos Foundation, a charter school operator founded a decade ago by a group of professors and businessmen from Turkey. Operating under the name Harmony Schools, Cosmos has moved quickly to become the largest charter school operator in Texas, with 33 schools receiving more than $100 million a year in taxpayer funds. …
Some of the schools’ operators and founders, and many of their suppliers, are followers of Fethullah Gulen, a charismatic Turkish preacher of a moderate brand of Islam whose devotees have built a worldwide religious, social and nationalistic movement in his name. Gulen followers have been involved in starting similar schools around the country — there are about 120 in all, mostly in urban centers in 25 states, one of the largest collections of charter schools in America. …
And this is what the paper says it is attempting to examine:
But an examination by The New York Times of the Harmony Schools in Texas casts light on a different area: the way they spend public money. And it raises questions about whether, ultimately, the schools are using taxpayer dollars to benefit the Gulen movement — by giving business to Gulen followers, or through financial arrangements with local foundations that promote Gulen teachings and Turkish culture.
I suggest you visit the site and read the entire article. It is definitely worth reading. You may also want to read a few select pieces from BFP on Gulen:
Did You Know: The King of Madrasas Now Operates over 100 Charter Schools in US?
Turkish Intel Chief Exposes CIA Operations via Islamic Group in Central Asia
Additional Omitted Points in CIA-Gulen Coverage & A Note From ‘The Insider’
http://turkishinvitations.weebly.com/gulenist-non-profits.html
The Sanitized Gulen Coverage Continues
Read More:
http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2011/06/07/new-york-times%e2%80%99-expose-imam-gulen%e2%80%99s-charter-schools/#more-3859