Erdogan says Presidency allocated new armored car for top Diyanet imam ‘as gesture’

Religion gives you wings?

Erdogan says Presidency allocated new armored car for top Diyanet imam ‘as gesture’. (TZ).

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has announced that his office decided to give Religious Affairs Directorate President Mehmet Görmez a new armored car as a gesture following a controversy over a previously purchased TL 1 million car for the top imam.

The president, who became personally involved in the controversy by opposing Görmez returning the car in the face of public reaction, announced during an interview aired on a pro-government channel on Thursday that one of the armored cars serving the Presidency will be given to Görmez.

“We, the office of the president, decided to do this -- giving something which befits the post of the Religious Affairs Directorate president -- as a gesture following the rudeness against our Religious Affairs Directorate president,” Erdoğan said. The car initially purchased for Görmez was not armored.

In separate remarks, Erdoğan said that most of those "who are putting forward this slander" are using Mercedes vehicles. "What is so wrong with our grand Religious Affairs Directorate president using such a car for his official duties?” Erdoğan had said in a rally in the eastern province of Van. Hmmmm.....Matthew 6:24 - “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.

Compare to the car the Pope was using in 'Islamist' Turkey!

Related:   The Diyanet: Turkey's 'Islamist state' within.

  Video - Top 'Islamist' Turkish Diyanet Cleric Mehmet Gormez: 'We Should Not Accept Jerusalem As the Capital of Anyone but the Muslims'

Couldn't resist; suits perfect saga of Religious directorate's return of Mercedes+Erdogan's insisting he keep it. pic.twitter.com/kIkZl5tvJA

— Louis Fishman (@Istanbultelaviv) May 22, 2015

@Istanbultelaviv pic.twitter.com/VVFEGE1mxp

— Piero Castellano (@PieroCastellano) May 22, 2015

The Diyanet: Turkey's 'Islamist state' within.

Source Quote.

The Diyanet: Turkey's 'Islamist state' within. (FA).

A year after founding modern Turkey in 1923, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk abolished the caliphate and created a government directorate of religious affairs, or the Diyanet.

Through the management of mosques and religious education, the new body would make Islam subservient to the state to secure the republic’s ostensibly secular identity.

Today, the Diyanet has largely been turned on its head. In the lead-up to June parliamentary elections, Western news outlets have fretted about Erdogan’s crackdown on free speech and his broader authoritarian drift. Meanwhile, his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), in power since 2002, has wielded a beefed-up Diyanet to promote a conservative lifestyle at home and, increasingly, to project Turkish Islam abroad.

Since 2006, the Diyanet’s budget has leapt fourfold, to 5.4 billion lira (just over $2 billion). Its share of government spending has increased by about a third and its staff has doubled, to nearly 150,000. It budget allocation this year is 40 percent more than the Ministry of the Interior’s and equal to those of the Foreign, Energy, and Culture and Tourism ministries combined.

Recent Diyanet-issued fatwas have condemned as haram the celebration of the Gregorian New Year, playing the lottery, tattoos, and abortions.

It is impossible to say whether the Diyanet issues these at AKP’s request, but the measures do jibe with AKP social policy. Further, the AKP seems to have little compunction about using the Diyanet for political ends. At Erdogan’s behest, the directorate is building a massive mosque on top of a hill overlooking the Bosporus in Istanbul. And after the government briefly shut down Twitter last year, the Diyanet’s Friday sermon reminded Turks that “freedom requires responsibility,” which many interpreted as a religious stamp of approval on the ban.

Just last week, Davutoglu said that Turkish Islam could be “an antidote” to the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) and that he had assigned the Diyanet the “mission” to battle the Middle East’s sectarian conflicts.

Today the Turkish-Islamic Union of Religious Affairs (DITIB) is one of Germany’s most influential Muslim organizations. The Diyanet’s French arm, established in 2003, now ranks among the country’s most prominent Muslim groups, even though Turkish-origin Muslims represent just 8­–10 percent of France’s seven million Muslims. In the Netherlands, the Diyanet pays the salaries of the Dutch Islamic Foundation, which oversees some 140 mosques. It also maintains a sizable Belgian arm.

It publishes Diyanet Avrupa, a slick monthly magazine on its work in Europe. Perhaps most important, it has helped build and rebuild dozens of Balkan mosques. “Turkey is now the most influential Muslim country in the [Balkan] region,” Oktem writes.

And on a recent visit to Mecca, the Diyanet head Mehmet Gormez announced plans for an Islamic university in Istanbul, arguing that highly regarded institutions such as al-Azhar University in Cairo and Saudi Arabia’s Medina Islamic University had failed to stem the conflict and violence vexing the Muslim world.

The new university is expected to open next year, with instruction in Turkish, Arabic, and English. Ankara expects it to burnish the country’s bona fides in Islamic theology. In 2013, the Diyanet published a seven-volume modern-day reinterpretation of the hadith, a collection of thousands of reported sayings from the Prophet Muhammad that, as the second most sacred text in Islam, largely dictate Islamic law.

Until recently, the Diyanet’s expanded scope and ambition had met with little complaint within Turkey, mainly because Turkish law stipulates that a political party that questions whether the Diyanet should exist can be dissolved. In 2013, Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag, in charge of religious affairs at the time, said that those who complain that the Diyanet’s budget is too high are “against the presence of the institution itself.”

Citing the AKP’s coziness with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, an article at the Clarion Project said the Maryland mosque is “the next step in Erdogan’s desire to increase the Islamist influence in America.”

But it could have the opposite effect. A January study by Bertelsmann Stiftung found that 46 percent of the population of North Rhine–Westphalia, home to a third of Germany’s Muslims and many Diyanet-run mosques, view Islam as a threat. In Saxony, which has a tiny Muslim population, 70 percent do. Hmmmmm........Erdogan: "Thank God i'm a servant of Sharia". Read the full story here.


 Related: 'Islamist' Turkey's Directorate of Religious Affairs budget alone is greater than those of 10 ministries put together.

Islamic State relies on Obama's 'moderate' rebels for weaponry purchases

Islamic State relies on Obama's 'moderate' rebels for weaponry purchases. (RT).

The Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) is an enigma: most of what we know about it comes from the brutal media apparatus of the IS itself. It lets everyone see executions and war the terrorists are waging – but still, how does life go under jihadist rule? One man decided to find out for himself, spending 10 days in the ‘capital city’ of the IS and coming back alive. Today, investigative journalist Jürgen Todenhöfer tells his story to Sophie Shevardnadze.

Sophie Shevardnadze: Jürgen Todenhöfer, the investigative journalist who went inside the territory of Islamic State – welcome to this show, it’s great to have you with us. Now, recent events have seen several ISIS’ defeats, when the group moved into Shia or non-Arab territory, it was actually repelled. The Kurds score victories against them, the Shias, the Iraqi army – has the ISIS threat passed, in your opinion?

Jürgen Todenhöfer: The situation hasn’t substantially changed since December, and if the Americans or NATO are saying that IS lost 25% of the territory – this is just not true. This is not the truth. Maybe, they have lost between 5 or 10%, but this doesn’t play any role in the guerilla war, when people are moving.

SS: So, just to make sure – in your opinion, ISIS is as strong as ever?

JD: Yeah, it’s the same. Nothing has changed substantially, unfortunately, I would say.

SS: Talking about cultivating terrorists, you also say that the Syrian rebels U.S. supported are the same terrorists the U.S. is now fighting. How did that happen, and does Washington realize that?

JD: I think that the knowledge of Europe and of the Americans about the Middle East is very small. You criticized me, and I spent, every year during 50 years, my free time in the Middle East, and I know a little bit about the Middle East. Americans don’t know anything. They thought if they would attack Saddam Hussein there will be democracy in the Middle East – and what do we have now? Chaos in the whole Middle East, and we are surprised that in this chaos we now chaotic people, terrorists, like IS.

So, I give you another example: the U.S. are supporting the FSA, these are rebels financed by Western countries. But these FSA fighters sell their ammunition to IS. The IS fighters told me: “we need them! We get almost all our ammunition from the FSA, and we also get weapons from FSA, and we get weapons from Kurds, and we hope that you will send a lot of weapons to the Kurds because we can, in the end, buy them on the market.”

I saw German machineguns, I saw them myself. It’s a complete mess. I personally think, the only solution in the Middle East is that the Western countries should withdraw their troops from the Middle East, and their bases from the Middle East. We have nothing to do there. We don’t have bases in China, we don’t have bases in India, and we don’t need bases in the Middle East.

It’s not our country, it’s the country of Muslims, them and Christians over there, but not of our countries. It’s a big mistake to think that the Middle East is our, our personal garden, where we can go whenever we want. Hmmm.....Not to mention all the 'weapons' delivered by 'Islamist' Turkey. Read the full story here.

'Sometimes NATO Ally' Turkey actively supporting FSA 'Al Nusra - Ahrar ash-Sham' brigade on Syria border.

'Sometimes NATO Ally' Turkey actively supporting FSA 'Al Nusra - Ahrar ash-Sham' brigade on Syria border. (ARANews).

The Turkish authorities have been trying to preserve their 800-long border with the war-torn neighbor Syria in the past four years, especially that most of border crossings have been under Islamists’ control since the beginning of the Syrian crisis.

Speaking to ARA News, the former media spokesman of al-Krad Front Brigade of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Ahmed Hisso, said that the Turkish authorities have recently failed to intervene in the border city of Tel Abyad in Raqqa province, northeastern Syria, “despite frequent attempts”.

The 10th division of the FSA, supported by Turkish authorities, failed to penetrate into the city of Tel Abyad, the main IS-held border city with Turkey in Syria’s northeast.

“The Turkish authorities have recognized its losses in Kobane and Tel Abyad,” Hisso argued.

Last February, Turkey supported the establishment of the 10th division force of the FSA, which consists of 1700 soldiers ــ most of them are former fighters of al-Nusra Front and the Ahrar ash-Sham rebels.

The majority of fighters of the new faction descend from the Syrian northeastern provinces of Deir ez-Zor, Raqqa, and Hasakah, local Kurdish activists told ARA News.

“Turkey also rushed to provide them with needed logistics, and distributed them on the borders of Tel Abyad after quipping them with light and medium weapons,” Hisso said.

The source also pointed out that Turkey, after failing to militarily intervene in Tel Abyad, “it seeks to control the city administratively through the Civil Turkmen Board”.

“There is an Arab-Kurdish-Turkmen agreement about the administration of Tel Abyad after its liberation from the Islamic State (IS/ISIS).”

In the meantime, the former spokesman of al-Akrad Front said that the joint forces (the People’s Protection Units “YPG” and Burkan al-Furat rebels) and the U.S.-led international coalition will cooperate to liberate Tel Abyad, “which will help in opening the road between Kobane and Hasakah.”

The joint forces continue advancement toward the city of Tel Abyad, coming from Kubane in the province of Aleppo, and from Sere Kaniye (Ras al-Ain) in Hasakah province, in northeastern Syria, to remove the IS radical group from the area. Hmmm....After the 'Liberation' , Syria an 'Sislamist' Turkish protectorate?