Turkish Dailies Misrepresent Content of CSIS Meeting, Says Participant
Separate news reports that appeared in the Milliyet and Cumhuriyet dailies on Friday over the content of a meeting hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., are full of errors and misinformation, according to Alp Aslandoğan, a board member of the Gülen Institute in the US.
In a piece titled "Our target is every Turk's relation with [the Gülen] movement," many points and quotes that were raised by Milliyet are false or misleading, Aslandoğan claimed.
The ideas, worldview and teachings of Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish Islamic scholar known for his promotion of mutual understanding and tolerance between cultures, were discussed at a meeting on Wednesday hosted by CSIS, a leading American think tank.
Aslandoğan asserted that the presentation of the report's headline creates the impression that his quotes were uttered by Gülen as the report was accompanied by a picture of Gülen. Aslandoğan, however, said he had warned participants of the meeting beforehand that he would not be speaking on behalf of any institution or the movement in general and that the views he would present belonged to him alone.
The daily also claimed that Aslandoğan said there is a branch of the Gülen movement in every Turkish province that and the goal of the movement was to cause all Turkish citizens have ties with the movement. "Everyone is a potential target," read the daily.
What Aslandoğan said, in fact, was much different, voice records of the meeting revealed. When asked: "One doesn't know who is in and who is outside the movement. Is that deliberate?" Aslandoğan had replied: "Potentially everybody is in. Potentially every Turkish citizen is in there. I mentioned it started with a handful of people. Now it's in the millions. And if it goes on like this, you can imagine that in a few decades everybody in Turkey will have something to do with it."
Similarly, a story that appeared in the Cumhuriyet daily on Friday on the CSIS meeting was full of misrepresentations, according to Aslandoğan. The daily ran with the headline "Aslandoğan defies from the States: No one can destroy us."
However, what Aslandoğan said, according to the voice recordings, was that the Gülen movement is the Turkish people itself and that it would be an oxymoron to talk about the destruction of the movement. "It is the Turkish people. It [destruction of the movement] is possible to the degree that you can destroy the Turkish people. We are talking about millions of participants that come from every segment of the society. How is it possible to destroy anything like that unless you actually get rid of people themselves? So I don't think it's possible or even imaginable to destroy the movement," Aslandoğan had stated.
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