Adnan Oktar and the Kittens of Peace

Michael Lumish

Turkish "televangelist" Adnan Oktar on March 31, 2010.
(CC-BY-SA-4.0,3.0,2.5,2.0,1.0 Harun Yahya International/Wikipedia)

In a piece written by the Associated Press and Michael Bachner, the Times of Israel tells us:

Turkish police on Wednesday detained a controversial Islamic “televangelist” who has an anti-Semitic past, and were seeking hundreds of people linked to him for alleged crimes including forming a criminal gang, fraud, blackmail and sexual abuse.

Istanbul police said warrants were issued against Adnan Oktar and 234 of his followers and that financial crime units were carrying out operations in Istanbul and four other cities to detain them.

This story is interesting to me, personally, because I briefly rubbed shoulders with this group in the not too distant past.

I was in contact with one of their executives concerning peace prospects between Palestinian-Arabs and the State of the Jews. There was even some possibility that I might fly to Istanbul to visit with them as a pro-Israel writer and blogger as part of a larger outreach program.

I found Adnan Oktar and his smart harem interesting because they seemed to be pushing against the boundaries of Islam within the increasingly Islamist country of Turkey.

In my brief discussions with them, and through my readings of some of their writers, the very last thing that I saw was antisemitism.

On the contrary, Oktar and his people seemed to be genuinely going out of their way to be fair in their stance on the Long Arab War Against the Jews of the Middle East. If anything - although I understand that his opinion has evolved over time - the organization leaned in favor of Israel and seemed to be genuinely interested in opening a reasonable dialogue with anyone interested in a peaceful solution.

Oktar reminded me a bit of a Turkish "Hugh Hefner," although more distinguished and handsome than Hugh. But like Hefner, he fancied himself a cultural critic and a man with the financial and intellectual resources to push back against the stifling, prevailing norms of his culture. Unlike Hefner, he is actually a prolific writer, although I cannot attest to the quality of his insights, some of which are said to be anti-Darwinian.

What I have wondered for a number of years, now, however, is how a guy like this can maintain a small sexually-oriented, semi-political empire and pseudo-cult that insists upon its Islamic nature under an increasingly orthodox Islamist regime like that of Erdogan's?

I guess now I have my answer.

He could not.

In any case, it seems to me that if you want to understand the ideological drift of Turkey then keeping an eye on the fate of Oktar and his people would offer a clue.

The Rabbanut and the Waqf

Sar Shalom

I'll take it as a given that the readers are all familiar with the agreement that was struck between an Israeli government committee and representatives of Reform and Conservative Judaism for a mixed prayer area at the Western Wall only for the agreement to be nixed when chareidi parties threatened to bring down the government if it went into effect. Without getting into the merits of the deal, why are the chareidim so opposed to the deal? Would the area that would have been allocated for mixed prayer have in any way have reduced the ability of those who insist on separate-gender prayer space to pray at the Wall? Obviously this is not the case. The reason is that the chareidim view prayer at the Wall in a manner contrary to halacha as a defilement of the sacred space. They did not describe those who pray in mixed gatherings as trespassing "with their filthy feet," but the non-Orthodox Jews who thought they had an agreement would have justification to read that into them.

Similar to mixed prayer being restricted at the Wall, the Waqf goes apoplectic about Jews simply setting foot on the Temple Mount, let alone praying. This raises the question about why the Waqf, and the rest of the Palestinian national movement (PNM) is so against Jews at their most sacred site. No one can seriously claim that Jews walking around the site, even in substantially larger numbers than at present, impinges on Muslims praying at the Dome of the Rock or Al Aqsa. Same with Jews praying on the mountain. So why does the PNM oppose Jews' presence on the mountain so vehemently, referring that presence as defiling the site with their "filthy feet?" The simplest explanation is that Jews ascending and praying on the mount would remove one more manner in which they lord Islam's superiority of Judaism. The thing is that the preeners who notice and excoriate that behavior in the chareidi establishment regarding non-Orthodox Judaism will circle the wagons to assert that the Waqf has a legitimate interest in doing so with all Jews.

This Week on Nothing Left

Michael Lumish

I am happy to see that Dr. Andrew Pessin is talking with Michael Burd and Alan Freedman over at Nothing Left.

Some of you may recall that Pessin was the Connecticut College professor that found himself in trouble for the crime of comparing Hamas to "rabid dogs," or something quite along those lines, on social media.

I compared and contrasted his story to that of Rabab Abdulhadi at San Francisco State University, who openly despises "Zionists" and who gets paid good money from the people of California to do so, in a piece entitled, A Tale of Two Professors in the Age of Obama.

Here is this week's episode of Nothing Left ...

3 min Editorial: Communal orgs lack of recognition for AJA

9 min Bernie Finn, state Liberal MP for Western metropolitan region

39 min Dr David Adler, Aust Jewish Association

51 min Senator Fraser Anning, on his senate questions on PA funding

1 hr 34 min Prof Andrew Pessin, anti-Zionism on university campuses

1 hr 42 min Prager U clip on deliberately deceptive media in USA

Michael Lumish

I find it astonishing that almost everyone that I know seems to believe that the Jewish people are under some ethical or political obligation to recognize the "Palestinians."

This may be the first time in world history in which a people have been pressured by the international community to recognize and negotiate with an alleged ethnicity that came into existence within living memory and whose stated purpose is to wipe out the self-defense and self-determination of another people.

It is amazing and horrific.

This Week on Nothing Left

Michael Lumish

4 min Editorial: non-reporting of Gaza violence

11 min Matthew M Hausman, attorney and writer

33 min Benjamin Weinthal, Washington correspondent for J Post

The Happiness of the Israeli Defense Forces

Michael Lumish

It was only a few years ago that I came across the following video of what appear to be tank-men in the IDF singing the Pharrell Williams song "Happy."

I am charmed by this bit because it demonstrates a joyous indomitability of spirit that I can never know because I do not live under those circumstances. At the same time, the tune is sort-of doofy. It is fluffy, syrupy, sweetness, but very upbeat and fun and I love it and, yet, the joy of the tune seems entirely discordant with men in a tank.



The Jewish people in the Middle East are a people under siege. For thirteen hundred years, from the time of Muhammad until the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the indigenous Jews lived as second and third-class non-citizens under the boot of Arab and Muslim imperial rule. And, now, upon securing their freedom - and thus, in some measure, the freedom of all Jewish people everywhere - they are set upon by constant warfare.

Decade after decade, from the early twentieth-century until the early twentieth-first.

There are three hundred to four hundred million Arabs in the Middle East and about six million Jews. The Arab leadership, both political and religious, make no secret of their delicious genocidal ambitions. They scream malice from the hillsides on a daily basis and, yet, are still funded by morally self-righteous western-progressives who do not even believe, despite three thousand years of historical evidence, that the Jewish people are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel.

So, those young guys in the video above are Israeli Jews who are forced into the military by their Arab and European enemies because otherwise their entire civilization will, yet again, get knocked out. That could very easily mean the death of their own families and children.

So, my question is, how does the weird and wonderful video emerge from Israeli Jewish culture?

Furthermore, how is it possible that the Jerusalem Post can report that according to the UN annual World Happiness Report that Israel is ranked eleventh in the world in terms of "happiness"?

How is this possible?