Good news: Islamist author Adnan Oktar (penn name: Harun Yahya, h/t reader AAB) has been sentenced to three years in prison. A Turkish court found him guilty of creating an illegal organization for personal gain. Oktar had been put on trial in Istanbul together with 17 other individuals. The sentence came after a previous trial which began in the year of 2000 after Oktar, along with 50 members of his Science Research Foundation (BAV) were arrested in 1999.

In that court case, Oktar had been charged with using threats for personal benefit and creating an organization with the intent to commit a crime. The charges were dropped but another court picked them up resulting in the latest case.

As the article linked to above points out, Oktar ‘is the driving force behind a richly funded movement based in Turkey that champions creationism, the belief that God literally created the world in six days as told in the Bible and the Koran.’ After he finished the book, he sent thousands of copies of the book which teaches Islamic creationism to people who hadn’t asked for it. He constantly attacks both Darwinism and Free Masonry (huh?) and is constantly trying to influence uneducated Muslims.

That’s quite sad of course, but why am I celebrating this conviction? Well, because he gets what was coming to him. This man was responsible for the fact that Turks could not visit my website. Wordpress hosted blogs he did not agree with, that said negative things about him, Oktar went to court requesting the court to make it impossible for Turks to visit and read Wordpress blogs, the court complied with his request, next I had dozens of e-mails from people saying they could not read my blog any longer.

Aside from that, I also find the man despicable because of his so-called anti-Zionist views and his strange hatred for Free Masonry (he considers the two to be interrelated). From Wikipedia:

In 1986, Adnan Oktar published the book, Judaism and Freemasonry. The book suggests that the principal mission of Jews and Freemasons in Turkey was to erode the spiritual, religious, and moral values of the Turkish people and, thus, make them like animals, as stated in what Oktar refers to as the “Distorted Torah.” ^{[11] [12]} Oktar asserts that “the materialist standpoint, evolution theory, anti-religious and immoral lifestyles were indoctrinated to the society as a whole” by Jews and Freemasons.^[11]

He also had some nice things to say about the holocaust:

In 1996, the SRF distributed a book which was originally published the previous year, entitled Soykırım Yalanı (”Holocaust Lie”).^[15] The publication of Soykırım Yalanı sparked much public debate.^[16] This book claims that “what is presented as Holocaust is the death of some Jews due to the typhus plague during the war and the famine towards the end of the war caused by the defeat of the Germans”^[17]. In March 1996, a Turkish painter and intellectual, Bedri Baykam, published a strongly worded critique of the book in the Ankara daily newspaper Siyah-Beyaz (”Black and White”). A legal suit for slander was brought against him. During the trial in September, Baykam exposed the real author of the book as Adnan Oktar ^[16]. The suit was withdrawn in March 1997.^{[18] [19]}

Not only is the man responsible for the blocking of Wordpress sites, but also for Google Groups:

On April 10, 2008, public access to Google Groups has been blocked in Turkey following a seemingly successful libel complaint by Adnan Oktar.^[34] As of May 5, 2008, the ban remains in effect for TTNet users.

As for the case, threatening people is obviously illegal, and creating a criminal organization isn’t legal either. As such, the man deserves to go to jail; not because he says stupid things, yet is influential nonetheless, but because he has been proven to be a criminal, a mob-like figure.

It’s a good day!

Via Turkish Digest; the ultimate site for Turkish (political) news in English.