Thursday, May 05, 2005
Midwest Mullahs Link Up With Their Middle Eastern Counterparts
Tony Ortega of the Pitch, Kansas City's alternative newspaper, has a fascinating article on Mustafa Akyol, a spokesman for the murky Bilim Arastirma Vakfi, an organization said to have started as a religious cult that preyed on wealthy members of Turkish society. Incredibly, he is one of the witnesses called to testify in the state board of education's science hearings this week by the Discovery Institute and John Calvert's ID Network.
According to Tony O's report, beginning in 1998, Akyol's organization "BAV spearheaded an effort to attack Turkish academics who taught Darwinian theory. Professors there say they were harassed and threatened, and some of them were slandered in fliers that labeled them "Maoists" for teaching evolution. In 1999, six of the professors won a civil court case against BAV for defamation and were awarded $4,000 each."
"'There is no fight against the creationists now. They have won the war,' says Istanbul University forensics professor Umit Sayin. 'In 1998, I was able to motivate six members of the Turkish Academy of Sciences to speak out against the creationist movement. Today, it's impossible to motivate anyone. They're afraid they'll be attacked by the radical Islamists and the BAV.'"
Is the intelligent design community appalled by the rough tactics of Akyol and BAV? William Harris an ID leader here in Kansas says he hasn't heard of BAV. Told of the group's harassment of bioligists in Turkey and evolution's defeat there, he told the Pitch, "Great! Congratulations! I mean, that is the point, once people start to see science more objectively."
That's the future of Kansas as our intelligent design "theorists" see it in their more private moments, a science community terrorized into silence.
According to Tony O's report, beginning in 1998, Akyol's organization "BAV spearheaded an effort to attack Turkish academics who taught Darwinian theory. Professors there say they were harassed and threatened, and some of them were slandered in fliers that labeled them "Maoists" for teaching evolution. In 1999, six of the professors won a civil court case against BAV for defamation and were awarded $4,000 each."
"'There is no fight against the creationists now. They have won the war,' says Istanbul University forensics professor Umit Sayin. 'In 1998, I was able to motivate six members of the Turkish Academy of Sciences to speak out against the creationist movement. Today, it's impossible to motivate anyone. They're afraid they'll be attacked by the radical Islamists and the BAV.'"
Is the intelligent design community appalled by the rough tactics of Akyol and BAV? William Harris an ID leader here in Kansas says he hasn't heard of BAV. Told of the group's harassment of bioligists in Turkey and evolution's defeat there, he told the Pitch, "Great! Congratulations! I mean, that is the point, once people start to see science more objectively."
That's the future of Kansas as our intelligent design "theorists" see it in their more private moments, a science community terrorized into silence.
