Re: Adnan Oktar and his 'Kittens'

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Followers of Harun Yahya wear drag make-up and practice a “sexed-up, Disney version of Islam” that helps promote conservative Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s vision of a modern, Muslim Turkey. Step inside this surreal world where religious piety meets psychedelic softcore porn, led by the world’s foremost Islamic creationist.

Harun Yahya is said to be the messianic leader of an apocalyptic Islamic sex cult. He’s also the owner of a Turkish television station called A9, and the host of his own religious talk show, which just might make your eyeballs pop out of your skull. The entire set and everyone on it glow like irradiated ultraviolet rays. Five amazing looking women usually co-host the show, wearing things like false rainbow eyelashes, wigs, and diamond-studded Versace bondage gear. The backdrop is a blinding fake lavender cityscape. Conversations often focus on how materialism and Darwinism are dead, how to recognize the face of a real Muslim, and how Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan — with whom the host is rumored to enjoy friendly relations — is “one of the important figures for the End Times”.

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Harun Yahya wears Armani, and is only addressed as “my master” or “sultan”. His real name isn’t even Harun Yahya, though that’s how he’s known to audiences outside of Turkey. In reality, he’s Adnan Oktar, and right now, he’s the global icon of Islamic creationism. He’s also been named one of the world’s 50 most influential Muslims, The Complete Idiots Guide to Understanding Islam describes Oktar as a “top” Muslim scientist, and he even writes articles for the Huffington Post. More traditional clerics are beginning to express their concern about his growing influence in the Muslim world.

Like most creationists, Oktar and his followers believe Darwinism is evil. And like many American evangelicals, they are skilled in the art of televangelism and the mass marketing of religious materials. The sect has produced more than 300 books to date, including the 800-page pinnacle of anti-evolutionary scholarship, the Atlas of Creation. A promotional video for the masterwork alleges that the book’s release had “the impact of an atom bomb”: According to a “scientific” study, before the atlas was published, a full “90 percent of Europeans believed in evolution”. Since the Atlas of Creation has been made available in nine different languages, “only 10 percent of Europeans still believe in Darwinism”. Real facts. Watch the entire promo video below.

Though the volume weighs about 12 lbs. (5.4 kg), Harun Yahya and associates decided to ship it, completely unsolicited, to the United Nations, the US Congress, and numerous biology departments at universities around the world, including the Imperial College London, Utrecht University, the University of Chicago, the University of Barcelona, UC Berkeley, Brown, and the medical school at Columbia University.

Kevin Padian, a Professor of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley, was one of the lucky recipients who came to work one day and found a copy of the hefty book waiting for him. “In our country we are used to nonsense like this,” Dr. Padian said of the United States. Several of his colleagues also received the Atlas of Creation, and were all “astonished at what a load of crap it is.”

[www.youtube.com]

“If he sees a picture of an old fossil crab or something, he says, ‘See, it looks just like a regular crab, there’s no evolution,’” he said. “Extinction does not seem to bother him.”

The gifted atlases brought the world’s attention to the existence of this new trend in creationism, which the Council of Europe apparently found so disturbing it immediately passed a resolution urging all of its members to “defend and promote scientific knowledge”.

In addition, the tome so shook the European establishment that it also inspired a 12,150-word Council of Europe report by the Committee on Culture, Education, and Education titled “The Dangers of Creationism in Education”.

[www.google.com]

The committee wrote that the lavishly illustrated book attempts to prove “the secret links between Darwinism and the ideologies ‘with blood on their hands’, such as fascism and communism”. Ministers of Education in Belgium and France denounced the text, while Hervé Le Guyader, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Paris VI, was asked to produce a detailed analysis of the atlas by the French National Education Inspectorate. Dr. Le Guyader warned that the book’s sophisticated and attractive design “could prove highly effective” at influencing the public. That said, the professor echoed his American colleague at UC Berkeley. “The scientific content of this book is pathetically inadequate,” he concluded.

Anne Ross Solberg, a scholar of religion who has written the only doctoral dissertation on the group to date (2014)

(Titled The Mahdi Wears Armani: An Analysis of the Harun Yahya Enterprise)

Anne Ross Solberg

[sh.diva-portal.org]

says that Oktar’s sect is estimated to have just 30 core followers, with an “additional 200 to 300 more or less involved in the group’s activities”. But Adnan Oktar has many, many more adherents around the world — all thanks to the internet.

[turkishislamicunion.com]

His group operates “hundreds of websites”, and several YouTube channels — the English language version has almost 12,000 subscribers, while the Turkish channel has well over 100,000. He also has about 38,200 followers on Twitter, and the peroxide blondes who appear on his show in drag make-up have tens of thousands of devotees as well. The group of the most faithful 30 followers live with Oktar in luxurious compound in Istanbul, where he has personally selected each item in the house, down to the $1200 Fendi throw pillows embedded with 2,000 Swarovski crystals.

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.. Young Oktar grew bored with his interior design classes. Solberg notes that this is when he started holding speeches, railing against Charles Darwin and Freemasonry. Soon, a small group of students was following him around, and he had the foundation of a new cemaat or religious community.

Then these early followers decided to engage in some recruitment efforts, and targeted physically attractive members of Istanbul’s young, cosmopolitan elite. Many of them were well-heeled students at Istanbul’s prestigious Bogazici University, the highest-ranked institution in Turkey. A few were the children of celebrities. As the group grew, the media dubbed them Adnancilar — adherents of Adnan.

Adnan Oktar’s arrest - photo - [balkanist.net]

But a few years later, Oktar gave an interview to a conservative newspaper that alarmed the rigidly secularist authorities, and he was arrested. According to Solberg, the young religious leader was charged with “making propaganda with the aim of weakening or destroying national sentiments” by the Istanbul State Security Court, and given a 19-month prison sentence. Part of his incarceration was spent inside the locked ward of Bakirkoy Hospital — Istanbul’s largest psychiatric facility. He was diagnosed with “obsessive-compulsive personality disorder” and paranoid schizophrenia. Oktar insists these labels were only applied to him in order to discredit his work.

After his release, the group began gathering in villas and upscale cafes in Istanbul’s wealthiest suburbs, where Oktar would obsessively rehash stale Jewish-masonic conspiracies. This preoccupation became the subject of the first book published under the pen name Harun Yayha. The 500-page Judaism and Freemasonry was released in 1987 as an illustrated opus dedicated to exposing the “distorted Torah” and the Jewish-masonic machinations behind the Russian, American, and French revolutions

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The sermons Oktar gives on his show are effusively pro-Erdogan. He suggests that anti-government protesters are actually quite happy with the premier but “just aren’t aware of it”, that Erdogan is an “immaculate Anatolian man” innocent of any of the wrongdoings suggested by the recent corruption scandal, and that he should rule Turkey right up until the imminent end of the world. As Sunday’s all-important local elections approach, praise for the premier has been even more fervent than usual.

In addition to the talk show, the television station, and the more than 55,000 pages of printed materials produced and distributed around the world, the group has also made some 175 documentaries, including “The Collapse of Darwinism in Europe” and “Crystal Skull; work of aliens?” Certainly the creation of so many videos, and the researching, writing, editing, and printing of 300 book titles in multiple languages, plus international shipping fees, must have cost millions. But where Oktar gets all the money to keep the well-oiled Harun Yahya machinery operating remains a mystery, though some still suspect that favorable business dealings with Erdogan and his inner circle have helped.

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Oktar refers to his cadre of devoted women as "kittens." At his behest, the "kittens" shirk hijabs and traditional dress. Instead, they wear designer outfits, apply heavy makeup, and undergo plastic surgery. They also happen to be wealthy socialites.

Together, Oktar and his followers are ushering in what they call the new face of modern Islam. Oktar and his kittens even have their own television network to broadcast their views, which include discrediting evolution.

Broadly spends three strange days with the cult leader and his "kittens" to see what life in Oktar's cult is really like for women.

For the story, go here:

[www.vice.com]