le nation:
In an 480-page indictment prosecutors laid out charges including sexual abuse, fraud and organised crime that reached deep into Turkey’s elite.
On Monday Oktar, 64, who denied the charges against him, was sentenced to 1,075 years and three months in jail. Thirteen of his acolytes, including high-ranking kittens, were convicted on a wide range of charges. Their total jail time ran to almost 10,000 years.
Yet the lure of the group is still strong: Facebook and Twitter are awash with messages of support from kittens and lions who pledge their loyalty to Oktar and denounce the “traitors” who put him behind bars.
Kittens and lions are the names Oktar gave to his female and male supporters. Here he is with some kittens, in happier times:
As I noted in 2018 when he was first charged, Oktar, aka Harun Yahya, is a megalomaniac whose achievements include The Atlas of Creation, a lavishly-produced magnum opus which claims to have finally defeated Darwinism. In 2010 he was selected as one of the top fifty of The 500 Most Influential Muslims in the World by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre of Jordan, for his dissemination of creationism in an Islamic context, and other extensively distributed publications on Islamic topics. He also, unsurprisingly, dabbles in Holocaust denial and various antisemitic and Freemasonry-related conspiracy theories.
What brought about the man's spectacular fall from grace? Clearly not his opinions. Perhaps Turkey's President Erdogan decided there was only room for one megalomaniac in the country.
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