The observant amongst you will have noticed that I went for option 3. MT was just not doing what I needed it to, and when I installed Wordpress in parallel to trial it, it did everything I need more or less without fail.

It’s taken me a couple of days to transition (which, combined with a new job, is why the blog has been quiet,) but I’m there now, and shouldn’t be changing again¹. Expect the blog to be back to normal(ish) levels of posting.

1. Until the next big thing comes along. [↩]

Wordpress, the popular blogging site, has been blocked by the Turkish government, following allegations of defamation by one Adnan Oktar, who is a well-known Islamist creationist, who’s recently been in the blog spotlight (bloglight?) for a mass-mailing campaign of tens of thousands of copies of his latest book, The Atlas of Creation to universities, schools and research institutes throughout the western world.

While he was just another creationist crank mailing out books and trying to convert people, I wasn’t that interested; it’s not that different from The Discovery Institute or their UK equivalent, Truth in Science. But this latest development gave me cause to look into him a bit more thoroughly, and it’s much worse than I thought. This is someone with enough sway in his home country to get an entire site banned based on a couple of articles, who’s so certain of his deluded ideas that he’s prepared to orchestrate a campaign of misinformation, harassment and threats against anyone with opposing views. From Wikipedia:

In early 1998, Adnan Oktar and the BAV launched a campaign against Darwinism. Thousands of free copies of Adnan Oktar’s book, The Evolution Deceit, and the booklets based on this book were distributed within Turkey.

BAV [Foundation for Scientific Research - Oktar’s mouthpiece organisation] also spearheaded an effort to attack Turkish academics who taught evolutionary theory. A number of academics were harassed, threatened and slandered in fliers that labelled them “communists, separatists and Maoists” for teaching evolution.[19][20] In 1999, six of the professors won a civil court case against BAV for defamation and were awarded $6,000 each.

The court decided that “a severe and unjust attack was perpetrated on the plaintiffs’ personal rights, by listing the names of the scientists defending the theory of evolution and describing them as communists and separatists on the flyers distributed by the foundation.” [20] Professor Ümit Sayın summed up the effect of BAV’s campaign when, in 2005, he said: 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.

In just seven years he’s gone from being prevented from persecuting people, to being able to shut down websites that host pages critical of him, he’s mailed out thousands of copies of a book of lies, and in his own country people are too afraid of him to speak out in favour of evolution; how is it that hardly anyone in the west has heard of this man?