steal this: don’t block the blog letter

Don’t block the blogHere is a really quite flawless letter that cjwriter wrote to the Turkish Ambassador to Australia regarding the recent banning of all WordPress.com blogs in Turkey (and, indirectly, Albania, because Albania gets much of its internet access from Turkey). I suggest, as he suggests, that you copy and adapt the text and send it to the Turkish embassy in your own country. Judyb12 has supplied an abbreviated list of them:

Turkish Embassy: USA
Turkish Embassy: UK
Turkish Embassy: Australia
Turkish Embassy: Canada

RE: Freedom of Speech

Dear Mr __________,

My name is __________. I live in ______ and I’m writing to you regarding an action a Turkish court has taken that is of great concern to me.

On August 17th, 2007, the Turkish Fatih 2nd Civil Court of First Instance blocked access to the WordPress.com domain. The ban on WordPress, a blogging platform hosting some 1.3 million blogs, was a response to a suit filed by lawyers for Adnan Oktar alleging that defamatory statements had been made about their client by several blogs on WordPress.com.

The ban has resulted in all blogs hosted by WordPress.com being made inaccessible to Turkey. I feel very strongly that this is an overreaction. I am a blogger on WordPress; I have done nothing wrong, but my readership is being impacted.

Even more serious is the fact that there are many innocent Turkish bloggers on WordPress.com who now cannot access their blogs or are being forced to use other means to access them. It is a violation of their free speech and that of readers from all over the world.

Please understand, this is not about whether Adnan Oktar was slandered, or about the Turkish legal system; I respect your country, as I hope you respect mine. But it has gone beyond that. Now it is about innocent Turkish bloggers being forced into silence, and countless others being denied the freedom to be read. The court could have ordered that the offending blogs and any subsequent offenders be blocked, but instead ordered the complete ban of WordPress.com. It’s the equivalent of closing a library because of a single offending book, rather than just removing the book itself.

Many websites and blogs on both WordPress.com and on other platforms are initiating campaigns in support of Turkish bloggers, and I am writing to you to express my concern, and to ask that the Turkish authorities reconsider their position.

Yours sincerely,

____________.

Steal, copy and paste at will! Vive la Resistance!

WordPress is blocked by Turkey(s): a blogger’s revenge plan of action

Turkish Flag

And here is why (all links my own):

Dear Sir,

We have applied to you to remove the unlawful statements regarding my client Mr. Adnan Oktar (who is the author of the books written under the pen name Harun Yahya) in your blogs. The number of our attempts to inform and warn you regarding these defamation blogs must have been at least twenty, many times through your support page, a couple of times to your legal department and we even sent a regular mail to Mr. Matt Mullenweg. Most of our attempts were unanswered.

These defamation blogs contained slanders to some of my client’s friends as well. They also applied WordPress.com support with their official ID cards and a representative directed them to write to the legal department. So they did but again no response from legal.

So we have become obliged to apply to Turkish judicial courts to stop this defamation executed through your services. By the decision of Fatih 2nd Civil Court of First Instance, number 2007/195, access to WordPress.com has been blocked in Turkey.

The organization, which is led by Edip Yuksel, responsible for these defamation blogs in question are currently up for crimes such as “building an organization to commit crime” in Turkey. The sites of Edip Yuksel, http://www.yahyaharun.com, http://www.19.org, http://www.calinmisgenclik.com and also the blog under your site with the user name http://adnanoktar.wordpress.com have been blocked by Turkish judicial courts in Turkey before(by Gaziosmanpasa Civil Court of First Instance, dated 06.04.2007 and decision number 2007/130 D. Is) . We have also sent you the official documents on this judicial decision in one of our applications to you.

Since Edip Yuksel and his crime organization could easily start new blogs in your site, they had even launched a campaign in opening defamation blogs regarding my client and had explicitly expressed this organized endeavor in his defamation blogs:

In order to make people hear our voice, let everyone start new blogs from websites such as http://blogcu.com or http://wordpress.com and let them copy the posts on those blogs and paste them to their own. You can start several at once, if possible. Please remember that the name you will give to the blogs, should be related to Adnan Oktar or Harun Yahya in order to find them quickly through Google search. If the names are already taken, you can solve this problem by using characters such as “_” (Adnan_Oktar) or numbers such as AdnanOktar100, Adnan_Oktar_50.

The aim of all of these blogs that he and his organization starts, was to insult my client. All of them were completely full of slanderous statements. There are still some sites left open -not accessible from Turkey, but still accessible abroad – :

http://adnanoktar.wordpress.com
http://adnanoktarveislam.wordpress.com/
http://fitikado.wordpress.com

http://oktarbabuna.wordpress.com
http://adnancilar.wordpress.com/
http://adnanoktarveislam.wordpress.com/
http://whoisharunyahya.wordpress.com/
http://adnanoktargercekleri.wordpress.com/
http://quiestharunyahya.wordpress.com/
http://harunyahyaarabic.wordpress.com/
http://safsataciharunyahya.wordpress.com/
http://savsatalaracevap.wordpress.com/

The below are taken but still empty:

http://adnanzedeler.wordpress.com/
http://kodadiabi.wordpress.com/

As we have requested before:

WE DEMAND YOU TO REMOVE AND PROHIBIT ANY BLOGS IN YOUR SITE THAT CONTAIN MY CLIENT’S NAME ADNAN OKTAR OR HIS PEN NAME HARUN YAHYA OR VARIOUS COMBINATION OF THESE 4 NAMES.

Yours sincerely,

Attorneys of Mr. Adnan Oktar (Harun Yahya)
Atty. Kerim Kalkan / Atty. Ceyhun Gökdog(an (Istanbul Barr register number:
27405)

Address: Darulaceze caddesi, Bilal Is Merkezi, A Blok, D:5. Okmeydani Sisli
Istanbul
Telephone: 90 212 220 31 20
Fax: 90 212 220 74 21
E-mail: rotahukuk@rotahukuk.com
ceyhungokdogan@istanbulbarosu.org.tr

Now, I made a suggestion. I rather hope it gets taken up by other bloggers around the world, preferably on NON-WORDPRESS.COM platforms. People using self-hosted WordPress, people on Blogger and Blogspot, people with LiveJournals, and people who reinvented the wheel and built it themselves.

It is this:

I put out a call for all bloggers, on all platforms, to make silly jokes and bad puns and hey, some defamatory statements about anal-retentitiveness while we’re at it about the apparently both well-connected and thin-skinned ADNAN OKTAR or his pen name HARUN YAHYA.

This will cause Turkey either to extend the ban to ALL blogging platforms, including mainstream newspapers such as the Guardian and the New York Times, or to drop their block against WordPress. Such legal actions have to be asserted in all cases, or they must be dropped.

What say you all?

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