Adnan Oktar: Turkey's Richard Warman

Turkish creationist leading suppression of evolution in Turkey

Since successfully convincing a Turkish court to block access to Richard Dawkins' website, it would seem he's been a very busy man.

This week Oktar was successful in getting the website of the Vatan newspaper blocked in Turkey.

Once again, Oktar cited personal abuse and defamation as his reason for seeking the ban. "The reason for this block is a court decision sought by Adnan Oktar due to reader comments on an article printed on our site about his 'community'," Vatan explained.

Once again, Canada's pro-Human Rights Commission crowd has been eerily silent on Oktar's use of the notions of "defamation" and the "encouragement of hatred" to silence critics of his writings.

Some of the more intellectually impoverished members of the pro-HRC crowd have offered characteristically worthless commentary on the topic.

But this predominating silence is so eery because Canada has its own equivalent to Oktar -- Richard Warman, a multiple-time litigant under the Canadian Human Rights Commission, who has sought to silence many of his critics via legal action.

Of course, Warman himself has had his conduct scrutinized and been found wanting. In a country like Turkey, where the notion of free speech seems to carry so little influence with leaders, one has to wonder how likely it is that Oktar's conduct in his pro-censorship quest will receive the same scrutiny.

Not terribly likely.

Ironically, one would think that Canada's pro-HRC crowd would have a little more to say about this. After all, Oktar's targets, to date, have been Richard Dawkins, beloved atheist du jour and a liberal Turkish newspaper.

Then again, to deal with the issues being raised by Oktar's litigious nature would only shed additional light on their own warts -- and that is something that all too many of them simply could not bear.