The core tenets of a functioning democracy — the rule of law, respect for individual freedoms — are also the most basic of Islamic values bestowed up… - Fethullah Gülen

He needed an enemy to justify all of this: When the service movement did not become a tool for his own political ambitions, he declared Hizmet as an enemy and started to motivate his base with this. In order to maintain this motivation, they are now trying to blame every problem on the Hizmet movement. It can also be said that he made the right choice for himself. Because he knew very well that no matter how much he slandered and oppressed, there would be no retaliation against him and that the people he served would not even raise their hands to shake a fist.

The next day, the government produced lists of thousands of individuals whom they tied to Hizmet — for opening a bank account, teaching at a school or reporting for a newspaper — and treated such an affiliation as a crime and began destroying their lives. The lists included people who had been dead for months and people who had been serving at NATO’s European headquarters at the time. International watchdogs have reported numerous abductions, in addition to torture and deaths in detention. The government pursued innocent people outside Turkey, pressuring Malaysia, for instance, to deport three Hizmet sympathizers last week, including a school principal who has lived there for more than a decade, to face certain imprisonment and likely torture.

I learned with deep sorrow that the 7.7 magnitude earthquake centered in Kahramanmaraş shook the provinces of Hatay, Adana, Gaziantep, Malatya, Kilis, Adıyaman, Diyarbakır, Şanlıurfa and Osmaniye, as well as some regions of our neighbor Syria, that many of our people died and that there were people waiting to be rescued under the rubble.