re: Turkey issues warrant for Enes Kanter. Claims he is member of Terrorist Group

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Unless of course he is an actual terrorist, then he can GTFO.

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Yeah a nearly 7 foot professional athlete would totally have blended in at training camps.

Muslim on Muslim crime - wish they'd come after Asik

Don't know if Kanter is an awful person but it seems like Gulen is just another shade of evil. Anybody more familiar with Turkey know if there is a popular faction besides Erdogan and Gulen?

Don't come home Enes.

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Anybody more familiar with Turkey know if there is a popular faction besides Erdogan and Gulen?

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Gulenists aren't even a faction anymore. Erdogan has purged them from academia, journalism, and within the government/military.

anything that helps the pels I'm all for
asik has been acting suspiciously lately
better to arrest them both and try to take out the whole cell

Well, Hedo Turkoglu is the head of the basketball federation and has relatively close ties to Erdogan, so that's possible People liked the first post but not the second. Not sure why.

As for the political situation, Erdogan has about 45-50 percent of the vote with the AKP. The CHP (which is known as the Republican party if translated directly to English) is the mainstream secular alternative and gets about 25 percent of the vote and dwindling. It's pretty much the party for anyone who is affluent, well educated, and unreliant on Erdogan for their prosperity. The changing demographics of the country have really hurt that party's viability, unfortunately.

The HDP is popular with the young left (think Bernie bros) as well as Kurds and other ethnic minorities that are marginalized by Erodgan, such as the Alawites. They get 10-15 percent of the vote but one of their leaders was jailed.

The MHP is the populist right party that isn't religious but very anti Kurd/Armenian. It's the closest parallel to grassroots Trump supporters, but from a completely Turkish standpoint. They get 10-15 percent but have recently formed an alliance of sorts with the AKP, which would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

As for Gulen, his numbers were never too big. I doubt ever more than 2 million but they were an influential bunch. Lots of guys from poor backgrounds who got into the best colleges with great test scores, a large faction of the police, etc. They were closely aligned with Erdogan until the last 4 years or so but are now heavily targeted.

Since they were once close allies, Erdogan knows exactly who is a member and who to go after. It's like shooting fish in a barrel.

However, they are not a violent group by nature. The odds of Kanter doing anything that someone on this board would consider terrorism would be less likely than one in a billion. Erdogan is using "terrorism" as code for "speaking out against me publicly" while also being a high profile supporter of Gulen who has likely given him millions of dollars.

The whole Kanter situation is an extreme version of what is going on with Hakan Sukur, a guy that a lot of the Soccer Board would now.

Sukur was a member of Parliament with the AKP just 6 years ago. Now he has been charged with insulting the President and being a member of an armed terrorist group (the Gulen movement). I believe Sukur now lives in the US as well.

Was anyone else Muslim on the Kings besides Hedo? Peja and Divac are both Orthodox although I think Divac is much more politically active and religious than Peja. Tariq Abdul Wahad was a French convert from Christianity but I think he was gone by then from the Kings.

Hedo is a Bosniak and I have always suspected Turkoglu was a name given to his family that hid a far more Serbian sounding last name (which in turn the Serbs probably made his family take in the 1940s, if not earlier), while Asik is a regular Turk. Not sure about Kanter, but I wonder if he is an Alawite.

Appreciate that post, shame it sounds like things won't get better in the near future