The Turkish state-run news agency has announced its “Anadolu World Report News Package” at the 2016 joint annual convention of two US Muslim Brotherhood organizations. According to the announcement:
May 29, 2016 Anadolu Agency has used the largest annual gathering of American Muslims to present its new Anadolu World Report News Package.
The launch was held on Saturday during the 41st annual convention of the Islamic Circle of North America – Muslim American Society (ICNA-MAS) in Baltimore, Maryland.
Leading American Muslim NGOs as well as tens of thousands of Muslims from across the U.S. visited the site where Anadolu Agency opened a stand in the convention area to introduce the package, which focuses on news from the Islamic world.
During a speech at the launch, Anadolu Agency’s Deputy Director General and Editor-in-Chief Metin Mutanoglu told the audience that the news package would deliver political, economic, cultural and social news from the Islamic world to its subscribers in English, Arabic and Turkish.
Mutanoglu said the project was important in terms of filling the gap for media from the Muslim world, adding that it came about when Anadolu Agency recognized that there were no strong agencies among Muslims to cover news about themselves.
‘We hope that this new project will be a news bridge between Muslims,’ he said. Mutanoglu added that although the launch of the news package was a small step, it should be considered as the beginning of bigger projects. ‘It will grow with our young people, with our youth – inshallah – in the future,’ he said.”
Read the rest here.
The choice of venue for the announcement is unsurprising as we have frequently reported on the close ties of Erdogan and the Turkish government to the Global Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. This reporting largely began with a report by the GMBDW Editor, centered on the June 2010 Gaza flotilla but which also provided the following background on Erdogan:
The Turkish political establishment has had ties with the Global Muslim Brotherhood since at least the 1970s when Prime Minister Erdogan was reported to have been associated with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), a fundamentalist Saudi religious organization that has been accused of promoting extremism and supporting terrorism all over the world. Erdogan has since maintained his ties to the Global Brotherhood as evidenced by his close relationships to Global Muslim Brotherhood leaders such as former Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Akef, Malaysian opposition politician Anwar Ibrahim, and Yassin Abdullah Qadi, a Saudi businessman blacklisted by the United Nations for funding terrorism and who had links with the US Muslim Brotherhood. A Muslim Brotherhood spokesman has also said that the Brotherhood has maintained ties with the “Islamic movement” in Turkey since the days of Necmettin Erbakan’s early political parties, and the European Muslim Brotherhood has fused with Erbakan’s movement in Europe known as Millî Görüs. German Muslim Brotherhood leader Ibrahim El-Zayat is married to a member of the Erbakan family, and El-Zayat’s business partner is the Secretary-General of Millî Görüs in Germany. El-Zayat, formerly the head of WAMY in Western Europe, also runs Millis Gorus’ extensive portfolio of mosque properties throughout Europe as well as serving as a leader in the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe (FIOE), the umbrella group representing the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe.
The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) is a part of the US Muslim Brotherhood and considered to be closely tied to the Jamaat-e-Islami organization of Southeast Asia, itself allied with the Global Muslim Brotherhood. ICNA is particularly close to the Muslim American Society and the two organizations have been holding joint conferences in recent years. The MAS was identified in a Hudson Institute report authored by the GMBDW editor as a part of the US. Muslim Brotherhood and closely tied to the Egyptian organization. The GMBDW reported just last week that one of its speakers at the joint conference ICNA/MAS conference was Dr. AbdulMawgoud Dardery, a former leader in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s political party.