There are some people in this world who are perceived as so manifestly terrible and disruptive to society at large that even people from vastly different ideologies and schools of thought can come together and agree that such people just need to go away.
Leftist billionaire philanthropist George Soros is one of those individuals. While Soros is already generally despised by most conservatives and moderates in America for his work at destabilizing the nation through the funding of a plethora of progressive groups, it appears he has also now drawn the ire of the Islamist leader of Turkey for reasons that, at least on the surface, appear to be remarkably similar.
The Guardian reported that Soros’ Open Societies Foundation has announced that it will cease operations and completely withdraw from the nation of Turkey. The announcement came in response to an accusation from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that the progressive organization was attempting to undermine, divide and destroy his nation … the same sort of thing American conservatives accuse Soros of attempting to do.
The Soros organization called the accusations baseless, of course, and asserted that the unwelcome reception it is receiving from the Turkish government has now made it impossible for it to continue doing whatever work it is that it does.
The real reason the Soros-funded Open Societies Foundation may have begun scrambling to extricate itself from Turkey is that it is also now reportedly under investigation by the Turkish Interior Ministry for alleged links to anti-government protests that occurred in Gezi Park in Istanbul in 2013 — protests that the Soros organization denied having any involvement with.
However, a key associate of Soros — indeed, the founder of Soros’ operations in Turkey — named Hakan Altinay was detained by the government along with a dozen other individuals a little more than a week ago as part of the government’s investigation.
Altinay and the others were accused of providing support for a jailed civil rights activist named Osman Kavala, who himself stands accused of attempting to overthrow the government by way of the mass protests in 2013.
Erdogan delivered a speech recently to local administrators in which he linked the recent arrests to both the 2013 protests and Soros. He reportedly said, “The person (Kavala) who financed terrorists during the Gezi incidents is already in prison.”
The Turkish president then set his attention to Soros, and in the process revealed that there is likely a bit of anti-Semitism mixed in with his nationalist defense of Turkish sovereignty as part of the overall opposition to Soros.
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