Orgies, blackmail and anti-Semitism: Inside the Islamic cult whose leader is embraced by Israeli figures
He has a harem of scantily clad ’kittens,’ claims the U.K. ’deep state’ brought Hitler to power and is accused of sex slavery. What draws Israeli politicians and rabbis to Turkish cult leader Adnan Oktar?
By Asaf Ronel Mar 29, 2018
▻https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/turkey/.premium.MAGAZINE-inside-the-muslim-sex-cult-whose-leader-is-embraced-by-is
ISTANBUL – Fulya is a Turkish woman of 36. Tall, thin, with short, oxidized hair, hazel eyes, penciled eyebrows and full lips. When she enters a fancy restaurant on the European banks of the Bosporus in Istanbul’s fashionable Bebek neighborhood, almost all eyes turn to look at her. Even though Fulya (not her real name), who’s the daughter of the CEO of a large Turkish company, seems to leave a trail of stardust behind her, her work is not especially glitzy. She organizes delegations of foreign dignitaries who visit Turkey, part of the burgeoning array of nonprofit organizations doing diplomatic work under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Before that, Fulya was a journalistic commentator on Turkey and the Middle East, appearing both in print and on-air. She held those jobs while she was, for more than a decade, a member of a religious sex cult led by a person named Adnan Oktar. According to Fulya, for the last four years she pursued her career as a journalist even though she was a captive of the idiosyncratic cult, following a failed first attempt to escape. She’d made an appointment with a doctor in a hospital in an effort to flee, but Oktar’s people seized her as she was entering the hospital and forced her into a car. After that, she relates, she was imprisoned in a room in one of the Istanbul compounds owned by the cult, managing her career mostly via computer and under close scrutiny, and leaving the room only to take part in the cult’s activities.
Fulya says she knew she would never escape if she remained in the cult’s central walled-in, high-surveillance compound. Accordingly, she quarreled repeatedly with Oktar, until, less than a year ago, he ordered her to be moved to another compound he owns. There, after managing to get a message out to her father, she organized a getaway. At a prearranged moment, she ran out to the yard with only her ID card and the pajamas she was wearing, got into her father’s waiting car and fled, as the cult’s staff tried to catch her.
According to the story told by Fulya and by her partner, Sedat (also a pseudonym), who also escaped from the cult two years ago, Oktar is a combination of the type of evangelical preachers one sees on American television and the head of a sex cult that objects in principle to bringing children into the world. The cover for all this is a singular interpretation of Islam.