By SPIEGEL ONLINE
Added: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:00:00 UTC

Adnan Oktar (aka Harun Yahya) is one of Turkey's major proponents of creationism and he believes Darwin's theory of evolution is the Devil's work. In a SPIEGEL ONLINE interview, he explains how he plans to defeat Darwinism.

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<!-- SPIEGEL ONLINE: Interview with Harun Yahya, 22 Sept 2008 <br /><a href="http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,578838,00.html" target="_blank" >http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,578838,00.html</a><br /><br />Translated from the German by <strong>Paula Kirby</strong><br /><br /><hr /><br /><br /><strong>"All Terrorists are Darwinists"</strong><br /><br /><strong>There's no such thing as evolution and Darwin's teachings are the work of the devil: the books of Adnan Oktar, alias Harun Yahya, have made him one of the most famous creationists in the Islamic world. In this interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE he explains how he wants to defeat Darwinism.</strong><br /><br />SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr Oktar, just about every reputable biologist believes evolution to be the best-proven theory since the discovery that the Earth isn't flat. Do you really think you know better than they do?<br /><br />Oktar: There are over 100 million fossils that prove creationism. And these fossils have never changed. A fish has remained a fish, a shrimp has remained a shrimp. You can find these fossils all over the world. We've put them on display in Turkey too, and people have seen them with their own eyes. That is clear proof. Unlike creationism, Darwinism has no proof of evolution theory. Its adherents haven't found any fossil evidence they could use.<br /><br /><img src="http://cdn.cloudfiles.mosso.com/c114612/images/2008/yahya.jpg" alt="Yahya" /><br /><br />SPIEGEL ONLINE: Last year the Council of Europe called upon EU States not to teach creationism and evolution in schools as though they were equally valid. Do you see that as a defeat?<br /><br />Oktar: Darwinism enjoys official protection all over the world. No other ideology, no other idea, has ever been so shielded. Any criticism of it provokes an official reaction. Yet it is a scientific fact that evolution is wrong. Anyone reading my <em>Atlas of Creation</em> comes to the same conclusion. Darwinism has been deceiving humankind for 150 years.<br /><br />SPIEGEL ONLINE: To what extent have you been influenced by the Christian Fundamentalists in America and Europe, the proponents of Intelligent Design?<br /><br />Oktar: I find the concept of Intelligent Design rather dishonest. We should believe sincerely in the existence of Allah, and we should stand up for religion, whether Islam or Christianity. The concept of Intelligent Design claims that things were created somehow — but it doesn't say by whom. We should say quite clearly: it was by Allah.<br /><br />SPIEGEL ONLINE: Richard Dawkins, one of the most prominent of the New Atheists, has recently brought out his bestselling book, <em>The God Delusion</em>, in Turkish and we gather it has already sold 15,000 copies. One of the things he writes is that religion can be a cause of terrorism.<br /><br />Oktar: Darwinism was the foundation of Hitler's and Mussolini's Fascism and Stalin's Communism. And if we look at the present day, we see that all terrorists — even those who consider themselves to be Muslims — are actually Darwinists and atheists. A believer who prays regularly does not plant bombs. The only people who do that are those who are pretending to be Muslims — or who are Darwinists clearly saying that they are terrorists or Communists. So it follows that they are all Darwinists.<br /><br />SPIEGEL ONLINE: Do you seriously believe that someone like Osama Bin Laden, who uses the Koran and the godlessness of the West to justify terrorist attacks, is being driven by Darwinist ideals?<br /><br />Oktar: These people aren't always the way they seem to be in their youth. If one tests them to discover their true beliefs, one realises that they are materialists and Darwinists at heart. It is impossible for a person who fears Allah to commit terrorist acts. Such acts are perpetrated by people who have studied abroad and have had a Darwinist education, people who have internalised Darwin and later call themselves Muslims.<br /><br />SPIEGEL ONLINE: Since you've mentioned Hitler: on your website you condemn the Holocaust and claim that there's a connection between that and Darwinism. But as recently as the 1990s you wrote a book about what you called "The Lie of the Holocaust".<br /><br />Oktar: That book wasn't by me, it was by one of my friends, Nuri Özbudak. He published his own essays under that title. We protested about it later, and a Notary Public clarified the facts. My complaint wasn't against the author himself, it was against the use of my name. My own book on this subject was published later.<br /><br />SPIEGEL ONLINE: Next year we're going to be celebrating the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of his most important work, On the Origin of Species. Will you be joining in the celebrations?<br /><br />Oktar: It's going to be a worldwide celebration of the collapse of Darwinism. People are going to be amazed at how on Earth they could ever have believed in Darwinism, and at how they were taken in by such a con for so many years. At how hundreds, thousands of universities and professors allowed themselves to be misled and at how they were deceived by Satan.<br /><br />SPIEGEL ONLINE: One of your books is called <em>Atlas of Creation</em>, a huge and clearly very expensive tome. It has been distributed across the world and numerous newspaper and magazine editors have received free copies of it. How do you finance your fight against Darwinism?<br /><br />Oktar: The publisher makes a fantastic profit, since I don't claim any royalties. And my books sell in huge numbers. Last year alone I sold eight million copies in Turkey and a further two million abroad. Hardly any other books in Turkey sell as well as mine. This year it's even better, my sales figures are many times higher. They have doubled. So it's perfectly reasonable for the publisher to distribute free copies — that's just public relations. But the money for it comes from the publisher.<br /><br />SPIEGEL ONLINE: But in May of this year you were convicted by a Turkish court of having founded an illegal organisation for the purpose of enriching yourself. <br /><br />Adnan Oktar: Yes, it's true, I was accused of running a criminal organisation. I was sentenced to three years' imprisonment. But that still has to be confirmed by the Appeals Court. There is no evidence against me that I consider acceptable. My confession was obtained in the absence of a lawyer and under duress. No one in Turkey would accept the kind of punishment I have been given. <br /><br /><hr /><br /><br /><strong>Supplementary information given by SPIEGEL ONLINE about Harun Yahya:</strong><br />Harun Yahya (real name: Adnan Oktar), 52, is a Turkish author and one of the best-known creationists in the Islamic world. He likes to describe "Darwinism" as the root of all evil and the driving force behind Islamic terrorists. Oktar became known as a Holocaust-denier in the 1990s, although he has since officially distanced himself from anti-Semitism. All the same, in his book <em>The Horrors of the Holocaust</em>, Oktar accuses "radical Zionists" of having fanned the flames of anti-Semitism during the 1930s through "their collaboration with the Nazis", and of now exploiting it both politically and economically.<br /><br />Last year Oktar came to the public's attention again when he had thousands of free copies of his 800-page, lavishly produced <em>Atlas of Creation</em> distributed to schools and publishers around the world. It is not clear who funded this exercise. Oktar claims that in 2007 he sold eight million books in Turkey and two million abroad; in addition it is said that his writings have been downloaded from his website 60 million times. In 2007 the region of Baden-Württemberg produced a Defence of the Constitution Report, which named Oktar in the section on Islamic extremism.<br />-->

TAGGED: -, CREATIONISM, EVOLUTION, INTERVIEWS