Matthew Mullenweg, founding developer of the popular WordPress blogging platform, has received a letter from the lawyers acting on behalf of a Turkish Islamic-creationist, Adnan Oktar, aka Harun Yahya, claiming to be responsible for the blanket ban on blogs hosted on the wordpress.com blogging platform in Turkey. On August 17th, 2007, the Turkish Fatih Second Civil Court of First Instance blocked access to all wordpress.com blogs in response to a suit filed by Adnan Oktar’s lawyers on the grounds that blogs hosted on the platform published allegedly defamatory and “unlawful” statements about their client. The Court’s decision resulted in Turkish Internet users being unable to access more than one millions weblogs hosted wordpress.com. We have applied to you to remove the unlawful statements regarding my client Mr. Adnan Oktar (…) in your blogs. The number of our attempts to inform and warn you regarding these defamation blogs must have been at least twenty, many times through your support page, a couple of times to your legal department and we even sent a regular mail to Mr. Matt Mullenweg. Most of our attempts were unanswered. So we have become obliged to apply to Turkish judicial courts to stop this defamation executed through your services. By the decision of Fatih 2nd Civil Court of First Instance, number 2007/195, access to WordPress.com has been blocked in Turkey. It has also been reported by Monsters and Critics that the court ordered Turk Telecom (Turk Telekomunikasyon) to block few specific websites. But, when the authors of those sites moved the allegedly defamatory content to other blogs hosted on the wordpress.com domain “we applied to the court to order that all websites of WordPress be blocked,” kerim Kalkan, a lawyer for Adnan Oktar, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa). Adnan Oktar’s lawyers are accusing Edip Yuksel, a Turkish writer and rival of their client, of using wordpress.com blogs to publish “slander” about Adnan Oktar. They are asking wordpress.com to dismiss all of the blogs responsible for the alleged defamatory content: Since Edip Yuksel and his crime organization could easily start new blogs in your site, they had even launched a campaign in opening defamation blogs regarding my client and had explicitly expressed this organized endeavor in his defamation blogs: “In order to make people hear our voice, let everyone start new blogs from websites such as http://blogcu.com or http://wordpress.com and let them copy the posts on those blogs and paste them to their own. You can start several at once, if possible. Please remember that the name you will give to the blogs, should be related to Adnan Oktar or Harun Yahya in order to find them quickly through Google search. If the names are already taken, you can solve this problem by using characters such as “_” (Adnan_Oktar) or numbers such as AdnanOktar100, Adnan_Oktar_50.” we demand you to remove and prohibit any blogs in your site that contain my client’s name adnan oktar or his pen name harun yahya or various combination of these 4 names. In an article entitled “Shooting the messenger” posted on The Guardian's Comment is Free blog, Ali Eteraz expressed the belief that “WordPress is caught up in a long-standing political and cultural battle between two competing Muslim groups,” adding that “the ban should be seen as the first sign of the kind of censorship that an Islamist Turkish government is willing to accept.” Some commentators, however, seem more sceptical about Ali Eteraz's conclusion: “The author is simply trying to malign the government. It's not the fault of the Turkish government that the court has passed this order. Censorship in Turkey existed before the AK party came into power. To say that banning a blog is part of an ‘Islamic censorship’ is completely ridiculous,” said nadeem. The case has caught the attention of the Turkish media and already made it to the front page of one of the top newspapers in the country. On the Turkish Blogsphere, and espacially within the wordpress.com community, two posts by WordPress founding developer Matthew Mullenweg (Blocked in Turkey and Why We’re Blocked in Turkey: Adnan Oktar) kicked off a storm of comments and reactions.