Turkey Blames American Scholar for Coup Attempt

Henri Barkey

The post-coup purge of Turkey’s education establishment by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took a bizarre turn recently when the president’s lackeys in the Turkish press charged that American scholar Henri Barkey helped plan the failed effort to oust Erdogan and his pro-Islamist party. A.J. Caschetta examines the conspiracy-mongering nonsense behind this turn of events in a Campus Watch-sponsored article published at the Daily Caller:

Observers of academic trends might expect the smearing of an American scholar with unfounded charges and wild conspiracy theories to provoke an impassioned defense from all of academia. But that has not been the case with Henri J. Barkey, a scholar at the Washington, D.C.-based Woodrow Wilson Center who has become a target of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s widespread persecution of “intellectuals.”

To read the rest of this essay, please click here.

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Winfield Myers

Winfield Myers is managing editor of the Middle East Forum and director of its Campus Watch project, which reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North American universities. He has taught world history and other topics at the University of Michigan, the University of Georgia, Tulane, and Xavier University of Louisiana. He was previously managing editor of The American Enterprise magazine and CEO of Democracy Project, Inc., which he co-founded. Mr. Myers has served as senior editor and communications director at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and is principal author and editor of a college guide, Choosing the Right College (1998, 2001). He was educated at the University of Georgia, Tulane, and the University of Michigan.