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."
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