Turkish authorities, once again have shown little respect for the freedom of speech and religion by successfully banning access to the Richard Dawkins website. This action taken on Wednesday, comes after complaints that the websites contents were both defamatory and blasphemous.

The chief protagonist, Adnan Oktar, who writes under the pen name Haran Yahya, complained that Dawkins, an avowed atheist and vocal critic on the theory of creationism and intelligent design, had insulted him in comments in a number of different blog postings and during various online discussion forums.

Oktar, a Muslim creationist, is well known in Turkey through his many books and DVD's contesting Darwin's theory on evolution. In 2006 he published 10,000 copies of a slickly produced 800-page book entitled the 'Atlas of Creation' rejecting all of Darwin's writings on evolution.

The renowned biologist and writer Richard Dawkins,was one of the 10,000 lucky recipients of the colorful creationist book which he succinctly described as simply 'preposterous'.

The blocking of Dawkins' website is one of several attempts by Oktar to censor access to the outside world. In August last year he managed to influence the courts to restrict access to the blogging site WorldPress.com. Oktar and his team of lawyers have also suffered some failures as well in there attempt to prevent free speech by trying to block access to Google Groups. They also failed to ban Dawkins' best seller the God Delusion.

If you ask me it all seems like a lot of monkey business.