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Saturday, September 11, 2010
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
10 Facets of Islamic Deception: Taqiyya Shown in Gulen Charter Schools
1. Hard core Denial: Flatly deny, we are not part of Gulen we are Turkish Scholars, merely trying to educate you Americans in your insufficent educational efforts.
2. Soft Intimidation: Intimidate teachers and parents with cease and desist letters if they mention Gulen in connection with the schools. American teachers threatened with job loss.
3. Hide under the guise of Religion and Tolerance: Claim Gulen is a good man who promotes interfaith dialog with world's religious leaders. (photos to prove 1 time meetings) uses local Gulen Interfaith programs to con local politicians and Christian groups. Turning churches into Gulen Charter schools (Lotus School of Excellence- Aurora, CO) or the ex- private Catholic School purchased by the Gulen movement and shamelessly converted to a new Charter school in St. Louis, MO.
4. Hard intimidation: Send cease and desist letters from Gulen Foundation lawyers to parents or teachers who dare speak the truth. (threats and intimidation start) walk into State Charter meetings with attorney as in the case of Beehive Science Academy. Fire teachers that try to form a Teachers Union and want to improve student academics. Claim parents are disgruntled because their child got bad grades.
5. Step up Marketing and Public Relations: Beef up the marketing and Public relations with Gulen's own web sites and media. Keep up the appearance with local politicians, police, etc., who visit the schools - always have a video or camera ready to capture the moment of presenting tea sets to visiting elected officials. Stay on top of blogs, web sites, news articles that are exposing and questioning the Gulen managed charter schools in the USA. Free trips to Turkey for local media, politicans and interfaith groups.
6. Medium Core Denial: Gulen schools claim "there is no proof or evidence" it is a "conspiracy theory" (by the way there is plenty of proof) or "American paranoia."
7. Pay offs and bribes: Pay off's of victims so the case doesn't reach national attention only local. Dove Science Academy rape victim -family and attorney get $100,000 from the Gulen Foundation in Oklahoma. $5,000 for the kids locked into a closet by Turkish teacher (after all it was a cultural difference) Free trips to Turkey for politicians, students, etc. Turkish language taught at night and in the schools, "Turkish is the language of Love and Peace."
8. Business as usual : Continually apply for more grants, loans and open more schools at a rapid pace. Surely no one will notice (strategic ambiguity) rob grants from Walton Family Foundation and Gates Foundation to pay for payroll, and other non-allowable expenses. Audits come and go - dodge more bullets with attorneys. It is all a misunderstanding, we are another culture. We didn't understand that we cannot use American Tax dollars for HB-1 Visas, Turkish trips, etc, after all we teach Turkish Character in the schools.
9. Soft Core Denialism: Schools are admitting to ties to the Gulen Movement - "We may have teachers that are Gulen followers but we don't teach religion." "We cannot prevent our teachers from being Gulen followers." or Gulen "inspired" school. Be honest: you are all known Gulen members, with ties to each other in the USA and in Turkey.
10. Playing Victim: "Mean Americans don't understand Muslims, you are being unfair and racist (Turkish is not a race but an Ethnicity)" "Why do American people hate us and have so many prejudices toward us?" "We are victims of American ignorance." "All these articles and documentation are untrue." "Gulen is promoting peace and tolerance -Americans promote lies and hatred." "We will sue you"
2. Soft Intimidation: Intimidate teachers and parents with cease and desist letters if they mention Gulen in connection with the schools. American teachers threatened with job loss.
3. Hide under the guise of Religion and Tolerance: Claim Gulen is a good man who promotes interfaith dialog with world's religious leaders. (photos to prove 1 time meetings) uses local Gulen Interfaith programs to con local politicians and Christian groups. Turning churches into Gulen Charter schools (Lotus School of Excellence- Aurora, CO) or the ex- private Catholic School purchased by the Gulen movement and shamelessly converted to a new Charter school in St. Louis, MO.
4. Hard intimidation: Send cease and desist letters from Gulen Foundation lawyers to parents or teachers who dare speak the truth. (threats and intimidation start) walk into State Charter meetings with attorney as in the case of Beehive Science Academy. Fire teachers that try to form a Teachers Union and want to improve student academics. Claim parents are disgruntled because their child got bad grades.
5. Step up Marketing and Public Relations: Beef up the marketing and Public relations with Gulen's own web sites and media. Keep up the appearance with local politicians, police, etc., who visit the schools - always have a video or camera ready to capture the moment of presenting tea sets to visiting elected officials. Stay on top of blogs, web sites, news articles that are exposing and questioning the Gulen managed charter schools in the USA. Free trips to Turkey for local media, politicans and interfaith groups.
6. Medium Core Denial: Gulen schools claim "there is no proof or evidence" it is a "conspiracy theory" (by the way there is plenty of proof) or "American paranoia."
7. Pay offs and bribes: Pay off's of victims so the case doesn't reach national attention only local. Dove Science Academy rape victim -family and attorney get $100,000 from the Gulen Foundation in Oklahoma. $5,000 for the kids locked into a closet by Turkish teacher (after all it was a cultural difference) Free trips to Turkey for politicians, students, etc. Turkish language taught at night and in the schools, "Turkish is the language of Love and Peace."
8. Business as usual : Continually apply for more grants, loans and open more schools at a rapid pace. Surely no one will notice (strategic ambiguity) rob grants from Walton Family Foundation and Gates Foundation to pay for payroll, and other non-allowable expenses. Audits come and go - dodge more bullets with attorneys. It is all a misunderstanding, we are another culture. We didn't understand that we cannot use American Tax dollars for HB-1 Visas, Turkish trips, etc, after all we teach Turkish Character in the schools.
9. Soft Core Denialism: Schools are admitting to ties to the Gulen Movement - "We may have teachers that are Gulen followers but we don't teach religion." "We cannot prevent our teachers from being Gulen followers." or Gulen "inspired" school. Be honest: you are all known Gulen members, with ties to each other in the USA and in Turkey.
10. Playing Victim: "Mean Americans don't understand Muslims, you are being unfair and racist (Turkish is not a race but an Ethnicity)" "Why do American people hate us and have so many prejudices toward us?" "We are victims of American ignorance." "All these articles and documentation are untrue." "Gulen is promoting peace and tolerance -Americans promote lies and hatred." "We will sue you"
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
USA TODAY: Objectives of charter schools with Turkish ties questioned
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
They have generic, forward-sounding names like Horizon Science Academy, Pioneer Charter School of Science and Beehive Science & Technology Academy. Quietly established over the past decade by a loosely affiliated group of Turkish-American educators, these 100 or so publicly funded charter schools in 25 states are often among the top-performing public schools in their towns.
The schools educate as many as 35,000 students — taken together they'd make up the largest charter school network in the USA — and have imported thousands of Turkish educators over the past decade.
But the success of the schools at times has been clouded by nagging questions about what ties the schools may have to a reclusive Muslim leader in his late 60s living in exile in rural Pennsylvania.
Described by turns as a moderate Turkish nationalist, a peacemaker and "contemporary Islam's Billy Graham," Fethullah Gülen has long pushed for Islam to occupy a more central role in Turkish society. Followers of the so-called Gülen Movement operate an "education, media and business network" in more than 100 countries, says University of Oregon sociologist Joshua Hendrick.
Top administrators say they have no official ties to Gülen. And Gülen himself denies any connection to the schools. Still, documents available at various foundation websites and in federal forms required of non-profit groups show that virtually all of the schools have opened or operate with the aid of Gülen-inspired "dialogue" groups, local non-profits that promote Turkish culture. In one case, the Ohio-based Horizon Science Academy of Springfield in 2005 signed a five-year building lease with the parent organization of Chicago's Niagara Foundation, which promotes Gülen's philosophy of "peace, mutual respect, the culture of coexistence." Gülen is the foundation's honorary president. In many cases, charter school board members also serve as dialogue group leaders.
Education officials who are familiar with them say the schools aren't trying to proselytize for Gülen's vision of Turkey. While Turkish language and culture are often offered in the curriculum, there's no evidence the schools teach Islam.
Nelson Smith, president of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, sees no evidence of an "active network. What I do see is a really impressive group of educators."
The Turkish-affiliated schools focus on math and science and often appear as top scorers on standardized tests. Still, lawmakers, researchers and parents are beginning to put the schools under the microscope for hiring practices — they import hundreds of teachers from Turkey each year — and for steps they take to keep their academic profile high.
The schools' unacknowledged ties to Gülen, they say, mock public schools' spirit of transparency.
"That's what I was always asking for," says Kelly Wayment, a former board member and parent at Beehive Science & Technology Academy in Holladay, Utah. He has pressed for more than a year to get the school to acknowledge ties to Gülen. "I said, 'Parents have a right to know.' "
Wayment says Beehive removed him from the board last year after he began investigating the decision to fire a popular Spanish teacher, saying it was based on a single classroom visit by the Tustin, Calif.-based Accord Institute of Education Research, an education services company with ties to a chain of California charter schools inspired by Gülen. He complained to Utah state Rep. Jim Dunnigan, a Republican lawmaker, who launched an audit of charter school governance — the audit is ongoing.
But Beehive's Karlene Welker says Wayment "removed himself (from the board) by pulling his students out of the school."
Utah's State Charter School Board launched an investigation last year after American teachers complained that Turkish colleagues got hiring and promotion preferences.
The charter school board looked into Beehive's ties to Islam and found them "circumstantial," but a financial probe found that the school was $337,000 in the red — and that Accord officials had loaned it thousands. The board last April revoked its charter, but in June voted to keep the school open on probation.
Dunnigan, the state lawmaker who requested the legislative audit, says the financial details, such as personal loans and public funds spent recruiting overseas faculty, are what concern him. "When they're in such financial difficulty, should they spend $53,000 to bring these people over from another country?"
But questions about hiring and academics also have arisen in Arizona, where Daisy Education Corp. runs five schools and has received certifications for 120 H-1B visas for foreign teachers since 2002, records show. In Texas, the Cosmos Foundation has filed 1,157 H1-B applications since 2001. It operates 25 Harmony schools statewide. Since 2001, Harmony has imported 731 employees using H-1Bs, surpassing all other secondary education providers nationwide. Parents last year also accused one Harmony school of "pushing out" underperforming students — a charge the Texas Education Agency confirmed.
Ed Fuller, a University of Texas-Austin researcher, found that Harmony schools throughout Texas had an "extraordinarily high" student attrition rate of about 50% for students in grades six through eight.
"It's not hard to be 'exemplary' if you lose all the kids who aren't performing," Fuller says.
Crossing the line?
At minimum, the rapid growth of the Turkish-affiliated schools shows how the freewheeling world of charter schools has changed the face of K-12 education in the USA.
In most cases, charters are loosely regulated in exchange for improved performance. A few schools are affiliated with religious groups or offer programs that others can't. But in several cases, a school's orientation has forced it to show that it's not crossing lines and endorsing religion. Examples:
•Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, a Minnesota charter school authorized by Islamic Relief USA, a Virginia-based aid group. In 2008, the school ran afoul of state officials who said having teachers take part in voluntary Friday prayers could give students the impression that the school endorsed Islam.
•Sacramento City Unified School District in California, which for 12 years has fought a lawsuit that says the city's Waldorf schools are based on the religious beliefs of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner.
Whether such schools continue to grow is no small question, since President Obama has made charter school expansion a priority.
While the Turkish-affiliated schools disavow any connection to the Gülen Movement, Gülen himself maintains in legal filings that he's the inspiration behind their growth. But William Martin of Rice University in Houston says educators' assertions of "no organic connection" to Gülen are accurate.
Nonetheless, he says their efforts to minimize ties to Gülen, likely from fear of being branded Islamists, bring "unnecessary and probably counterproductive" suspicion. "I do not think they are a sinister organization."
In an e-mail interview, Mehmet Argin, principal of Tucson's Sonoran Science Academy, says his school's parent corporation, Daisy Education Corp., "has no legal or organic ties" with other schools. He cautions against linking charter schools founded by Turkish-Americans directly to the Gülen Movement "just because Turkish-Americans may be inspired by Mr. Gülen."
In an e-mail interview, Gülen denied any direct connection to these schools, rejecting the notion that there is a "Gülen Movement," but acknowledging there may be educators now in U.S. schools who have listened to his philosophy. "I have no relation with any institution in the form of ownership, board membership or any similar kind," he said.
A 'third force'
Gülen has pushed for more dialogue between the Western and Muslim worlds, yet he is a controversial figure in Turkey.
The University of Oregon's Hendrick, whose writings explore the Gülen Movement, calls him "Turkey's most famous religious personality." His movement is considered the nation's "third force" alongside the military and Turkey's ruling Adalet ve Kalkýnma Partisi, or AKP Party.
In 1999, after traveling to the USA for medical treatment, Gülen was charged in Turkey with trying to create an Islamic state. Since then he has remained in Pennsylvania. After the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service in 2007 denied his bid for a visa as an "alien of extraordinary ability in education," Gülen sued, saying his followers "had established more than 600 educational institutions" worldwide. He eventually prevailed, earning a green card in 2008. But Turkish educators in the USA continue to disavow their ties.
"Gülen is both the reason behind his schools, and he has nothing whatsoever to do with them," Hendrick says.
The schools educate as many as 35,000 students — taken together they'd make up the largest charter school network in the USA — and have imported thousands of Turkish educators over the past decade.
But the success of the schools at times has been clouded by nagging questions about what ties the schools may have to a reclusive Muslim leader in his late 60s living in exile in rural Pennsylvania.
Described by turns as a moderate Turkish nationalist, a peacemaker and "contemporary Islam's Billy Graham," Fethullah Gülen has long pushed for Islam to occupy a more central role in Turkish society. Followers of the so-called Gülen Movement operate an "education, media and business network" in more than 100 countries, says University of Oregon sociologist Joshua Hendrick.
Top administrators say they have no official ties to Gülen. And Gülen himself denies any connection to the schools. Still, documents available at various foundation websites and in federal forms required of non-profit groups show that virtually all of the schools have opened or operate with the aid of Gülen-inspired "dialogue" groups, local non-profits that promote Turkish culture. In one case, the Ohio-based Horizon Science Academy of Springfield in 2005 signed a five-year building lease with the parent organization of Chicago's Niagara Foundation, which promotes Gülen's philosophy of "peace, mutual respect, the culture of coexistence." Gülen is the foundation's honorary president. In many cases, charter school board members also serve as dialogue group leaders.
Education officials who are familiar with them say the schools aren't trying to proselytize for Gülen's vision of Turkey. While Turkish language and culture are often offered in the curriculum, there's no evidence the schools teach Islam.
Nelson Smith, president of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, sees no evidence of an "active network. What I do see is a really impressive group of educators."
The Turkish-affiliated schools focus on math and science and often appear as top scorers on standardized tests. Still, lawmakers, researchers and parents are beginning to put the schools under the microscope for hiring practices — they import hundreds of teachers from Turkey each year — and for steps they take to keep their academic profile high.
The schools' unacknowledged ties to Gülen, they say, mock public schools' spirit of transparency.
"That's what I was always asking for," says Kelly Wayment, a former board member and parent at Beehive Science & Technology Academy in Holladay, Utah. He has pressed for more than a year to get the school to acknowledge ties to Gülen. "I said, 'Parents have a right to know.' "
Wayment says Beehive removed him from the board last year after he began investigating the decision to fire a popular Spanish teacher, saying it was based on a single classroom visit by the Tustin, Calif.-based Accord Institute of Education Research, an education services company with ties to a chain of California charter schools inspired by Gülen. He complained to Utah state Rep. Jim Dunnigan, a Republican lawmaker, who launched an audit of charter school governance — the audit is ongoing.
But Beehive's Karlene Welker says Wayment "removed himself (from the board) by pulling his students out of the school."
Utah's State Charter School Board launched an investigation last year after American teachers complained that Turkish colleagues got hiring and promotion preferences.
The charter school board looked into Beehive's ties to Islam and found them "circumstantial," but a financial probe found that the school was $337,000 in the red — and that Accord officials had loaned it thousands. The board last April revoked its charter, but in June voted to keep the school open on probation.
Dunnigan, the state lawmaker who requested the legislative audit, says the financial details, such as personal loans and public funds spent recruiting overseas faculty, are what concern him. "When they're in such financial difficulty, should they spend $53,000 to bring these people over from another country?"
But questions about hiring and academics also have arisen in Arizona, where Daisy Education Corp. runs five schools and has received certifications for 120 H-1B visas for foreign teachers since 2002, records show. In Texas, the Cosmos Foundation has filed 1,157 H1-B applications since 2001. It operates 25 Harmony schools statewide. Since 2001, Harmony has imported 731 employees using H-1Bs, surpassing all other secondary education providers nationwide. Parents last year also accused one Harmony school of "pushing out" underperforming students — a charge the Texas Education Agency confirmed.
Ed Fuller, a University of Texas-Austin researcher, found that Harmony schools throughout Texas had an "extraordinarily high" student attrition rate of about 50% for students in grades six through eight.
"It's not hard to be 'exemplary' if you lose all the kids who aren't performing," Fuller says.
Crossing the line?
At minimum, the rapid growth of the Turkish-affiliated schools shows how the freewheeling world of charter schools has changed the face of K-12 education in the USA.
In most cases, charters are loosely regulated in exchange for improved performance. A few schools are affiliated with religious groups or offer programs that others can't. But in several cases, a school's orientation has forced it to show that it's not crossing lines and endorsing religion. Examples:
•Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, a Minnesota charter school authorized by Islamic Relief USA, a Virginia-based aid group. In 2008, the school ran afoul of state officials who said having teachers take part in voluntary Friday prayers could give students the impression that the school endorsed Islam.
•Sacramento City Unified School District in California, which for 12 years has fought a lawsuit that says the city's Waldorf schools are based on the religious beliefs of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner.
Whether such schools continue to grow is no small question, since President Obama has made charter school expansion a priority.
While the Turkish-affiliated schools disavow any connection to the Gülen Movement, Gülen himself maintains in legal filings that he's the inspiration behind their growth. But William Martin of Rice University in Houston says educators' assertions of "no organic connection" to Gülen are accurate.
Nonetheless, he says their efforts to minimize ties to Gülen, likely from fear of being branded Islamists, bring "unnecessary and probably counterproductive" suspicion. "I do not think they are a sinister organization."
In an e-mail interview, Mehmet Argin, principal of Tucson's Sonoran Science Academy, says his school's parent corporation, Daisy Education Corp., "has no legal or organic ties" with other schools. He cautions against linking charter schools founded by Turkish-Americans directly to the Gülen Movement "just because Turkish-Americans may be inspired by Mr. Gülen."
In an e-mail interview, Gülen denied any direct connection to these schools, rejecting the notion that there is a "Gülen Movement," but acknowledging there may be educators now in U.S. schools who have listened to his philosophy. "I have no relation with any institution in the form of ownership, board membership or any similar kind," he said.
A 'third force'
Gülen has pushed for more dialogue between the Western and Muslim worlds, yet he is a controversial figure in Turkey.
The University of Oregon's Hendrick, whose writings explore the Gülen Movement, calls him "Turkey's most famous religious personality." His movement is considered the nation's "third force" alongside the military and Turkey's ruling Adalet ve Kalkýnma Partisi, or AKP Party.
In 1999, after traveling to the USA for medical treatment, Gülen was charged in Turkey with trying to create an Islamic state. Since then he has remained in Pennsylvania. After the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service in 2007 denied his bid for a visa as an "alien of extraordinary ability in education," Gülen sued, saying his followers "had established more than 600 educational institutions" worldwide. He eventually prevailed, earning a green card in 2008. But Turkish educators in the USA continue to disavow their ties.
"Gülen is both the reason behind his schools, and he has nothing whatsoever to do with them," Hendrick says.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Thacker: Gulen Charter School Issues in Arizona
Arizona's Gulen charter schools have stopped posting the board minutes as of October 2009. It was then and there they had started covering problems with the schools. This gives one the feeling that the administrators do not wish for the specifics to get out. As a non-profit charter in Arizona a school is legally held to the standards of being transparent and those board minutes are to be posted publically.
http://www.sonoranacademy.org/district/OrganizationGovernance/BoardMinutes/tabid/68/Default.aspx
Notice on the "Interest Forms" link, how did you know about Sonoran Science Academy? they listed "door hangers" as a medium for advertising? Seriously have they gone this far to attract and to promote new students? I know one thing, when they are telling parents that there is a waiting list when there isn't one this has got to stop. Are they selling used vacuum cleaners or is there focus really on education or are they to focused on the business side of things? After all the fund raising and promotions from private business and public donations as well as grants we have to ask where did all that go?
http://www.sonoranacademy.org/district/Admissions/OnlineInterestForm/tabid/74/Default.aspx
The last thing that may be considered here on this page that strikes me as alarming as a parent and a consumer are the question Has the student ever been or currently suspended or expelled from any school?" and "Has the student ever been or currently under the supervision of a Juvenile Court?" Are these questions there help screen out certain children at risk and then using the misinformation of a waiting list as back door excuse as not to accept that child?
Under Obama's incentive of backing charter schools "Race to the Top" program and educating children as cheaply as possible has created more problems than it has cured. When charter schools decide to pick and choose students and cut back financially for programs because it may not be good for the bottom line or image then it should be more accurately and penned as a "Race to the Bank" program. Entreprenuership of charter schools will be a thing of the past and a failed experiment that parents have chosen for there kids to participate in as lab rats. While charter school owners had made a fast buck in the amount of hundreds and thousands in some cases millions, will have moved on to there next venture. Charter schools like this one are a complete waste of taxpayers and private donor money. What have we ever gotten in return? In fact there is no proof that charter schools educate better than public schools.
http://www.sonoranacademy.org/district/OrganizationGovernance/BoardMinutes/tabid/68/Default.aspx
Notice on the "Interest Forms" link, how did you know about Sonoran Science Academy? they listed "door hangers" as a medium for advertising? Seriously have they gone this far to attract and to promote new students? I know one thing, when they are telling parents that there is a waiting list when there isn't one this has got to stop. Are they selling used vacuum cleaners or is there focus really on education or are they to focused on the business side of things? After all the fund raising and promotions from private business and public donations as well as grants we have to ask where did all that go?
http://www.sonoranacademy.org/district/Admissions/OnlineInterestForm/tabid/74/Default.aspx
The last thing that may be considered here on this page that strikes me as alarming as a parent and a consumer are the question Has the student ever been or currently suspended or expelled from any school?" and "Has the student ever been or currently under the supervision of a Juvenile Court?" Are these questions there help screen out certain children at risk and then using the misinformation of a waiting list as back door excuse as not to accept that child?
Under Obama's incentive of backing charter schools "Race to the Top" program and educating children as cheaply as possible has created more problems than it has cured. When charter schools decide to pick and choose students and cut back financially for programs because it may not be good for the bottom line or image then it should be more accurately and penned as a "Race to the Bank" program. Entreprenuership of charter schools will be a thing of the past and a failed experiment that parents have chosen for there kids to participate in as lab rats. While charter school owners had made a fast buck in the amount of hundreds and thousands in some cases millions, will have moved on to there next venture. Charter schools like this one are a complete waste of taxpayers and private donor money. What have we ever gotten in return? In fact there is no proof that charter schools educate better than public schools.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Gulen Hype?
Many readers see stories and reports of Gulen schools listed here and elsewhere and believe his antagonists to be really making a stretch to link Gulen to Islamic teaching. Some may suggest "Islam is just another religion" and perhaps espouse the view "it just doesn't matter."
If this describes your sentiments I am hopeful you will invest the time to dig deeper. The threat is real and left unchecked the beast of Islam will swallow up all you hold dear. Ignoring, placation and comprimise will not prevail. Prayer and action are needed now.
Fethullah Gulen is a "religious" Muslim and is head of a Muslim cult bearing his name. That is to say his flavor of Islam is slightly different from others, but at Islam's core are basic tennants. These tennants are very much a part of the belief system of Fethullah Gulen and leadership within the Gulen school network. While these tennants may not find their way into the classroom, they do color their world view and as such these tennants are subtly imparted in the Gulen curriculum and in after hours program and field trips.
Let's look at some of these Islamic tennants:
If this describes your sentiments I am hopeful you will invest the time to dig deeper. The threat is real and left unchecked the beast of Islam will swallow up all you hold dear. Ignoring, placation and comprimise will not prevail. Prayer and action are needed now.
Fethullah Gulen is a "religious" Muslim and is head of a Muslim cult bearing his name. That is to say his flavor of Islam is slightly different from others, but at Islam's core are basic tennants. These tennants are very much a part of the belief system of Fethullah Gulen and leadership within the Gulen school network. While these tennants may not find their way into the classroom, they do color their world view and as such these tennants are subtly imparted in the Gulen curriculum and in after hours program and field trips.
Let's look at some of these Islamic tennants:
- The Quran is the supreme political document of Islam--it's political manifesto and political constitution. It is the only constitution of the nation-state Saudi Arabia, which is the home of Mecca and the Kaaba, where all mosques point, and is the birthplace of Islam.
- The Quran is a totalitarian constitution. It demands submission by anyone within its jurisdiction.
- The Quran governs all mosques everywhere in the world.
- As a political document, the Quran asserts everyone in the world is within its jurisdiction. (So far, Islam has not been able to enforce that totalitarian claim on the entire world, but has managed to do so through threat, infiltration, violence, terrorism, and coercion on roughly 20% of the world.) It is engaged in a 1400-year-long Universal Jihad to dominate the rest of the world. All mosques are its outpost headquarters.
- Central to the Quran's political mandates is prohibition of religious freedom and religious tolerance, along with denouncements of religions such as Christianity and Judaism.
- All mosque leaders must be loyal to and supportive of these political and militaristic mandates.
- The Quran as a political document also forbids separation of church and state. That is why every Islamic nation, where Islamic leaders have managed to gain power, is a theocracy, ruled by the Quran and Islamic Sharia law.
Communication to Catholics
This article was submitted to the National Catholic Reporter, July 9, 2010. Dear reader, please feel free to copy and paste this message in Catholic newsletters, Knights of Columbus, Catholic schools and similar outlets - TB
Last week Ephiphany of our Lord Catholic School in St. Louis closed its doors after 95 years. The reason? Dwindling enrollment. What will become of the facility? It was purchased by Gateway Science Academy. Gateway is but one of the dozens of names used by Gulen charter schools.
Fetullah Gulen, school founder, sought political assylum in the United States in 1998 after fleeing from the then secular Turkish government. Gulen now has dozens of campuses in the USA, paid for by you, the taxpayer. Gulen lives in Pennsylvania and directs a major Islamist movement in Turkey as well as controlling a growing number of schools in the USA. Gulen is ranked 13 among the world's most influential Muslims.
The Gulen charter schools have an excellent reputation in science and math but sadly also promotes certain Islamic beliefs.
Recently Gulen bought a church in Colorado to form a school. Gulen's most recent acquisition in St. Louis hardly creates a trend, but it does make one reflect on the history of the Ottoman Empire where Christian leadership and churches were replaced with those of Islam.
Occupation and conversion of formerly Christian buildings is classic. With the fall of Epiphany in St Louis we see the first of what will likely not be the last for the glory of Gulen and their goal of an Islamized America. Be watchful and in prayer.
Last week Ephiphany of our Lord Catholic School in St. Louis closed its doors after 95 years. The reason? Dwindling enrollment. What will become of the facility? It was purchased by Gateway Science Academy. Gateway is but one of the dozens of names used by Gulen charter schools.
Fetullah Gulen, school founder, sought political assylum in the United States in 1998 after fleeing from the then secular Turkish government. Gulen now has dozens of campuses in the USA, paid for by you, the taxpayer. Gulen lives in Pennsylvania and directs a major Islamist movement in Turkey as well as controlling a growing number of schools in the USA. Gulen is ranked 13 among the world's most influential Muslims.
The Gulen charter schools have an excellent reputation in science and math but sadly also promotes certain Islamic beliefs.
Recently Gulen bought a church in Colorado to form a school. Gulen's most recent acquisition in St. Louis hardly creates a trend, but it does make one reflect on the history of the Ottoman Empire where Christian leadership and churches were replaced with those of Islam.
Occupation and conversion of formerly Christian buildings is classic. With the fall of Epiphany in St Louis we see the first of what will likely not be the last for the glory of Gulen and their goal of an Islamized America. Be watchful and in prayer.
Friday, July 9, 2010
WRAY: Winning the Harmony Lottery
July 07, 2010 2:00 PM
While one might have expected shouting and cheers of delight as numbers were called, parents gathered to find out whether their child will be selected to go to Harmony Science Academy waited quietly as Harmony Schools superintendent Soner Tarim read the numbers aloud.
“Oh, there’s your number. You’re going to Harmony,” Brittany Powers told her 5-year-old son Nick, after his number was called.
Nick, who will be a kindergartner this fall, didn’t seem to be really challenged by regular studies in pre-K, Powers said.
“The charter school focuses on science and computers, things he’s really into. It just looked like a really good program,” Powers said.
Harmony Science Academy is slated to open in the old Dunlaps building, 2755 N. Grandview, this August, and was recently awarded a charter request by the Texas Education Agency. Since receiving their first charter in 2000, Tarim said they open about five schools a year around the state; they are opening seven this year in Texas, including this one in Odessa.
Initially, news of the new charter school was met with protests from the West Texas Patriots, a small local political group who alleged that Harmony schools have ties to Islamic extremists. After the initial flurry caused by their claims, the protesters have disappeared and Harmony is moving closer to opening its doors as students are randomly selected to fill places in the lottery.
There were 517 applications submitted to Harmony Science Academy and 300 places available. The administrators decided to hold a lottery, drawing numbers out of a fish bowl for each grade, because it seemed like the fairest way to select the students.
The school initially planned to fill just 250 spots, but administrators decided to make it 300 after they saw the amount of community interest, Tarim said. There were 50 students selected for kindergarten through second grade, and just 25 spots each grade from third to eighth grade.
Students whose numbers came up in the lottery have until July 16 to submit their paperwork to the school. After this date, any open spots will be filled by starting at the top of the waiting list, Tarim said.
About 150 people attended the charter school lottery, which was held in a lecture hall at University of Texas of the Permian Basin.
Harmony principal Hasan Sazci looked giddy with delight as he surveyed possible Harmony students.
“It’s so exciting. These are the children who are going to make up our school,” Sazci said, with wide, open smile.
Parent Anna De La Cruz was one of the first to apply for a place at the charter school and she said she was excited to know her son would be going to school there.
“I think it’s going to be a great experience for him. It’ll be more entertaining, more involved and more challenging. It was just something new so we thought we’d try it,” De La Cruz said.
BY DIANNA WRAY
Odessa American
While one might have expected shouting and cheers of delight as numbers were called, parents gathered to find out whether their child will be selected to go to Harmony Science Academy waited quietly as Harmony Schools superintendent Soner Tarim read the numbers aloud.
“Oh, there’s your number. You’re going to Harmony,” Brittany Powers told her 5-year-old son Nick, after his number was called.
Nick, who will be a kindergartner this fall, didn’t seem to be really challenged by regular studies in pre-K, Powers said.
“The charter school focuses on science and computers, things he’s really into. It just looked like a really good program,” Powers said.
Initially, news of the new charter school was met with protests from the West Texas Patriots, a small local political group who alleged that Harmony schools have ties to Islamic extremists. After the initial flurry caused by their claims, the protesters have disappeared and Harmony is moving closer to opening its doors as students are randomly selected to fill places in the lottery.
There were 517 applications submitted to Harmony Science Academy and 300 places available. The administrators decided to hold a lottery, drawing numbers out of a fish bowl for each grade, because it seemed like the fairest way to select the students.
The school initially planned to fill just 250 spots, but administrators decided to make it 300 after they saw the amount of community interest, Tarim said. There were 50 students selected for kindergarten through second grade, and just 25 spots each grade from third to eighth grade.
Students whose numbers came up in the lottery have until July 16 to submit their paperwork to the school. After this date, any open spots will be filled by starting at the top of the waiting list, Tarim said.
About 150 people attended the charter school lottery, which was held in a lecture hall at University of Texas of the Permian Basin.
Harmony principal Hasan Sazci looked giddy with delight as he surveyed possible Harmony students.
“It’s so exciting. These are the children who are going to make up our school,” Sazci said, with wide, open smile.
Parent Anna De La Cruz was one of the first to apply for a place at the charter school and she said she was excited to know her son would be going to school there.
“I think it’s going to be a great experience for him. It’ll be more entertaining, more involved and more challenging. It was just something new so we thought we’d try it,” De La Cruz said.
BY DIANNA WRAY
Odessa American
LINDE: St Louis Catholic School Replaced by Gulen School
Last week, Epiphany of Our Lord Catholic School held its 95th, and final, graduation ceremony. After several years of financial struggle, and despite various fundraising campaigns, the decision to close the school, a cornerstone its southwestern city neighborhood, was made in early spring. As at many Catholic schools in the city, dwindling enrollment was the reason. It was especially sad for my family, which funneled three generations through its doors. My nephew had the honor of being in that last graduating class, which is bittersweet. Well, mostly bitter.
But hope survives. A new charter school, Gateway Science Academy of St. Louis, will open its doors this August. The school will be housed in the Epiphany building at 6576 Smiley Ave. and will lease it and the grounds from the parish. It's going to be a college preparatory charter school (for a definition of charter schools, see my earlier post here) and is the first school to open in Missouri by the management company Concept Schools, which currently operates 19 charter schools in four states.
I’m pretty jonsed about this school. Concept’s model at its other standards-based college prep schools focuses on math and literacy in grades K to eight, then shifts its focus to math, science and technology through high school. Instead of adopting one curricular model, it realizes there are differing aspects from many theories which can be utilized in conjunction successfully. Some of these idealologies include project-based learning, differentiated instruction and direct teaching. Concept schools have won prestigious awards, including The National Blue Ribbon and The National Title 1 Distinguished Award. In addition, unlike any other charter school in the area, Gateway will offer many extra-curricular activities, including sports and after-school clubs.
If you're a parent of a qualifying child, look at the homepage, especially the story about how the schools were started and the amazing things Concept kids do (such as overseas trips!). While Gateway is currently constructing itself – and hard decisions concerning specifics have yet to be made – the Concept model is pretty darn impressive. It isn't like any charter school I’ve seen in this area before, and I, for one, can’t wait to watch it grow.
By Sharon Linde, Education Blogger for SmartParenting
But hope survives. A new charter school, Gateway Science Academy of St. Louis, will open its doors this August. The school will be housed in the Epiphany building at 6576 Smiley Ave. and will lease it and the grounds from the parish. It's going to be a college preparatory charter school (for a definition of charter schools, see my earlier post here) and is the first school to open in Missouri by the management company Concept Schools, which currently operates 19 charter schools in four states.Like all charter schools, there is no tuition and any children within the ZIP code boundaries (which surround the school, making it a neighborhood campus) determined by the charter will be eligible to attend, depending on vacancy. The school will open with grades kindergarten through seven the first year and build a grade each additional year through grade 12. According to Cengiz Karatas, the school’s principal, expected enrollment for the 2010-2011 school year is 350.
If you're a parent of a qualifying child, look at the homepage, especially the story about how the schools were started and the amazing things Concept kids do (such as overseas trips!). While Gateway is currently constructing itself – and hard decisions concerning specifics have yet to be made – the Concept model is pretty darn impressive. It isn't like any charter school I’ve seen in this area before, and I, for one, can’t wait to watch it grow.
By Sharon Linde, Education Blogger for SmartParenting
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
ROGERS: Fethullah Gulen: Infiltrating the U.S. through our chartered schools
For some time we have been researching a Turkish-based Islamist movement that has a significant network here in the United States. Given Turkey’s history of secular, democratic government, and some of the remarks made by President Obama in his recent speech there, many of our members and other readers will likely be surprised by what we have found.
I suspect that even many who are well-read on the issue of Islamism are unfamiliar with the Fethullah Gulen Community (FGC), a movement a February 2009 article in the respected Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst labeled “Turkey’s third power.” Indeed, the article noted in its Key Points: “Turkey’s Islamist Gulen movement, while a powerful political force, is largely an unfamiliar entity to the West.”
The FGC is named after Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish imam who now lives in the United States. He fled Turkey in 1998 to avoid prosecution on charges that he was attempting to undermine Turkey’s secular government with the objective of establish an Islamic government. Since Gulen’s arrival here the Department of Homeland Security tried to deport him, but he successfully fought the effort in federal court because it was ruled he was an individual with “extraordinary ability in the field of education” – although he has no formal education training.
The FGC emerged in Turkey in the 1970’s. According to the Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst piece, Gulen stated that “in order to reach the ideal Muslim society 'every method and path is acceptable, [including] lying to people.’” This public acknowledgement of taqiyya (employing deception to advance Islam) is highly pertinent to Gulen’s activities here in the United States.
A recent article in the Middle East Quarterly by Rachel Sharon-Kreskin titled “Fethullah Gulen’s Grand Ambition” sheds light on Gulen’s background:
Gülen was a student and follower of Sheikh Sa'id-i Kurdi (1878-1960), also known as Sa'id-i Nursi, the founder of the Islamist Nur (light) movement. After Turkey's war of independence, Kurdi demanded, in an address to the new parliament, that the new republic be based on Islamic principles. He turned against Atatürk and his reforms and against the new modern, secular, Western republic.
Sharon-Kreskin documents how the FGC, in league with Turkey’s ruling party, Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP), has been successful in gradually moving Turkey away from its secular democratic governance, towards an Islamist state governed by Shariah law, and reorienting itself toward Iran. What’s more, other evidence suggests that Gulen’s ultimate goal may well be the resurrection of the Ottoman Empire so as to reinstate the Islamic Caliph. Clearly this has immensely serious ramifications for geo-political affairs in the Middle East as well as for the continued rise of radical Islam throughout the world.
What makes Gulen particularly dangerous is his strategic and tactical means to achieving this goal. He oversees a worldwide network of businesses, schools, foundations and media outlets, with an estimated budget of 25 billion dollars. Here’s what Gulen had to say in a sermon in 1999 aired on Turkish television:
You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers … until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria … like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it … You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey … Until that time, any step taken would be too early—like breaking an egg without waiting the full forty days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all—in confidence … trusting your loyalty and secrecy. I know that when you leave here—[just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here.
Simply put, he is brilliantly and patiently employing taqiyya on a global scale, because this strategic approach is not confined to Turkey.
Here in the U.S. the FGC runs over 90 charter public schools in at least 20 states. This was brought to our attention by ACT! for America members who actually have relatives who teach in one of these schools, an illustration of the growing reach of ACT! for America’s “eyes and ears” across our country. For obvious reasons we cannot reveal the identity of our sources.
Our readers may be familiar with the numerous emails we have released regarding the operation of the Tarek ibn Zayed Academy (TiZA), a publicly funded charter school in Minnesota that is so blatantly Islamic in nature that the Minnesota Department of Education issued two citations against it and the ACLU is suing it. FGC schools appear to be very different, and reflect the Gulen’s exhortation to “move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers…”
Indeed, the fact that so little has been written about the FGC schools here in the U.S., as well as the accolades that have been accorded the FGC as a model of “moderation” by some in our government, would appear to confirm that the FGC and its schools are doing an excellent job of heeding Gulen’s exhortation and masking their true intent.
During several discussions and emails with our sources inside FGC schools, I asked specifically if the schools promote Islam in the way that the TiZA school in Minnesota does. I was told that this was not the case in the schools these sources were familiar with. However, one particular school (and likely numerous others) appears to be in violation of state law because the school’s affidavit for its charter does not acknowledge that it is connected with a religious institution or group. In other words, those who chartered this school practiced taqiyya by hiding this fact. (Enterprising readers may want to research this with respect to FGC schools around the country. For a list of the FGC network in America and its schools, click here).
What’s more, the schools appear to be a source of recruitment for outside school activities sponsored by the FGC, such as summer camps, which would be in keeping with the pattern of recruitment of members and followers that FGC employs worldwide, according to both the Jane’s and Middle East Quarterly articles.
As a further example of the use of taqiyya, the Jane’s article gives examples of how FGC’s Turkish language media outlet Zaman runs stories with information and headlines that are missing from the English language media outlet Today’s Zaman. This practice of two different messages, one to the indigenous Islamic population and one to the West, is common in the Islamic world, and has led many in the West, including political leaders and academics, to be misled as to the true intentions of Islamists.
In building a sophisticated and well-funded worldwide network, including a substantial presence here in the U.S., Fethullah Gulen is following in the footsteps and exhortations of Mohammed, who counseled patience and deception as a means of overcoming the infidel when the power of the infidel was greater than the power of the umma, the Muslim community. In a very real sense this is as or more sinister than the frontal assault strategy of Islamist organizations such as al Qaeda and Hamas, because, like the proverbial “frog in the kettle,” we are incrementally “boiled alive” without realizing it.
For years American Congress for Truth, and now its “sister” organization ACT! for America, have been ringing the alarm bells about what is variously known as “cultural jihad,” “creeping jihad,” “stealth jihad,” and “creeping shariah.” Much of Europe and Great Britain has been Islamized through this process, a process that invariably does not lead to peaceful coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims, but leads to Islamic self-segregation, increased Islamist militancy and aggression, and the eventual forced imposition of Islamic shariah law within the society.
The FGC charter schools in America may outwardly appear innocuous, but they are serving a greater and long-range objective of Fethullah Gulen. We in the West need to be less gullible and more discerning when it comes to the elements of “stealth jihad” within our midst.
Guy Rodgers is Executive Director of ACT! for America.
An ACT for America exclusive
I suspect that even many who are well-read on the issue of Islamism are unfamiliar with the Fethullah Gulen Community (FGC), a movement a February 2009 article in the respected Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst labeled “Turkey’s third power.” Indeed, the article noted in its Key Points: “Turkey’s Islamist Gulen movement, while a powerful political force, is largely an unfamiliar entity to the West.”
The FGC is named after Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish imam who now lives in the United States. He fled Turkey in 1998 to avoid prosecution on charges that he was attempting to undermine Turkey’s secular government with the objective of establish an Islamic government. Since Gulen’s arrival here the Department of Homeland Security tried to deport him, but he successfully fought the effort in federal court because it was ruled he was an individual with “extraordinary ability in the field of education” – although he has no formal education training.
The FGC emerged in Turkey in the 1970’s. According to the Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst piece, Gulen stated that “in order to reach the ideal Muslim society 'every method and path is acceptable, [including] lying to people.’” This public acknowledgement of taqiyya (employing deception to advance Islam) is highly pertinent to Gulen’s activities here in the United States.
A recent article in the Middle East Quarterly by Rachel Sharon-Kreskin titled “Fethullah Gulen’s Grand Ambition” sheds light on Gulen’s background:
Gülen was a student and follower of Sheikh Sa'id-i Kurdi (1878-1960), also known as Sa'id-i Nursi, the founder of the Islamist Nur (light) movement. After Turkey's war of independence, Kurdi demanded, in an address to the new parliament, that the new republic be based on Islamic principles. He turned against Atatürk and his reforms and against the new modern, secular, Western republic.
Sharon-Kreskin documents how the FGC, in league with Turkey’s ruling party, Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP), has been successful in gradually moving Turkey away from its secular democratic governance, towards an Islamist state governed by Shariah law, and reorienting itself toward Iran. What’s more, other evidence suggests that Gulen’s ultimate goal may well be the resurrection of the Ottoman Empire so as to reinstate the Islamic Caliph. Clearly this has immensely serious ramifications for geo-political affairs in the Middle East as well as for the continued rise of radical Islam throughout the world.
What makes Gulen particularly dangerous is his strategic and tactical means to achieving this goal. He oversees a worldwide network of businesses, schools, foundations and media outlets, with an estimated budget of 25 billion dollars. Here’s what Gulen had to say in a sermon in 1999 aired on Turkish television:
You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers … until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria … like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it … You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey … Until that time, any step taken would be too early—like breaking an egg without waiting the full forty days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all—in confidence … trusting your loyalty and secrecy. I know that when you leave here—[just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here.
Simply put, he is brilliantly and patiently employing taqiyya on a global scale, because this strategic approach is not confined to Turkey.
Here in the U.S. the FGC runs over 90 charter public schools in at least 20 states. This was brought to our attention by ACT! for America members who actually have relatives who teach in one of these schools, an illustration of the growing reach of ACT! for America’s “eyes and ears” across our country. For obvious reasons we cannot reveal the identity of our sources.
Our readers may be familiar with the numerous emails we have released regarding the operation of the Tarek ibn Zayed Academy (TiZA), a publicly funded charter school in Minnesota that is so blatantly Islamic in nature that the Minnesota Department of Education issued two citations against it and the ACLU is suing it. FGC schools appear to be very different, and reflect the Gulen’s exhortation to “move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers…”
Indeed, the fact that so little has been written about the FGC schools here in the U.S., as well as the accolades that have been accorded the FGC as a model of “moderation” by some in our government, would appear to confirm that the FGC and its schools are doing an excellent job of heeding Gulen’s exhortation and masking their true intent.
During several discussions and emails with our sources inside FGC schools, I asked specifically if the schools promote Islam in the way that the TiZA school in Minnesota does. I was told that this was not the case in the schools these sources were familiar with. However, one particular school (and likely numerous others) appears to be in violation of state law because the school’s affidavit for its charter does not acknowledge that it is connected with a religious institution or group. In other words, those who chartered this school practiced taqiyya by hiding this fact. (Enterprising readers may want to research this with respect to FGC schools around the country. For a list of the FGC network in America and its schools, click here).
What’s more, the schools appear to be a source of recruitment for outside school activities sponsored by the FGC, such as summer camps, which would be in keeping with the pattern of recruitment of members and followers that FGC employs worldwide, according to both the Jane’s and Middle East Quarterly articles.
As a further example of the use of taqiyya, the Jane’s article gives examples of how FGC’s Turkish language media outlet Zaman runs stories with information and headlines that are missing from the English language media outlet Today’s Zaman. This practice of two different messages, one to the indigenous Islamic population and one to the West, is common in the Islamic world, and has led many in the West, including political leaders and academics, to be misled as to the true intentions of Islamists.
In building a sophisticated and well-funded worldwide network, including a substantial presence here in the U.S., Fethullah Gulen is following in the footsteps and exhortations of Mohammed, who counseled patience and deception as a means of overcoming the infidel when the power of the infidel was greater than the power of the umma, the Muslim community. In a very real sense this is as or more sinister than the frontal assault strategy of Islamist organizations such as al Qaeda and Hamas, because, like the proverbial “frog in the kettle,” we are incrementally “boiled alive” without realizing it.
For years American Congress for Truth, and now its “sister” organization ACT! for America, have been ringing the alarm bells about what is variously known as “cultural jihad,” “creeping jihad,” “stealth jihad,” and “creeping shariah.” Much of Europe and Great Britain has been Islamized through this process, a process that invariably does not lead to peaceful coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims, but leads to Islamic self-segregation, increased Islamist militancy and aggression, and the eventual forced imposition of Islamic shariah law within the society.
The FGC charter schools in America may outwardly appear innocuous, but they are serving a greater and long-range objective of Fethullah Gulen. We in the West need to be less gullible and more discerning when it comes to the elements of “stealth jihad” within our midst.
Guy Rodgers is Executive Director of ACT! for America.
An ACT for America exclusive
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Bigger Fish
A VERY SPECIAL THANK YOU TO THE EX-TEACHERS AND PARENTS OF EX-STUDENTS (KELLY, BILL, MARY, ETC, )AND TO DR. WILLIAMS, SIBEL EDMONDS, DEBBIE FROM "THE RIGHT TRUTH", Reporter Tim Steller from Arizona Desert Star, SHARON FROM " CHARTER SCHOOL SCANDALS" MARK HESS FROM ACT CALIFORNIA WHO KEEPS IT INTO PERSPECTIVE (SHALOM), Kristen Stewart, reporter-Salt Lake Tribune, Victoria Camron- Reporter Longmont Times, Elizabeth Stuart-Reporter Desert News, WEST TEXAS PATRIOTS, BRAVE TEACHERS OF CHICAGO MATH AND SCIENCE ACADEMY, ET AL. brief updates!!!
Between now and the beginning of school keep it up. Blog often and communicate everywhere 2 state officials (2 different states have responded) they are alarmed and want answers, have your back up documentation, if you have problems finding it, reach out to us!!! Hit hard on the Islamic and Turkish indoctrination, money fraud, un credentialed foreign teachers. Paper trail is always good to have. Get local media involved, not all are bought off with expensive ads from the schools, talk to your local school districts, teachers, and politicians. Above all educate yourself on charter state laws, regulations, read Gulen's web site and learn what motivates them. Know thy enemy!!
1) State officials in California have been made aware about Magnolia and Bay Area Technology link to Gulen--and the application for $17 million in our state for building fund. Original charter application shows that Dialogue Foundation fronted the money to open the schools, yet they are applying for the $17 million under MERF (Magnolia Education and Research Fund) BLOG ON CHARTER SCHOOL FRAUD WEB SITES on NEWSPAPER ARTICLES, TALK TO YOUR TEA PARTY OR TEA BAGGERS over $600,000 spent on "consulting services", "operating expenses" yet a lousy $100,000 spent on textbooks and lab equipment. Magnolia (Bell) boasts about their trip and performance in Turkey, children are on web site with photo posed in front of a Mosque. New school announces opening with Tim (Timur) Saka who is from "charter" schools in Colorado and Utah. Former founder and board member for Beehive goes back to Turkey where he is appointed head of Council on Higher Education. New MSA in Santa Clara announces Timur (Tim) Saka from Magnolia Reseda will be Principal, and they boast how he opened Charter Schools in CO, UT.
http://tucson.craigslist.org/rnr/1813631589.html
http://perimeterprimate.blogspot.com/2010/06/magnolia-schools-charter-management.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QMV_BZwcYc (Gulens ERBU Names schools)
who says Gulen isn't connected to the AKP ruling party of Turkey?
2) Beehive Academy UT- closed and now re opened with a probation and another meeting with the state of Utah 7/15. Scandal was so bad last principal was hidden away (where will he re surface?) , new principal (another Turkish National) walked into the state school board meeting with an attorney. They had "chronic mismanagement of funds" private loans and ties to Magnolia, and members of Willow Education, MERF, etc., (Gulen foundations) $53,000 spent on HB-1 Visas, $200,000+ on "Extra Curricular activities" Loans forgiven. Enrollment dropped drastically. School claims state wasn't "clear" on the accountability-and there was "new" information. Minutes from 1 year ago show the same money issues. State of Utah sets forth more ACCOUNTABILITY regulations.
http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/2010/06/12/utah-taxpayer-funded-islamist-school-loses-money-stays-open/
http://www.deseretnews.com/user/comments/save/700042335/Reader-comments-Charter-schools-to-be-held-accountable-for-finances-academics.html
3) Lotus School of Excellence in Aurora, CO has lied about opening another school and was advertising it with a web site BEFORE APPROVAL - however SVVUSD denied them another school in Longmont, CA. They are heavily utilizing interfaith dialogue at Churches (FREE dinners, trips to Turkey, etc.,) and even purchased an old Church to convert to a school. A favorite Islamic past time taking a church and converting or destroying it. Journalist for Longmont Times verifies to me that Lotus was turned DOWN for a Longmont, CO location.
http://www.timescall.com/News_Story.asp?id=22472
http://www.longmont.lotusschool.org/
NO TEACHING CREDENTIALS http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com/rocky-mountain-low.html
2 TEACHERS WITH CREDENTIALS LET GO, Children reportedly "cutting" themselves. These Turk Guys clearly are unprepared for American attitudes and social behaviors http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com/4/post/2010/06/sorry-no-free-advertising-on-this-website.html#comments
4) Harmony Science Academy, busted by the West Texas Patriots. Many things are coming out in the news. The Turkish Olympiads, the school web sites boasting of the children going to Turkey, photos, and videos of American children dancing by the Islamic Flag of Turkey. Opening 3 preschools called (Bluebonnet) on the school locations. This is a model stolen from Sonoran Science Academy and their Daisy Learning Center. The pre-schools have a tuition fee of $150.00 a week (revenue stream) you cannot mix a non-profit with a "for profit" Daisy Learning Center in Az was busted by family services for this. Cosmos foundation raised over $10 million from Bill Gates Foundation (who we are sure doesn't know about the Turkish domination in the schools) Peyton Wolcott exposes the Superintendents in Texas and kick backs to Turkish Contractor EGE who get the exclusive contract to build the Harmony Science Academy's in Texas. Dr. Soner Tarim, Superintendent denies any connection to "Gulen" how ever - ex FBI Turkish Translator Sibel Edmonds testifies about Gulen's schools in Texas and Gulen's web sites make reference to his many schools. Government officials tied into Gulen's Raindrop Turkish House, complete with regular dinners, Turkish coffee and LOTS of trips to Turkey with children. Why does Dr. Tarim always look like the "doe in the headlight" every time someone questions him about Gulen involvement?
http://peytonwolcott.com/Charters_Cosmos.html, Hispanic,Africian American children are taught to abandoned their culture, learn to dance proudly under the Islamic flag of Turkey. Perform in Turkey.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8owhHdmK40.
http://gulencharterschools.weebly.com/harmony-science-academy-denials-and-evidence.html
http://www.wtxpatriots.org/ (thanks for exposing the 1,100+ HB-1 Visas 2001 to 2009)
Let show them Texas style what America is!
5) Triad Math and Science Academy, NC web site boasts of the trip to Washington DC and their performance at the Turkish Olympiad, they are also on the Gulen web site (videos) in their costumes at the
same Gulen sponsored Turkish Olympaid , (MAFTAA). They are turned into state officials, and a very well-known Charter competitor was very interested in the information we had. Charter competition gets fierce for state money. Turkish Gulen school "TIE, Technology Integrated Education. More bells and whistles for the "Appearances" but little substance to the children. Word is they are applying for a new school consideration, so "block that punt" elaborate Turkish Olympiads productions: Washington DC, Texas, Arizona, California, Cleveland, Atlanta and more.
http://greensboro.craigslist.org/grp/1808168095.html
http://www.fethullah-gulen.org/news/turkisholympiad.html
The participants were the mid Atlantic areas. The school's web sites all mention that they participated in this Turkish Olympiad.
Virginia http://www.pinnacleacademyva.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=180&Itemid=112
Kentucky
North Carolina
http://www.tmsacharter.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1535:turkish-olympiad-team-brings-home-the-gold&catid=125:issue-31-April-16-2010&Itemid=131
Maryland
Delaware
6) Sonoran Science Academies (AZ) to the biggest liar of them all Faith Karatas, Principal of SSA Tuscon. Lies to Journalist Tim Steller about his past work at LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District) Tim did his due diligence and found Karatas never worked for LAUSD, but worked for Magnolia Science Academy (his Turkish Gulen Brothers in California) which is UNDER the management of LAUSD. Liar Liar-pants on Fire. SSA pioneered the pre-school Daisy Learning Center, (named after yet another Gulen foundation Daisy Education Corporation) was fined by the Family Services for the "Profit" day care center co - mingled with the non-profit schools. Karatas, the next time you choose to threaten a parent with legal action -follow through with it instead of idle threats. Lying about waiting list for enrollment, lying about teachers inappropriate behavior, etc,. Americans are on to the "I sue you" from foreigners(say with accent)
Karatas is squeezing his butt cheeks over AZ state monitoring public school teachers for accents, coming down hard on the illegals and immigrants-same to imported teachers. Yet the Turk boys (most are young and male) have heavy THICK accents. Thank you to reporter Tim Steller for exposing that SSA had 38 HB-1 Visas in 1 year. Who(m) is paying for these Visas? Are HB-1 Visas a bonafide "expense?'" My next pay check says the Turkish guys are using Uncle Sam to finance their scam.
http://charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com/ thank you Tim for coining the phrase "strategic ambiguity"
http://azstarnet.com/news/blogs/senor-reporter/article_d043a0ea-6dd5-11df-b05a-001cc4c002e0.htm
http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/ohohmrbill-424188-sonoran-science-lie-lies-academy-gulen-movent-charter-school-fraud-ssa-entertainment-ppt-powerpoint/
7) Horizon Science Academy (OH) Money, Money, Money, why are these guys always e mailing each other for money? American teachers are not respected, yet they have the credentials. http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com/how-to-get-a-turkish-teaching-license.html
Thank you Cleveland for educating us on what an "audit" is
http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com/you-are-cordially-invited-to-an-audit.html
8) Chicago Math and Science Academy (IL) Gulen's Web site boasts about the "Chicago Turkish School" and the science fair, they also name a fellow Gulen Teacher Mr. Arslan who works at CMSA in room 109.
The American Teachers have voted in a UNION, and are fighting for their rights! American teacher who is 8.6 months pregnant is fired. Chicago teachers, fight for your rights and stay together on this!!!
http://fgulen.org/press-room/news/2313-turkish-school-excels-at-chicago-science-fair.html
Seems that Gulen even boasted about the accomplishments of their Chicago Science Science Academy's achievements at a local Science Fair. Teacher and Gulen follower Mr. Arslan mentioned in the Gulen article ..teaches in room 109.
http://cmsaonline.net/newwebsite/?page_id=71
http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com/index.html
http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com/4/post/2010/06/sorry-no-free-advertising-on-this-website.html#comments
9) Florida, et al Florida is picking up steam, we have someone who has contacted the local "Jihad Watch" and blogs frequently in local papers about schools. Coral Science (NV) has had financial issues and some scandals (law suits, and police called for a student attempted kid napping) Dove Science (OK) this school has hit some financial hard spots, also those Turk boys stand out in good ole Oklahoma. Young Scholars of Penns.
http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com/from-the-land-of-oz.htm
http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com/67-and-100.html
http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com/pie-charts-are-pretty-groovy.html
http://www.kolotv.com/home/headlines/93431074.html?storySection=comments
Author and professor, Dr. Paul Williams for not being afraid of the "truth" and caring so much about our country and children.
http://thelastcrusade.org/
AND TO THE GULEN CULT FOR ENTERTAINING US WITH HOURS OF PROPAGANDA AND DAMAGE CONTROL. LET'S PLAY HIDE A TURK!
http://fethullahgulen.mobi/press-room/news/3610-qyou-couldnt-meet-a-nicer-bunch-of-peopleq.html
Between now and the beginning of school keep it up. Blog often and communicate everywhere 2 state officials (2 different states have responded) they are alarmed and want answers, have your back up documentation, if you have problems finding it, reach out to us!!! Hit hard on the Islamic and Turkish indoctrination, money fraud, un credentialed foreign teachers. Paper trail is always good to have. Get local media involved, not all are bought off with expensive ads from the schools, talk to your local school districts, teachers, and politicians. Above all educate yourself on charter state laws, regulations, read Gulen's web site and learn what motivates them. Know thy enemy!!
1) State officials in California have been made aware about Magnolia and Bay Area Technology link to Gulen--and the application for $17 million in our state for building fund. Original charter application shows that Dialogue Foundation fronted the money to open the schools, yet they are applying for the $17 million under MERF (Magnolia Education and Research Fund) BLOG ON CHARTER SCHOOL FRAUD WEB SITES on NEWSPAPER ARTICLES, TALK TO YOUR TEA PARTY OR TEA BAGGERS over $600,000 spent on "consulting services", "operating expenses" yet a lousy $100,000 spent on textbooks and lab equipment. Magnolia (Bell) boasts about their trip and performance in Turkey, children are on web site with photo posed in front of a Mosque. New school announces opening with Tim (Timur) Saka who is from "charter" schools in Colorado and Utah. Former founder and board member for Beehive goes back to Turkey where he is appointed head of Council on Higher Education. New MSA in Santa Clara announces Timur (Tim) Saka from Magnolia Reseda will be Principal, and they boast how he opened Charter Schools in CO, UT.
http://tucson.craigslist.org/rnr/1813631589.html
http://perimeterprimate.blogspot.com/2010/06/magnolia-schools-charter-management.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QMV_BZwcYc (Gulens ERBU Names schools)
who says Gulen isn't connected to the AKP ruling party of Turkey?
2) Beehive Academy UT- closed and now re opened with a probation and another meeting with the state of Utah 7/15. Scandal was so bad last principal was hidden away (where will he re surface?) , new principal (another Turkish National) walked into the state school board meeting with an attorney. They had "chronic mismanagement of funds" private loans and ties to Magnolia, and members of Willow Education, MERF, etc., (Gulen foundations) $53,000 spent on HB-1 Visas, $200,000+ on "Extra Curricular activities" Loans forgiven. Enrollment dropped drastically. School claims state wasn't "clear" on the accountability-and there was "new" information. Minutes from 1 year ago show the same money issues. State of Utah sets forth more ACCOUNTABILITY regulations.
http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/2010/06/12/utah-taxpayer-funded-islamist-school-loses-money-stays-open/
http://www.deseretnews.com/user/comments/save/700042335/Reader-comments-Charter-schools-to-be-held-accountable-for-finances-academics.html
3) Lotus School of Excellence in Aurora, CO has lied about opening another school and was advertising it with a web site BEFORE APPROVAL - however SVVUSD denied them another school in Longmont, CA. They are heavily utilizing interfaith dialogue at Churches (FREE dinners, trips to Turkey, etc.,) and even purchased an old Church to convert to a school. A favorite Islamic past time taking a church and converting or destroying it. Journalist for Longmont Times verifies to me that Lotus was turned DOWN for a Longmont, CO location.
http://www.timescall.com/News_Story.asp?id=22472
http://www.longmont.lotusschool.org/
NO TEACHING CREDENTIALS http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com/rocky-mountain-low.html
2 TEACHERS WITH CREDENTIALS LET GO, Children reportedly "cutting" themselves. These Turk Guys clearly are unprepared for American attitudes and social behaviors http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com/4/post/2010/06/sorry-no-free-advertising-on-this-website.html#comments
4) Harmony Science Academy, busted by the West Texas Patriots. Many things are coming out in the news. The Turkish Olympiads, the school web sites boasting of the children going to Turkey, photos, and videos of American children dancing by the Islamic Flag of Turkey. Opening 3 preschools called (Bluebonnet) on the school locations. This is a model stolen from Sonoran Science Academy and their Daisy Learning Center. The pre-schools have a tuition fee of $150.00 a week (revenue stream) you cannot mix a non-profit with a "for profit" Daisy Learning Center in Az was busted by family services for this. Cosmos foundation raised over $10 million from Bill Gates Foundation (who we are sure doesn't know about the Turkish domination in the schools) Peyton Wolcott exposes the Superintendents in Texas and kick backs to Turkish Contractor EGE who get the exclusive contract to build the Harmony Science Academy's in Texas. Dr. Soner Tarim, Superintendent denies any connection to "Gulen" how ever - ex FBI Turkish Translator Sibel Edmonds testifies about Gulen's schools in Texas and Gulen's web sites make reference to his many schools. Government officials tied into Gulen's Raindrop Turkish House, complete with regular dinners, Turkish coffee and LOTS of trips to Turkey with children. Why does Dr. Tarim always look like the "doe in the headlight" every time someone questions him about Gulen involvement?
http://peytonwolcott.com/Charters_Cosmos.html, Hispanic,Africian American children are taught to abandoned their culture, learn to dance proudly under the Islamic flag of Turkey. Perform in Turkey.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8owhHdmK40.
http://gulencharterschools.weebly.com/harmony-science-academy-denials-and-evidence.html
http://www.wtxpatriots.org/ (thanks for exposing the 1,100+ HB-1 Visas 2001 to 2009)
Let show them Texas style what America is!
5) Triad Math and Science Academy, NC web site boasts of the trip to Washington DC and their performance at the Turkish Olympiad, they are also on the Gulen web site (videos) in their costumes at the
same Gulen sponsored Turkish Olympaid , (MAFTAA). They are turned into state officials, and a very well-known Charter competitor was very interested in the information we had. Charter competition gets fierce for state money. Turkish Gulen school "TIE, Technology Integrated Education. More bells and whistles for the "Appearances" but little substance to the children. Word is they are applying for a new school consideration, so "block that punt" elaborate Turkish Olympiads productions: Washington DC, Texas, Arizona, California, Cleveland, Atlanta and more.
http://greensboro.craigslist.org/grp/1808168095.html
http://www.fethullah-gulen.org/news/turkisholympiad.html
The participants were the mid Atlantic areas. The school's web sites all mention that they participated in this Turkish Olympiad.
Virginia http://www.pinnacleacademyva.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=180&Itemid=112
Kentucky
North Carolina
http://www.tmsacharter.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1535:turkish-olympiad-team-brings-home-the-gold&catid=125:issue-31-April-16-2010&Itemid=131
Maryland
Delaware
6) Sonoran Science Academies (AZ) to the biggest liar of them all Faith Karatas, Principal of SSA Tuscon. Lies to Journalist Tim Steller about his past work at LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District) Tim did his due diligence and found Karatas never worked for LAUSD, but worked for Magnolia Science Academy (his Turkish Gulen Brothers in California) which is UNDER the management of LAUSD. Liar Liar-pants on Fire. SSA pioneered the pre-school Daisy Learning Center, (named after yet another Gulen foundation Daisy Education Corporation) was fined by the Family Services for the "Profit" day care center co - mingled with the non-profit schools. Karatas, the next time you choose to threaten a parent with legal action -follow through with it instead of idle threats. Lying about waiting list for enrollment, lying about teachers inappropriate behavior, etc,. Americans are on to the "I sue you" from foreigners(say with accent)
Karatas is squeezing his butt cheeks over AZ state monitoring public school teachers for accents, coming down hard on the illegals and immigrants-same to imported teachers. Yet the Turk boys (most are young and male) have heavy THICK accents. Thank you to reporter Tim Steller for exposing that SSA had 38 HB-1 Visas in 1 year. Who(m) is paying for these Visas? Are HB-1 Visas a bonafide "expense?'" My next pay check says the Turkish guys are using Uncle Sam to finance their scam.
http://charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com/ thank you Tim for coining the phrase "strategic ambiguity"
http://azstarnet.com/news/blogs/senor-reporter/article_d043a0ea-6dd5-11df-b05a-001cc4c002e0.htm
http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/ohohmrbill-424188-sonoran-science-lie-lies-academy-gulen-movent-charter-school-fraud-ssa-entertainment-ppt-powerpoint/
7) Horizon Science Academy (OH) Money, Money, Money, why are these guys always e mailing each other for money? American teachers are not respected, yet they have the credentials. http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com/how-to-get-a-turkish-teaching-license.html
Thank you Cleveland for educating us on what an "audit" is
http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com/you-are-cordially-invited-to-an-audit.html
8) Chicago Math and Science Academy (IL) Gulen's Web site boasts about the "Chicago Turkish School" and the science fair, they also name a fellow Gulen Teacher Mr. Arslan who works at CMSA in room 109.
The American Teachers have voted in a UNION, and are fighting for their rights! American teacher who is 8.6 months pregnant is fired. Chicago teachers, fight for your rights and stay together on this!!!
http://fgulen.org/press-room/news/2313-turkish-school-excels-at-chicago-science-fair.html
Seems that Gulen even boasted about the accomplishments of their Chicago Science Science Academy's achievements at a local Science Fair. Teacher and Gulen follower Mr. Arslan mentioned in the Gulen article ..teaches in room 109.
http://cmsaonline.net/newwebsite/?page_id=71
http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com/index.html
http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com/4/post/2010/06/sorry-no-free-advertising-on-this-website.html#comments
9) Florida, et al Florida is picking up steam, we have someone who has contacted the local "Jihad Watch" and blogs frequently in local papers about schools. Coral Science (NV) has had financial issues and some scandals (law suits, and police called for a student attempted kid napping) Dove Science (OK) this school has hit some financial hard spots, also those Turk boys stand out in good ole Oklahoma. Young Scholars of Penns.
http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com/from-the-land-of-oz.htm
http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com/67-and-100.html
http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com/pie-charts-are-pretty-groovy.html
http://www.kolotv.com/home/headlines/93431074.html?storySection=comments
Author and professor, Dr. Paul Williams for not being afraid of the "truth" and caring so much about our country and children.
http://thelastcrusade.org/
AND TO THE GULEN CULT FOR ENTERTAINING US WITH HOURS OF PROPAGANDA AND DAMAGE CONTROL. LET'S PLAY HIDE A TURK!
http://fethullahgulen.mobi/press-room/news/3610-qyou-couldnt-meet-a-nicer-bunch-of-peopleq.html
Saturday, July 3, 2010
SCHWARTZ: Islamist Gülen Movement Runs U.S. Charter Schools
A secretive foreign network of Islamic radicals now operates dozens of charter schools -- which receive government money but are not required to adopt a state-approved curriculum -- on U.S. soil. The inspirer of this conspiratorial effort is Fethullah Gülen, who directs a major Islamist movement in Turkey and the Turkish Diaspora but lives in the United States. He is number thirteen among the world's "50 most influential Muslims," according to one prominent listing.
Gülen has been criticized as the puppet master for the current Turkish government headed by the "soft Islamist" Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials as the AKP, in its slow-motion showdown with the secularist Turkish military. But Gülen is also known in Muslim countries for his network of 500-700 Islamic schools around the world, according to differing sources favorable to his movement. A more critical view of Gülen's emphasis on education asserts that his international network of thousands of primary and secondary schools, universities, and student residences is a key element in solidifying an Islamist political agenda in Turkey.
But in startling news for Americans, the Gülen movement operates more than 85 primary and secondary schools on our soil. A roster of the Gülen schools and of the numerous foundations that support them has been released to the public by the patriotic group Act! for America. The Gülen schools are often designated as "science academies" and are concentrated in Texas, Ohio, and California -- with others scattered across the rest of the country.
Two states that host Gülen charter schools are Arizona and Utah. In the former, the Daisy Education Corporation (the Gülen movement loves friendly-sounding institutional names) operates three schools in Tucson: one serving kindergarten through the eighth grade, another designated as an elementary school, and a middle-high school, all under the rubric of the Sonoran Science Academy. In Phoenix, it runs a satellite kindergarten-to-10th-grade campus with the same name.
The appearance of Gülen charter schools in Tucson has produced critical attention in local media. TheTucson Weekly published a report at the end of 2009 noting that the Sonoran Science Academy in the southern Arizona town had been named "charter school of the year" by the Arizona Charter School Association. But writer Tim Vanderpool reported that according to one dismayed parent, who declined identification while pointing out the Gülen movement's history of intimidating critics, "the Sonoran Academy seems constantly to be bringing Turkish educators into the United States, and subjecting students to substitute teachers while the teachers await work visas." Vanderpool submits that "several Sonoran Academy parents believe the school has a hidden agenda to promote Gülen's brand of Turkish nationalism, advance sympathy for that country's political goals such as winning acceptance into the European Union, and discourage official acknowledgment of Turkey's genocide against the Armenians during World War I." Such issues are exotic, to say the least, for Tucson parents.
Earlier in 2009, the Beehive Science and Technology Academy, a high school in Salt Lake City, came under similar critical scrutiny from the Salt Lake Tribune. That major daily's writer, Kirsten Stewart, reported that the Utah State Charter Board had begun an investigation of the Beehive school following complaints from a former teacher and an alarmed parent. The complainants asserted that while "Beehive advertises itself as a public charter school offering college-bound seventh through 12th graders a foundation in math and science ... the school has another mission: to advance and promote certain Islamic beliefs. They point to questionable financial transactions and hiring practices as proof of the school's covert ties to Turkish Muslim preacher Fethullah Gülen."
But while Fatih Karatas, principal of the Sonoran Science Academy middle school in Tucson, flatly denied any connection with the Gülen movement, Beehive principal Muhammet "Frank" Erdogan in Salt Lake City admitted such links in the case of his school. The Salt Lake Tribune quoted his admission that along with him, "many of Beehive's teachers and founders also support Gülen's ideals." The paper also described how "Adam Kuntz, a first-year history teacher at Beehive, was fired [in spring 2009], he alleges, for taking academic freedom concerns to the state board. Earlier in the school year, Kuntz had a run-in with Erdogan over a lesson plan on World War II and the Holocaust. Erdogan wanted Kuntz to revise the plan and during a tape-recorded meeting, questioned conventional accounts of the genocide."
Kelly Wayment, a parent of three children in the school, was removed from his post on the Beehive administrative board after he e-mailed other parents about Gülen movement influence in the school. Wayment told the Salt Lake Tribune that as in the Tucson case, teachers "tend to be from Turkey and central Asian republics living here on work visas."
Americans should ask both why and how the Islamist Gülen movement has managed to establish such a large presence for Turkish religious political indoctrination in publicly financed education -- and should unite to oppose it.
- Stephen Schwartz
Stephen Suleyman Schwartz is executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism in Washington, D.C. This article was sponsored by Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.
Gülen has been criticized as the puppet master for the current Turkish government headed by the "soft Islamist" Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials as the AKP, in its slow-motion showdown with the secularist Turkish military. But Gülen is also known in Muslim countries for his network of 500-700 Islamic schools around the world, according to differing sources favorable to his movement. A more critical view of Gülen's emphasis on education asserts that his international network of thousands of primary and secondary schools, universities, and student residences is a key element in solidifying an Islamist political agenda in Turkey.
But in startling news for Americans, the Gülen movement operates more than 85 primary and secondary schools on our soil. A roster of the Gülen schools and of the numerous foundations that support them has been released to the public by the patriotic group Act! for America. The Gülen schools are often designated as "science academies" and are concentrated in Texas, Ohio, and California -- with others scattered across the rest of the country.
Two states that host Gülen charter schools are Arizona and Utah. In the former, the Daisy Education Corporation (the Gülen movement loves friendly-sounding institutional names) operates three schools in Tucson: one serving kindergarten through the eighth grade, another designated as an elementary school, and a middle-high school, all under the rubric of the Sonoran Science Academy. In Phoenix, it runs a satellite kindergarten-to-10th-grade campus with the same name.
The appearance of Gülen charter schools in Tucson has produced critical attention in local media. TheTucson Weekly published a report at the end of 2009 noting that the Sonoran Science Academy in the southern Arizona town had been named "charter school of the year" by the Arizona Charter School Association. But writer Tim Vanderpool reported that according to one dismayed parent, who declined identification while pointing out the Gülen movement's history of intimidating critics, "the Sonoran Academy seems constantly to be bringing Turkish educators into the United States, and subjecting students to substitute teachers while the teachers await work visas." Vanderpool submits that "several Sonoran Academy parents believe the school has a hidden agenda to promote Gülen's brand of Turkish nationalism, advance sympathy for that country's political goals such as winning acceptance into the European Union, and discourage official acknowledgment of Turkey's genocide against the Armenians during World War I." Such issues are exotic, to say the least, for Tucson parents.
Earlier in 2009, the Beehive Science and Technology Academy, a high school in Salt Lake City, came under similar critical scrutiny from the Salt Lake Tribune. That major daily's writer, Kirsten Stewart, reported that the Utah State Charter Board had begun an investigation of the Beehive school following complaints from a former teacher and an alarmed parent. The complainants asserted that while "Beehive advertises itself as a public charter school offering college-bound seventh through 12th graders a foundation in math and science ... the school has another mission: to advance and promote certain Islamic beliefs. They point to questionable financial transactions and hiring practices as proof of the school's covert ties to Turkish Muslim preacher Fethullah Gülen."
But while Fatih Karatas, principal of the Sonoran Science Academy middle school in Tucson, flatly denied any connection with the Gülen movement, Beehive principal Muhammet "Frank" Erdogan in Salt Lake City admitted such links in the case of his school. The Salt Lake Tribune quoted his admission that along with him, "many of Beehive's teachers and founders also support Gülen's ideals." The paper also described how "Adam Kuntz, a first-year history teacher at Beehive, was fired [in spring 2009], he alleges, for taking academic freedom concerns to the state board. Earlier in the school year, Kuntz had a run-in with Erdogan over a lesson plan on World War II and the Holocaust. Erdogan wanted Kuntz to revise the plan and during a tape-recorded meeting, questioned conventional accounts of the genocide."
Kelly Wayment, a parent of three children in the school, was removed from his post on the Beehive administrative board after he e-mailed other parents about Gülen movement influence in the school. Wayment told the Salt Lake Tribune that as in the Tucson case, teachers "tend to be from Turkey and central Asian republics living here on work visas."
Americans should ask both why and how the Islamist Gülen movement has managed to establish such a large presence for Turkish religious political indoctrination in publicly financed education -- and should unite to oppose it.
- Stephen Schwartz
Stephen Suleyman Schwartz is executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism in Washington, D.C. This article was sponsored by Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
WILLIAMS: Exclusive: World’s ‘Most Dangerous Islamist’ Alive, Well, and Living in Pennsylvania
An Islamic Armed Fortress Emerges in the Pocono Mountains
The most dangerous Islamist in the world is neither Afghani nor Arab.
He comes from neither Sudan nor Somalia.
And he resides in neither the mountains of Pakistan nor the deserts of the Palestinian territories.
This individual has toppled the secular government of Turkey and established madrassahs throughout the world.
His schools indoctrinate children in the tenets of radical Islam and prepare adolescents for the Islamization of the world.
More than 90 of these madrassahs have been established as charter schools throughout the United States. They are funded by American taxpayers.
One of these charter schools – Tarek ibn Zayed Academy (TiZA) in Minnesota – is so radically Islamic and subversive in nature that the Minnesota Department of Education issued two citations against it and the American Civil Liberties Union is suing it.
Dozens of his universities, including the Faith University in Istabul, train young men to become lawyers, accountants, and political leaders so that they can take an active part in the restoration of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamization of the Western World.
He also allegedly operates compounds to train jihadis in the tactics of guerilla warfare.
This individual has amasssed a fortune – over $30 billion – for the creation of a universal caliphate.
His name is Fethullah Gulen and he resides not in the wilds of southern Turkey – but the mountains of Northeastern Pennsylvania.
From his fortess headquarters, located on 28 acres at 1857 Mt. Eaton Road in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, Gulen plots the overthrow of secular governments and oversees the spread of education jihad throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States.
Gulen is surrounded by an army of over 100 Turkish Islamists, who guard him and tend to his needs. The army is comprised of armed militants who wear suits and ties and do not look like traditional Islamists in cloaks and turbans. They follow their hocaefendi's (master lord’s) orders and even refrain from marrying until age 50 per his instructions. When they do marry, their spouses are expected to dress in the Islamic manner, as dictated by Gulen himself.
The Saylorsburg property consists of a massive chalet surrounded by numerous out buildings, including recreational centers, dormitories, cabins for visiting foreign dignitaries, a helicopter pad, and firing ranges.
Neighbors complain of the incessant sounds of gunfire – including the rat-tat-tat of fully automatic weapons – coming from the compound and the low flying helicopter that circles the area in search of all intruders.
The FBI has been called to the scene, the neighbors say, but no action has been taken to end the illegal activity.
Sentries stand guard at the gates to the estate to turn away all curiosity seekers.
Within the sentry hut are wide screen televisions that project high resolution images from security cameras.
Before the hut is a sign that reads “Golden Generation Worship and Retreat Center.”
It’s hard for the local residents to understand that the Muslim who operates this compound is not an American political or intelligence official – but rather a radical Islamist from Turkey.
Gulen fled Turkey in 1998 to avoid prosecution on charges that he was attempting to undermine Turkey’s secular government with the objective of establishing an Islamic government. Since his arrival in Pennsylvania, the Department of Homeland Security has been trying to deport him. But in 2008 a federal court ruled that Gulan was an individual with “extraordinary ability in the field of education” who merited permanent residence status in the U.S.
The ruling remains quizzical because Gulen has no formal education or training.
Gulen, according to the Middle East Quarterly, was a student and follower of Sheikh Sa'id-i Kurdi (1878-1960), also known as Sa'id-i Nursi, the founder of the Islamist Nur (light) movement. After Turkey's war of independence, Kurdi demanded, in an address to the new parliament, that the new republic be based on Islamic principles. He turned against Atatürk and his reforms and against the new modern, secular, Western republic.
How powerful is Gulen? And why is he such a threat to America and the Western world?
Consider this.
Turkey is now ruled by the Justice and Democratic Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma, AKP)- - a party under the Gulen’s control. Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s first Islamist President, is a Gulen disciple along with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Yusuf Ziya Ozcan, the head of Turkey’s Council of Higher Education.
Under the AKP, Turkey has transformed from a secular state into an Islamic country with 85,000 active mosques – one for every 350- citizens – the highest number per capita in the world, 90,000 imams, more imams than teachers and physicians – and thousands of state-run Islamic schools.
Despite the rhetoric of European Union accession, Turkey has transferred its alliance from Europe and the United States to Russia and Iran. It has moved toward friendship with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria and created a pervasive anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, and anti-America animus throughout the populace.
Speaking on Monday at the inauguration ceremony of "TRT al Turkiye," the new channel of the state run TV station TRT, Prime Minister Erdogan said Turkey will always be on the side of Muslims wherever they are.
Gulen’s tentacles stretch throughout the country since his followers, known as Fethullahists, have gained control of the country’s media outlets, its financial institutions and banks, and its business organizations.
According to Bayram Balci, a Turkish scholar, the Gulen schools that have been established throughout the world seek to expand “the Islamization of Turkish nationality and the Turification of Islam” in order to bring about a universal caliphate ruled by Islamic law.
Several countries have outlawed the establishment of Gulen schools and cemaats (communities) within their borders – including Russia and Uzbekistan. Even the Netherlands, a nation that embraces pluralism and tolerance, has opted to cut funding to the Gulen schools because of their imminent threat to the social order.
But Gulen’s activities in the United States, including the establishment of an armed fortress in the midst of the Pocono Mountains, have escaped national press attention.
In his public statements, Gulen espouses a liberal version of Sunni/Hanafi Islam and promotes the Muslim notion of hizmet – altruistic service to the common good.
Despite the paramilitary training at his Pocono fortress, Gulen has condemned terrorism and called for interfaith dialogue. He has met with Pope John Paul II, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomeos, and Israeli Sephardic Head Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron.
In private, Gulen has stated that “in order to reach the ideal Muslim society ‘every method and path is acceptable, [including] lying to people.’”
In a sermon that was aired on Turkish television, Gulen said:
You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers … until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria … like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it … You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey … Until that time, any step taken would be too early—like breaking an egg without waiting the full forty days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all—in confidence … trusting your loyalty and secrecy. I know that when you leave here—[just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here.
Why has the federal government opted to turn a blind eye to Gulen and his mountain fortress?
Why have Gulen’s madrassahs been kept under the radar screen of Hoimeland Security?
Why have the CIA and FBI allowed Gulen to wreak havoc and topple secular governments without interruption or intervention?
The questions beg answers.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Paul L. Williams is the author of The Day of Islam: The Annihilation of America and the Western World, The Al Qaeda Connection, and other best-selling books. He is a frequent guest on such national news networks as ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, MSNBC, and NPR. Visit his website at http://thelastcrusade.org.
- Dr. Paul L. Williams
The most dangerous Islamist in the world is neither Afghani nor Arab.
He comes from neither Sudan nor Somalia.
And he resides in neither the mountains of Pakistan nor the deserts of the Palestinian territories.
This individual has toppled the secular government of Turkey and established madrassahs throughout the world.
His schools indoctrinate children in the tenets of radical Islam and prepare adolescents for the Islamization of the world.
More than 90 of these madrassahs have been established as charter schools throughout the United States. They are funded by American taxpayers.
One of these charter schools – Tarek ibn Zayed Academy (TiZA) in Minnesota – is so radically Islamic and subversive in nature that the Minnesota Department of Education issued two citations against it and the American Civil Liberties Union is suing it.
Dozens of his universities, including the Faith University in Istabul, train young men to become lawyers, accountants, and political leaders so that they can take an active part in the restoration of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamization of the Western World.
He also allegedly operates compounds to train jihadis in the tactics of guerilla warfare.
This individual has amasssed a fortune – over $30 billion – for the creation of a universal caliphate.
From his fortess headquarters, located on 28 acres at 1857 Mt. Eaton Road in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, Gulen plots the overthrow of secular governments and oversees the spread of education jihad throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States.
Gulen is surrounded by an army of over 100 Turkish Islamists, who guard him and tend to his needs. The army is comprised of armed militants who wear suits and ties and do not look like traditional Islamists in cloaks and turbans. They follow their hocaefendi's (master lord’s) orders and even refrain from marrying until age 50 per his instructions. When they do marry, their spouses are expected to dress in the Islamic manner, as dictated by Gulen himself.
The Saylorsburg property consists of a massive chalet surrounded by numerous out buildings, including recreational centers, dormitories, cabins for visiting foreign dignitaries, a helicopter pad, and firing ranges.
Neighbors complain of the incessant sounds of gunfire – including the rat-tat-tat of fully automatic weapons – coming from the compound and the low flying helicopter that circles the area in search of all intruders.
The FBI has been called to the scene, the neighbors say, but no action has been taken to end the illegal activity.
Sentries stand guard at the gates to the estate to turn away all curiosity seekers.
Within the sentry hut are wide screen televisions that project high resolution images from security cameras.
Before the hut is a sign that reads “Golden Generation Worship and Retreat Center.”
It’s hard for the local residents to understand that the Muslim who operates this compound is not an American political or intelligence official – but rather a radical Islamist from Turkey.
Gulen fled Turkey in 1998 to avoid prosecution on charges that he was attempting to undermine Turkey’s secular government with the objective of establishing an Islamic government. Since his arrival in Pennsylvania, the Department of Homeland Security has been trying to deport him. But in 2008 a federal court ruled that Gulan was an individual with “extraordinary ability in the field of education” who merited permanent residence status in the U.S.
The ruling remains quizzical because Gulen has no formal education or training.
Gulen, according to the Middle East Quarterly, was a student and follower of Sheikh Sa'id-i Kurdi (1878-1960), also known as Sa'id-i Nursi, the founder of the Islamist Nur (light) movement. After Turkey's war of independence, Kurdi demanded, in an address to the new parliament, that the new republic be based on Islamic principles. He turned against Atatürk and his reforms and against the new modern, secular, Western republic.
How powerful is Gulen? And why is he such a threat to America and the Western world?
Consider this.
Turkey is now ruled by the Justice and Democratic Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma, AKP)- - a party under the Gulen’s control. Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s first Islamist President, is a Gulen disciple along with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Yusuf Ziya Ozcan, the head of Turkey’s Council of Higher Education.
Under the AKP, Turkey has transformed from a secular state into an Islamic country with 85,000 active mosques – one for every 350- citizens – the highest number per capita in the world, 90,000 imams, more imams than teachers and physicians – and thousands of state-run Islamic schools.
Despite the rhetoric of European Union accession, Turkey has transferred its alliance from Europe and the United States to Russia and Iran. It has moved toward friendship with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria and created a pervasive anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, and anti-America animus throughout the populace.
Speaking on Monday at the inauguration ceremony of "TRT al Turkiye," the new channel of the state run TV station TRT, Prime Minister Erdogan said Turkey will always be on the side of Muslims wherever they are.
Gulen’s tentacles stretch throughout the country since his followers, known as Fethullahists, have gained control of the country’s media outlets, its financial institutions and banks, and its business organizations.
According to Bayram Balci, a Turkish scholar, the Gulen schools that have been established throughout the world seek to expand “the Islamization of Turkish nationality and the Turification of Islam” in order to bring about a universal caliphate ruled by Islamic law.
Several countries have outlawed the establishment of Gulen schools and cemaats (communities) within their borders – including Russia and Uzbekistan. Even the Netherlands, a nation that embraces pluralism and tolerance, has opted to cut funding to the Gulen schools because of their imminent threat to the social order.
But Gulen’s activities in the United States, including the establishment of an armed fortress in the midst of the Pocono Mountains, have escaped national press attention.
In his public statements, Gulen espouses a liberal version of Sunni/Hanafi Islam and promotes the Muslim notion of hizmet – altruistic service to the common good.
Despite the paramilitary training at his Pocono fortress, Gulen has condemned terrorism and called for interfaith dialogue. He has met with Pope John Paul II, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomeos, and Israeli Sephardic Head Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron.
In private, Gulen has stated that “in order to reach the ideal Muslim society ‘every method and path is acceptable, [including] lying to people.’”
In a sermon that was aired on Turkish television, Gulen said:
You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers … until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria … like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it … You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey … Until that time, any step taken would be too early—like breaking an egg without waiting the full forty days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all—in confidence … trusting your loyalty and secrecy. I know that when you leave here—[just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here.
Why has the federal government opted to turn a blind eye to Gulen and his mountain fortress?
Why have Gulen’s madrassahs been kept under the radar screen of Hoimeland Security?
Why have the CIA and FBI allowed Gulen to wreak havoc and topple secular governments without interruption or intervention?
The questions beg answers.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Paul L. Williams is the author of The Day of Islam: The Annihilation of America and the Western World, The Al Qaeda Connection, and other best-selling books. He is a frequent guest on such national news networks as ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, MSNBC, and NPR. Visit his website at http://thelastcrusade.org.
- Dr. Paul L. Williams
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
THACKER: Gulen's Influence on Christians in Turkey
Gulen Values are not compatible with Judeo Christian values
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHiqidzKNx0
Persecution in Turkey is a result of Gulen Islam.
-Bill Thacker
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHiqidzKNx0
Persecution in Turkey is a result of Gulen Islam.
-Bill Thacker
MARTIN: Gulen Schools
Texas has almost 100 Gulen Schools and more are being built each year with innocuous names such as
"Harmony", Daisy" or "Buttercup." Texas is not alone - almost every state has been infiltrated with at least one Harmony Charter School with more coming in daily!
The teachers in these schools are Turkish Muslims with a scattering of American teachers who love the Science and Math curriculum the schools espouse. Obviously, the American teachers are unaware, or if they are, they are fired or quit.
This attempt to deceptively turn our children into Muslims is so awful that we cannot sit back and say "tsk tsk"!!! But if we can get the word out to enough parents, maybe they will leave the Harmony Schools in droves
Did you know that one such school in Dallas, on Forestgate Drive has over 700 enrolled students from K to tenth grade? Horrifying!
Right now you can help by getting the word out and around to everyone.
Share stories relating to Gulen with GulenWatch@gmail.com
Direct those you know to GulenWatch.blogspot.com for Gulen updates.
Tell others.
No state is immune.
Even small towns are the targets of this duplicitous, cunning scheme.
Of course they do not teach or mention Islam during the school day! Oh no - that would be against the Charter School rules!!! But they have plenty of camp outs, playground time, overnight trips, even free trips to Turkey in which to attempt secret indoctrination and conversion of our dear children!
We Americans are too easily hoodwinked! We are taken in by the deception the Gulen Movement practices! They are deceptive! They lie! They do not tell the truth. A friend in AZ whose daughter was enrolled, was upset by something she said she had been taught. When he complained to the principal, the principal threatened to sue him! Imagine! Using our laws against us.
Let's go!
- C. Martin
"Harmony", Daisy" or "Buttercup." Texas is not alone - almost every state has been infiltrated with at least one Harmony Charter School with more coming in daily!
The teachers in these schools are Turkish Muslims with a scattering of American teachers who love the Science and Math curriculum the schools espouse. Obviously, the American teachers are unaware, or if they are, they are fired or quit.
This attempt to deceptively turn our children into Muslims is so awful that we cannot sit back and say "tsk tsk"!!! But if we can get the word out to enough parents, maybe they will leave the Harmony Schools in droves
Did you know that one such school in Dallas, on Forestgate Drive has over 700 enrolled students from K to tenth grade? Horrifying!
Right now you can help by getting the word out and around to everyone.
Share stories relating to Gulen with GulenWatch@gmail.com
Direct those you know to GulenWatch.blogspot.com for Gulen updates.
Tell others.
No state is immune.
Even small towns are the targets of this duplicitous, cunning scheme.
Of course they do not teach or mention Islam during the school day! Oh no - that would be against the Charter School rules!!! But they have plenty of camp outs, playground time, overnight trips, even free trips to Turkey in which to attempt secret indoctrination and conversion of our dear children!
We Americans are too easily hoodwinked! We are taken in by the deception the Gulen Movement practices! They are deceptive! They lie! They do not tell the truth. A friend in AZ whose daughter was enrolled, was upset by something she said she had been taught. When he complained to the principal, the principal threatened to sue him! Imagine! Using our laws against us.
Let's go!
- C. Martin
THACKER: Sharia is misunderstood
Obama In Turkey "We Do Not Consider Ourselves A Christian Nation"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIVd7YT0oWA&feature=related
Now that you watched the video read this, from Gulen's own paper:
http://www.sundayszaman.com/sunday/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=177999
Obama's Muslim advisor, Dalia Mogahed, also claims that Sharia is just misunderstood.
What's there not to understand? Women wearing burkas, Christian pursecution, submit to Allah or die?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/6274387/Obama-adviser-says-Sharia-Law-is-misunderstood.html
Let's review:
1. Obama's Muslim advisor Dalia Mogahed supports the Gulen Movement and is a Gulen Disciple.
2. She is advising our president and he claims the USA in not a Christian Nation... are you with me so far?
3. Every day children are sent to these schools. Every day we grow closer to Sharia Law and become more like Europe - A socialist Islamic Nation.
So is Sonoran Science and the Turkish Charter schools a safe bet for education?
I think not.
- Bill Thacker
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIVd7YT0oWA&feature=related
Now that you watched the video read this, from Gulen's own paper:
http://www.sundayszaman.com/sunday/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=177999
What's there not to understand? Women wearing burkas, Christian pursecution, submit to Allah or die?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/6274387/Obama-adviser-says-Sharia-Law-is-misunderstood.html
Let's review:
1. Obama's Muslim advisor Dalia Mogahed supports the Gulen Movement and is a Gulen Disciple.
2. She is advising our president and he claims the USA in not a Christian Nation... are you with me so far?
3. Every day children are sent to these schools. Every day we grow closer to Sharia Law and become more like Europe - A socialist Islamic Nation.
So is Sonoran Science and the Turkish Charter schools a safe bet for education?
I think not.
- Bill Thacker
WILLIAMS: Bill Gates Funds Gulen Islamist Movement
In 2007, through the Texas High School Project, the Gates Foundation shelled out $10,550,000 to the Cosmos Foundation, a Gulen enterprise that operates 25 publicly funded charter schools in Texas.
The Internal Revenue Service Form 990 for Cosmos shows that the Cosmos Foundation received $41,570,721 from taxpayers.
At present, there are 85 Gulan madrassahs (Islamic schools) in the United States, and all operate with public funding.
At the Gulen schools, students are indoctrinated in Turkish culture, language, and religion so that they may be of service in making Fethullah Gulan’s dream of a universal caliphate a reality. The madrassahs sponsor Turkish clubs, Turkish language societies, Turkish dance groups, and annual trips to Istanbul.
According to Stephen Schwartz of the Center for Islamic Pluralism, the 85 Gulen schools advance and promote Islamic beliefs; present the Ottoman Empire, which lasted from 1299 to 1923, as a golden age; and serve to rewrite history by denying the Armenian holocaust under the Turks during World War I.
Many of the teachers at these schools are Turkish émigrés with questionable credentials. Some possess H-1B non immigrant visas which should only be granted to individuals who possess “highly specialized knowledge in a field of human endeavor.” The female faculty members appear in their classrooms wearing hijabs and traditional Islamic attire.
Critics can’t understand why the schools are staffed with imported elementary and secondary school teachers when thousands of trained and certified American educators are begging for teaching positions. But are the schools really subversive?
Rachel Sharon-Krespin writes: “His (Gulen’s) followers target youth in the eighth through twelfth grades, mentor and indoctrinate them in the ışıkevi, educate them in the Fethullah schools, and prepare them for future careers in legal, political, and educational professions in order to create the ruling classes of the future Islamist, Turkish state.”
Even more telling is a comment from Nurettin Veren, Gulen’s right hand man for 35 years, who said: “These schools are like shop windows. Recruitment and Islamization are carried out through night classes.
The use of the Islamic practice of taqiyya or deception to mask the true nature of the schools has been upheld by Gulen himself. In a 1999 sermon, the Turkish pasha offered the following advice to his followers:
You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers … until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria … like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it … You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey … Until that time, any step taken would be too early—like breaking an egg without waiting the full forty days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all -in confidence … trusting your loyalty and secrecy. I know that when you leave here - [just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here.
Fethullah Gulen has been called the “most dangerous Islamist” in the world. He has amassed a fortune – thanks, in part, to the CIA – of $25 billion. This money has been used to transform the secular government of Turkey into an Islamic Republic under the Justice and Democratic Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma, AKP) – a party under the Gulen’s control.
Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s first Islamist President, is a Gulen disciple along with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Yusuf Ziya Ozcan, the head of Turkey’s Council of Higher Education. Under the AKP, Turkey has transformed from a secular state into an Islamic country with 85,000 active mosques – one for every 350 citizens – the highest number per capita in the world, 90,000 imams, more imams than teachers and physicians – - and thousands of state-run Islamic schools.
Despite the rhetoric of European Union accession, Turkey has transferred its alliance from Europe and the United States to Russia and Iran. It has moved toward friendship with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria and created a pervasive anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, and anti-America animus throughout the populace.
Gulen has also established thousands of schools throughout central Asia and Europe. Because of their subversive nature, these schools have been outlawed in Russia and Uzbekistan. Even the Netherlands, a nation that embraces pluralism and tolerance, has opted to cut funding to the Gulen schools because of their imminent threat to the social order.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Paul L. Williams, Ph.D., is the author of The Day of Islam: The Annihilation of America and the Western World, The Al Qaeda Connection, and other best-selling books. He is a frequent guest on such national news networks as ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, MSNBC, and NPR. Visit his website at http://thelastcrusade.org/.
--Dr. Paul L. Williams
WILLIAMS: GULEN MOVEMENT ENGULFS LONE STAR STATE??
At the Harmony Schools which have spread throughout Texas, students are immersed in Turkish culture, customs, religion, history and language. They allegedly are taught that the Ottoman Empire represented the golden age of global civilization and that the Armenian Holocaust, in which millions of Turkish Christians were massacred, never occurred. The thousands of students who emerge from these schools advance the cause of Turkey and the New Islamic World Order, according to Act for America and other reliable sources.
Thirty-two Harmony Schools have been set up the Lone Star State at an annual expense to Texas taxpayers of $41 million.
The schools reportedly are the breeding grounds for the Gulen movement in America and Fethullah Gulen’s long-range plan to create a universal caliphate.
Seven Harmony Schools are in Houston, four in Austin, three in Fort Worth, three in San Antonio, two in El Paso, and two in Dallas. Others have been established in Brownsville, Laredo, Beaumont, Bryan, Waco, Lubbock, Carrollton, Euless, Odessa, Garland, and Grand Prairie.
The schools are operated by the Cosmos Foundation, a mysterious non-profit corporation with headquarters in Houston.
Spokespeople for Harmony in an exclusive interview denied that their charter schools are connected to the Gulen movement.
“We have no ties to Fethullah Gulen or his movement,” Sonar Tarim, the superintendent of the schools and a member of the Cosmos Foundation,, informed Family Security Matters in an exclusive interview.
Mr. Tarim, a Turkish national, also denied that the schools are Gulen-inspired and have any ties to Gulen’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) which has gained political control of Turkey.
“We have absolutely no connection whatsoever and we have one of the highest rated charter schools in the state,” Mr. Tarim insisted.
But the interview with Mr. Tarim raised more questions than answers and offered the following evidence that the Turkish administrators of Harmony are operating under the Islamic principle of taqiyya or “holy deception.”
Mr. Tarim said that the Gulen movement has no ties to the Harmony Schools. But he was obliged to admit that all Harmony schools participated in the Turkish Olympiads, an event established by Gulen for his schools throughout the country. This information comes from Zaman, Turkey’s daily newspaper, which is owned and controlled by Gulen and his movement.
Mr. Tarim said that very few teachers in Harmony Schools hail from Turkey. Yet the Cosmos Foundation has obtained H-1B visas for more than 1,136 Turks to come to Texas to teach in the Harmony Schools.
Mr. Tarim said that the Harmony Schools are not related in any way to the Bluebonnet Learning Centers, which represent another chain Gulen charter schools in Texas. Yet the Bluebonnet Learning Centers are located within the Harmony Schools and information about the centers remained posted on the Harmony website until the conclusion of the interview.
Mr. Tarim said that he and all Harmony teachers are certified by the Texas Board of Educators. Yet Tarim himself is not certified for his position as a school administrator.
Mr. Tarim said that Turkish nationals are not in control of the Cosmos Foundation and the Harmony Schools. Yet every member of the board of directors for the Cosmos Foundation is a Turkish national, and all members, save one, of the board of directors for the Harmony schools are Turks.
Mr. Tarim expressed no awareness that the Harmony schools were constructed by Turkish construction companies that reportedly are affiliated with Gulen and his movement.
The Islamic principle of taqiyya has served to characterize the movement.
In his public statements, Fethullah Gulen has espoused a liberal version of Sunni/Hanafi Islam by promoting the Muslim notion of hizmet – – altruistic service to the common good. He has condemned terrorism, advocated interfaith dialogue, and met with such religious dignitaries as Pope John Paul II, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomeos, and Israeli Sephardic Head Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron.
In private, Gulen has stated that in order to reach the ideal Muslim society “every method and path is acceptable, [including] lying to people.”
Nurettin Veren, a top administrator of the Gulen schools says: “These schools are like shop windows. Recruitment and Islamization activities are carried out through night classes.”
Bayram Balcri, a leading Turkish scholar, writes: “Fethullah’s aim is the Islamization of Turkish nationality and the Turkification of Islam in foreign countries. Dozens of Fethullah’s ‘Turkish schools’ are used to covertly ‘convert,’ not so much ‘in school,’ but through direct proselytism ‘outside school. Gulen wants to revive the link between state, religion, and society.”
Gulen, who has been labeled the “most dangerous Islamist on the planet,” has the financial means to achieve this objective. His movement has amassed more than $25 billion in assets – - a goodly portion for US taxpayers. In addition to Texas, his schools have been established at forty other locations throughout the country.
In the wake of Last Crusade reports, CBS7 in West Texas launched a cursory investigation into the Cosmos Foundation only to report that it remains “unlikely” that the Harmony Schools have only ties to Gulen and radical Islam.
The basis of the television station’s conclusion was stated as follows: “(Texas Congressman) Randy Neugebauer supports Harmony, and President George W. Bush invited Harmony Academy students to the Whitehouse in 2008.”
-- Dr. Paul L. Williams
Thirty-two Harmony Schools have been set up the Lone Star State at an annual expense to Texas taxpayers of $41 million.
The schools reportedly are the breeding grounds for the Gulen movement in America and Fethullah Gulen’s long-range plan to create a universal caliphate.
Seven Harmony Schools are in Houston, four in Austin, three in Fort Worth, three in San Antonio, two in El Paso, and two in Dallas. Others have been established in Brownsville, Laredo, Beaumont, Bryan, Waco, Lubbock, Carrollton, Euless, Odessa, Garland, and Grand Prairie.
The schools are operated by the Cosmos Foundation, a mysterious non-profit corporation with headquarters in Houston.
Spokespeople for Harmony in an exclusive interview denied that their charter schools are connected to the Gulen movement.
“We have no ties to Fethullah Gulen or his movement,” Sonar Tarim, the superintendent of the schools and a member of the Cosmos Foundation,, informed Family Security Matters in an exclusive interview.
Mr. Tarim, a Turkish national, also denied that the schools are Gulen-inspired and have any ties to Gulen’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) which has gained political control of Turkey.
“We have absolutely no connection whatsoever and we have one of the highest rated charter schools in the state,” Mr. Tarim insisted.
But the interview with Mr. Tarim raised more questions than answers and offered the following evidence that the Turkish administrators of Harmony are operating under the Islamic principle of taqiyya or “holy deception.”
Mr. Tarim said that the Gulen movement has no ties to the Harmony Schools. But he was obliged to admit that all Harmony schools participated in the Turkish Olympiads, an event established by Gulen for his schools throughout the country. This information comes from Zaman, Turkey’s daily newspaper, which is owned and controlled by Gulen and his movement.
Mr. Tarim said that very few teachers in Harmony Schools hail from Turkey. Yet the Cosmos Foundation has obtained H-1B visas for more than 1,136 Turks to come to Texas to teach in the Harmony Schools.
Mr. Tarim said that the Harmony Schools are not related in any way to the Bluebonnet Learning Centers, which represent another chain Gulen charter schools in Texas. Yet the Bluebonnet Learning Centers are located within the Harmony Schools and information about the centers remained posted on the Harmony website until the conclusion of the interview.
Mr. Tarim said that he and all Harmony teachers are certified by the Texas Board of Educators. Yet Tarim himself is not certified for his position as a school administrator.
Mr. Tarim said that Turkish nationals are not in control of the Cosmos Foundation and the Harmony Schools. Yet every member of the board of directors for the Cosmos Foundation is a Turkish national, and all members, save one, of the board of directors for the Harmony schools are Turks.
Mr. Tarim expressed no awareness that the Harmony schools were constructed by Turkish construction companies that reportedly are affiliated with Gulen and his movement.
The Islamic principle of taqiyya has served to characterize the movement.
In his public statements, Fethullah Gulen has espoused a liberal version of Sunni/Hanafi Islam by promoting the Muslim notion of hizmet – – altruistic service to the common good. He has condemned terrorism, advocated interfaith dialogue, and met with such religious dignitaries as Pope John Paul II, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomeos, and Israeli Sephardic Head Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron.
In private, Gulen has stated that in order to reach the ideal Muslim society “every method and path is acceptable, [including] lying to people.”
Nurettin Veren, a top administrator of the Gulen schools says: “These schools are like shop windows. Recruitment and Islamization activities are carried out through night classes.”
Bayram Balcri, a leading Turkish scholar, writes: “Fethullah’s aim is the Islamization of Turkish nationality and the Turkification of Islam in foreign countries. Dozens of Fethullah’s ‘Turkish schools’ are used to covertly ‘convert,’ not so much ‘in school,’ but through direct proselytism ‘outside school. Gulen wants to revive the link between state, religion, and society.”
Gulen, who has been labeled the “most dangerous Islamist on the planet,” has the financial means to achieve this objective. His movement has amassed more than $25 billion in assets – - a goodly portion for US taxpayers. In addition to Texas, his schools have been established at forty other locations throughout the country.
In the wake of Last Crusade reports, CBS7 in West Texas launched a cursory investigation into the Cosmos Foundation only to report that it remains “unlikely” that the Harmony Schools have only ties to Gulen and radical Islam.
The basis of the television station’s conclusion was stated as follows: “(Texas Congressman) Randy Neugebauer supports Harmony, and President George W. Bush invited Harmony Academy students to the Whitehouse in 2008.”
-- Dr. Paul L. Williams
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Fitzgerald: Ayatollah Khomeini and Fethullah Gulen
The Ayatollah Khomeini was forced to leave Iran by the Shah, but he found refuge in Iraq, and lived there for years until Saddam Hussein booted him out. Saddam considered him a potential threat to the Sunni despotism that, disguised as "Ba'athism," had reigned, more and less harshly depending on the ruler and the outside circumstances, in Iraq for decades. And when he had to leave Iraq, it was not clear where Ayatollah Khomeini could go. He couldn't return to Iran. But he also couldn't or wouldn't be taken in by any other Muslim Arab state, for they were all ruled by, dominated by, Sunni Arabs. They would not likely give refuge to a fanatical Shi'a Muslim who might hearten local Shi'as (in such countries as Bahrain, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen). In any case, he would be regarded with natural hostility and distrust, not unmingled with contempt, by Sunni Arabs.
But there was one country that was wiling to take the Ayatollah Khomeini in. And that country was not a Muslim state, but France. Famous for offering refuge to all sorts of revolutionaries and dissidents in the nineteenth century, the French government, or some in it, no doubt were moved by the Morality Play that was artfully constructed. According to it, the Shah, being vainglorious (he was that), and his court, being corrupt (it was that), and the regime, being allied to the Americans (it was that), was certifiably on the side of the Devil. And therefore Khomeini must have been a brave, tiers-monde debout-les-damnés-de-la-terre fighter for freedom, with - who could expect otherwise? - a special fondness and interest in Islam. But why not, and what was wrong with Islam anyway?
So he settled down, did this fanatic, into a comfortable existence at Neauphle-le-Chateau. And there he was not prevented from acting, not prevented from receiving visitors, not prevented from recording tapes full of calls for the violent overthrow of the Shah. Those tapes were then smuggled back to Iran, re-recorded by the tens of thousands, and then sent all over Iran to be listened to by others, including the rural poor and the urban bazaris. They were eager to listen to this fiery orator who was also a learned Shi'a theologian, and could appeal without any effort to the texts and tenets of Islam for support as he painted the Shah as an enemy of Islam because the Shah was a friend of, and defender of, Infidels.
Thirty years of the Islamic Republic of Iran have passed, and the hell is there for all to see. The hell of Khomeini, no sooner coming to power than reducing the marriageable age of girls to nine years, because that was good enough for Muhammad. And the hell of the execution of many of the members of the former regime, including people who were not wicked at all - such as Amir-Abbas Hoveyda - but the very best of the ancien regime, to be supplemented, later on, by the killing of some of the best Iranians in exile, such as Shahpour Bakhtiar, who had during World War II joined the French Resistance, and who, as a member of the Iranian resistance to Khomeini, having escaped the Gestapo, was many decades later murdered in Paris by Khomeini's agents.
It is amazing to me that no one in France has seen fit to utter a mea culpa (much less a mea maxima culpa) for this idiocy. For despite all his faults (and they were many), the Shah was, compared to what followed, practically Winston Churchill. And if there was one thing that characterized the Shah and the ancien regime of hoveydas and tabatabais, it was francophilia, French education, the French language. The Shah himself had attended Le Rosey in Switzerland. French lycees flourished in Teheran. The Shahbanou herself was part of the francophilia that in Iran was as notable a feature as it had been of pre-Revolutionary Russia. England was always, in Iranian eyes, the suspect, the enemy. England was the country of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. But France offered the "perfected civlisation" of Chamfort.
And yet it was France that, in offering the Ayatollah Khomeini what he could not have obtained anywhere in the Muslim world -- that is, asylum -- made possible the rise of Khomeini and the founding of the dangerous Islamic Republic of Iran. In Neauphle-le-Château Khomeini recorded those tapes which were then smuggled back into Iran and tens of thousands of copies made, and those copies sent all over Iran. The lessons of the Great Leader and Learned Theologian (an ayatollah, forsooth) Khomeini were listened to, with attention, with rapture, with fanatical faith by those sharpening their knives for the Shah, and those hoveydas, and those tabatabais.
Whoever, in the French government, had the bright idea of granting asylum to the Ayatollah Khomeini, helped to bring down the country where la francophonie and francophilia were kept alive. It was madness. And it should have been foreseen, for it was all utterly predictable, save for one thing, the other development so necessary to the resistible rise of Khomeini.
And that was the fact that from January 1977 to January 1981, during the period when the Shah's regime toppled and then fell, the people in charge of the American government, the ones most concerned with foreign policy and, specifically, with policy in Iran, were simply not up to the task.
There was Jimmy Carter, whose ostentatious piety, his treacly holier-than-thou aspect, led him even to write to the Infidel-despising Khomeini and appeal to him, ludicrously, as a "fellow man of faith." There was Zbigniew Brzezinski, harboring his resentments against those who had always been more obviously intelligent than he -- the worldly success Henry Kissinger, and even the young Stanley Hoffman, who stayed in Cambridge but was always, and obviously, to everyone from Carl Friedrich on down, intellectually superior to Brzezinski. This came out in Brzezinski's anti-Israel theme which, of course, naturally made him far less alarmed about Islam -- why, to this day he is not alarmed about, and completely ignorant of, Islam.
And the third person in this witches' brew or grim galere was the "Iran expert" Gary Sick, an Iran expert who knew nothing about Khomeini, could not read what Khomeini had so clearly set out in his own writings, and who, furthermore, was animated by the same animus toward Israel as was Brzezinski and Carter, and that always and everywhere somehow has a way of playing itself out, expressing itself, in not wanting to understand the threat of aggressive Islam. For if one were to truly understand that, then perforce one would have to be, antisemite or not, a defender of Israel as a key ally and obstacle to what is, after all, a worldwide Jihad that does not stop with Israel, or India, or even with Western Europe.
It was Carter, Brzezinski, and Sick who did not respond adequately to the appearance and challenge of Khomeini, but abandoned the Shah, vainglorious as he was, when the ancien regime, under someone more enlightened -- say, Shahpour Bakhtiar or someone of that illustrious ilk -- could certainly have survived. The fall of the regime, the rise of Khomeini, was not inevitable.
But two Western powers -- France and the United States -- helped Khomeini, the first in a sin of commission (that asylum, that refuge, at Neauphle-le-Château) and the second in a sin of omission (what the American government failed to do early on to help the Shah's forces suppress, not least by understanding and disseminating that understanding, what Khomeini was all about, not least to the Iranian left and its foreign supporters).
Why go over this business of how France so helped Khomeini by giving him refuge?
Because right now in the United States, beginning in 1998, there is a Turkish version of Khomeini. Trying to escape possible prosecution in Turkey for his assault on the secular state, he fled to the United States. He was taken in. He was allowed to remain, and he settled outside Washington, D.C. Now he has moved to a very large compound in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania. And from there, surrounded by dozens of Turks who are his followers and who act as his private retinue, he plans his course, his Muslim schools. He has founded these schools in Turkey, in Germany (aimed at the local Turks), in the United States (for example, in Minnesota, the Tarek Ibn Ziyad Academy (named after the Muslim conqueror of Spain), which has gotten into such hot water for what it preaches and teaches that even the ACLU has filed a brief against taxpayer support for such a place), and indeed, all over the globe. Now you might think of him as simply a pedagogue, a regular Jules Ferry or Maria Montessori or Rudolph Steiner, but I'm afraid that would leave out the sinister side of this man, who is perhaps more important to the Islamic revival in Turkey than either Erdogan or, before him, Erbakan. You can find out more about him by googling his name, or putting "Fethullah" or "Fethulleh" followed by "Gulen" (there are various spellings of the name) into the search box at Jihad Watch. And Paul L. Williams wrote about him in an article that fills in some details.
And among the other articles that mention Fethullah Gulen, I found one I put up at JW on July 23, 2007, and which contains a quote from him - the only change I made to the article, in the hope that you will pay special attention to those words, is to have now put them in bold:
Fitzgerald: Ataturk's legacy "Ironically, the far-right nationalists are now vehemently against the Islamists, and that's some good news. Because the Turks are fiercely nationalistic, there may be a way to resurrect nationalism and get rid of the Islamists once more."-- from a posting at Jihad Watch by a citizen of Turkey
Not sure why it should be "ironically" that the "far-right nationalists are now vehemently against the Islamists," because that was always the case, wasn't it? That has been true since the initial flourish of laws in the time of Ataturk himself -- to limit the power of Arabs, Arabic, and arabization by providing a Qur'an in Turkish and with a Turkish commentary, to make an end for Turkish of the Arabic script and adopting the Latin script, to give women the right to vote, and to create a ministry of religious affairs that would monitor or even write the sermons. In the armed forces those who gave signs of deep belief (such as frequent reading of the Qur'an) would be cashiered, and higher education was strictly secular. It was put in the hands of those who were leery of Islam. (Surely one of the first things that the new regime will attempt to do will be to take on again the universities and those who still control them. It will attempt to discharge those, especially certain brave Rectors, who have so far remained firm in keeping Erdogan and others of the Islamist line from gaining control in the Wars of the Rectors.) And of course there were new laws regarding clothing -- the banning of the hijab in government offices or on official business (see the wife of Abdullah Gul, see the wife of Tayyip Erdogan), and the forcible imposition of Western dress on men, with such measures as the Hat Act. It is much harder to pray five times a day with a Western visored cap or hat than with a fez.
The steady and relentless pressure of such laws, and of the attitude of suspicion and hostility toward Islam -- recognized as the very thing that was holding Turkey down and out -- helped create the class of "Muslim-but-secular" Turks who are a much greater proportion of the Muslim population than in any member of the O.I.C. save, possibly, Kazakhstan. (Kazakhstan registers the best results among the five stans possibly because of its large non-Muslim population -- Russians, Jews, and many other "nationalities," including, even, Koreans.)
But those laws were not end of it. Dealing with the primitive masses, the Kemalist Turks in control developed an alternative narrative to the narrative of Islam. It went like this: the "best of people" were no longer the Arab Muslims (for the Turks, like the Iranians contemptuous of the "desert" Arabs, also dimly recognized that Islam was a vehicle for Arab supremacism), but the Turks themselves, the "Sun People." Inonu worked on this. It offered the myth of "the Turk," a category that both appeared to exclude non-Muslims (Christians and Jews could be citizens of Turkey, with theoretical legal equality, but they were not "Turks.") At the same time, it backdated the claim of the Turks, back through the Osmanlis and the Seljuk Turks, back through Byzantium, all the way to the Hittites, so that everything that happened in Anatolia seemed to be appropriated into the "history of the Turk."
But more important than this has been the cult of Ataturk: the books about him, the formerly omnipresent pictures of him, the warrior at Gallipoli, the wise lawgiver pondering his nation's course at Dolmabahce Palace, the all-knowing all-wise never-to-be-questioned leader who ended up -- unsurprisingly -- as a replacement for Muhammad, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil.
In the end, the secular Turks didn't do enough. They complacently relied on the army to protect them, the army that would stage a coup and come to their rescue. But an army can stage a coup only when Islam is still in a state of weakness. Now the same infiltration that has gone on in many parts of Turkish society has also been going on, still at the lower levels, of the army. And given the way in which the Islamic forces have so cleverly used their time in office to appear, quite wrongly, as a "moderate" force, a "new kind of Islam" -- the kind of thing that the defeated secularists and Western governments all want desperately to believe because the truth is too unpleasant, too hard to take -- one wonders if the army can indeed stage another coup.
Why didn't those secularists, all these years, for the past half-century, work and work and work like madmen to change the minds of men, to continue the work of Ataturk, to substitute not a crude cult of "the Turk" and the "Sun People" and Ataturk as the Great Man, but to steadily create a class of Western men, encouraging skepticism and a spirit of criticism and self-criticism, that could exist with a reasonable patriotism? Why didn't they, long ago, begin to discuss, for example, the Armenian question? Instead of shunning the issue and trying to shut down all discussion inside and outside Turkey, they could have studied those mass murders as being prompted -- as indeed they were -- not by "the Turks" engaged in ethnic warfare, but by Muslim Turks (and Muslim Kurds too) against Armenians because they were Christians, as the detailed first-person memoirs, with the shouts of "giavour" and the fiendish glee with which the pregnant wives of priests were immolated, help to make clear. Why not, in other words, blame Islam-maddened Turks and Kurds, and not "Turks and Kurds"? That is, why not blame Islam for what happened, since it is clearly to blame?
And why did secular Turks not look closely at the example of Iran, where secular, leftist Iranians were snookered into helping overthrow the Shah by Khomeini and the True Believers, and then destroyed? (Yes, the Shah was corrupt and vainglorious, but compared to what followed, he and his court, those hoveydas and tabatabais, look better every day.) It will always be that way. The Muslims will use, as they are now using some among the secularists, to deplore the army, to deplore the laws that the threat of Islam makes necessary. And those secularists, not having studied carefully the example of Iran, fall for it. For god's sake, what happened to the elegant Bakhtiar? To Bani-Sadr? To Ghotbzahadeh? What happened to all those Iranian intellectuals? Who was jailed? Who went mad in jail? Who was tortured, who was murdered, who -- along with his wife --was decapitated, and their heads carefully placed at each end of the mantelpiece in their house, the grimmest of book-endings? Haven't the past nearly thirty years of the Islamic Republic of Iran right next door taught the Turkish secularists, the ones who think that Turkey can be just as solicitous of civil rights as the United States, what they needed to know?
The Turkish secularists let the army be their final protection. They accepted Kemalism and the benefits it brought. It made their own existence possible. But they were not grateful enough. They did not continue to work to weaken the power of Islam over the minds of men. They were not sufficiently relentless and ruthless. They did not stress or even make the connection between all the failures of Turkish society and Islam. That includes its political and economic failures: Turkey's current boom deflects attention from the high permanent unemployment rate, and may also be partly the consequence of the giant sums being expended in Iraq by the Americans, and dislocations in Iraq that redound to Turkish benefit. It also includes its social and intellectual failures: the bookstores of Istiqlal Caddesi are one thing, the Islamic bookstores quite another. Then there are its moral failures: the refusal to discuss the mass-murder of Armenians, or the treatment of the Jewish refugees on the Struma, or the massacres in Smyrna, not to mention the Varlik Vergesi (a special, confiscatory tax imposed during World War II on Jews, Armenians, and Greeks), and the attacks on the Greek community of Istanbul in 1955 (see "The Mechanism of Catastrophe" by Spyros Vryonis). All that was part of the continued discrimination and persecution that has helped to reduce the non-Muslim proportion of Istanbul's population from 50% in 1914 to 1% today.
Surely these things need to be written about, studied, discussed in Turkey -- and not only intermittently, and then by Orhan Pamuk of or someone of similar protecting fame, but continually, as part of the accepted daily fare, as openly as in Western countries their historic misdeeds are analyzed and discussed. For Turkey's secularists should wish to imprint on the collective mind the importance of study, investigation, analysis. That includes what, in the history of such mistreatment of non-Muslims, is owed to the promptings of Islam and not to some "ethnic" conflict as, at times, one is lead to believe: that "the Turks" made war on "the Armenians" when in fact it was Muslims, Turks and Kurds who made war on Christian Armenians and for reasons having to do with their being Christians more than their being Armenians.
In the schools, beginning with higher education, secularists need to insist that this subject -- Islam and its influence on Turkish behavior -- be discussed. Along with this, why should there not begin to be open discussion of how a land completely un-Muslim became Islamized, and how, indeed, so many of those who proudly call themselves Turks would discover, if they could or would investigate, that they are in fact the descendants of forcibly converted, or seized, Christians and Jews? How many fiercely nationalist or Islamic Turks, for example, were Armenians two or three generations ago?
The problem of the Turkish secularists is that they represent, at most, perhaps 25% of the population. After 80 years of Kemalism. That isn't enough. It won't be enough to withstand a cunning, tireless, relentless enemy of secularism. The Islamic side knows how to wait, and work, steadily, for their ends. For one startling example of this, see Fethullah Gulen's counsel of cunning and patience (recently translated by the scholarly Samaritans at www.MEMRI.org). Here is the most telling part:
"You must move in the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centers... until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria... like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete, and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it... You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey... Until that time, any step taken would be too early - like breaking an egg without waiting the full 40 days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all - in confidence... trusting your loyalty and sensitivity to secrecy. I know that when you leave here - [just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and feelings expressed here."
One thing the secular Turks can now do is make sure that all the Westerners they know, those long resident in Istanbul (of the Freely sort), those who come to study or trade, those whom they will continue to meet abroad, Western politicians, military men, academics, journalists, are made fully aware of their plight, and warned about the dangers of taking this "moderate Islamist" (as the BBC is now calling it) victory as anything other than a danger, a menace. The secularists should work away among the thinking portion of the Turkish population abroad -- for example, among the millions in Western Europe -- to enroll them in a campaign that can be billed as "upholding the legacy of Ataturk." (If the secularists ever manage to return to power, chastened, they must do much more than merely "uphold the legacy of Ataturk" but extend it, far beyond what they have done so far.) And those Turkish secularists who once looked to the army to rescue them in case of need, and now think that they can be rescued, or at least the problem shared with others by having Turkey admitted into the E.U., should instead realize that Turkey will not be, and should not be, admitted into the E.U., and that they will have to rely mostly on themselves, and that they cannot expect the menaced Infidels of Western Europe to share their danger in quite so immediate and menacing a way.
They should understand this rejection of Turkey's application -- understand it sympathetically. Would they, were they the citizens of Italy or France, want a Muslim country, with a population of 80 million, to become part of the E.U.? Would they want Muslims from Turkey, or other Muslims who could far more easily move into the E.U. from Turkey, moving freely about, visa-less, what would be one big Schengenland? (Think of the security problems as Arabs and Iranians -- hard for the Westerners to distinguish from Turks -- would try to enter the E.U. as "Turks.") Of course they wouldn't, and any resentment at the West for not wishing to share the problem of Islam more than it already does, is misplaced.
The Turkish secularists, like the Iranian secularists, did not realize that the primitive masses will always return to Islam -- or rather, that the hold of Islam is so great, that they will not have left it in the first place. And what happens in the capital (Istanbul,Teheran) is not what happens elsewhere. Never have the secularists, or "leftists" as they are often crudely and inaccurately called by the Western press, managed to outfox the upholders of Islam. It is always the other way round.
You don't necessarily have to see Gulen as the "most dangerous figure" etc. in the world, nor need you accept as true the more sensational claims made about him. But you know enough. You know that he is not up to any good, that is, good for us Infidels. And you know that for a dozen years he has been living safely in the United States, and even travels back and forth to Turkey. You know that when he first came here, he might have been in danger from Turkey's secularists, but now it is they who live in danger, and he could if he wished move back to Turkey. Why doesn't he?
Because here he is comfortable. Here he is entirely safe. Here the rule of law protects him. Here he can also plan and plot his moves, moves that will affect the future of Turkey, the future of Germany, and - by now you understand this - the future of the United States.
He has been extended every courtesy, provided with everything that a well-run non-Islamic polity can give - a well-run and safe and secure polity because it is non-Islamic, though Fethullah Gulen would be reluctant ever to recognize that. And all that courtesy, that generosity, that tolerance, has had no effect on him, and on his implacable desire to further the Cause of Islam. He can do no other. And that is why when he was addressing Turks about the future of Turkey - these words bear repeating, so you don't forget them -- he told them:
"You must move in the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centers... until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria... like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete, and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it... You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey... Until that time, any step taken would be too early - like breaking an egg without waiting the full 40 days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all - in confidence... trusting your loyalty and sensitivity to secrecy. I know that when you leave here - [just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and feelings expressed here."
He is not speaking about Turkey alone. He is speaking about every country where Islam does not yet dominate, where Muslims do not yet rule. It makes no difference, in the end, whether that country is now a Muslim country but with a regime that constrained Islam, as Turkey did as long as the system Ataturk put in place held, or is a country that has scarcely known any Muslims until the last few decades, and certainly has no historic connection to Islam, and was founded and developed by people who would not have lasted a minute under Islam. I mean, of course, the United States.
It is not Turkey for whom Fethullah Gulen represents a threat. In Turkey, those pressing for more and more Islam, an Islam unchained, are already winning. No, it is elsewhere that Fethullah Gulen is more of a threat, and that may explain why he chooses to continue to live, surrounded by a vast security apparatus at a compound in the Poconos, and doing, planning, plotting, scheming, about his next school, his next venture, his next move.
That should not surprise anyone. Tariq Ramadan preaches his message of an Islam that is non-threatening, and by choice does it in the Western world, addressing unwary and ignorant Infidels. Tariq Ramadan has no need to tell, and no interest in telling, fellow Muslims, whether within or without the Muslim lands, how tolerant and peaceful and splendid Islam is. They know better, and he knows they know better, and besides, he has never preached this to Muslims - it's what he preaches or teaches to non-Muslims only. They, after all, haven't read the Qur'an, the Hadith, the Sira. And they are eager to believe.
Now that Turkey is going just as Fethullah Gulen wished, you may ask why he doesn't fly home to a hero's welcome. And the answer is that he now has other, and bigger, fish to fry. He has the entire Western world to help conquer from within. He has fellow Muslims to guide. And what he says in the quote - repeated twice above -- shows that he is cunning, clever, and very very sinister.
Khomeini was given refuge at Neauphle-le-Château by the unthinking French government when he had nowhere else to go. And from that refuge, he was able from there to conduct his war against the Shah, one of the most francophilic of political leaders, with a court that looked to France for cultural guidance and inspiration. The French lycees have closed down in Iran, copies of French newspapers, access to French television, no longer available as under the bad old days of the Shah, which in France back in 1978 was seen only as consisting of "Savak, Savak, Savak." But on the other hand, in Tehran you can now find a street named, in honor of that French period of Khomeini's existence, Neauphle-le-Château.
And Fethullah Gulen was given refuge in the United States from the secular class of Turks who were, supposedly, the people who in Turkey, our "ally" and fellow member of NATO Turkey, were closest to us, and to our ways of thought and of living and of governing ourselves. And he has used his time here to support Erdogan, an enemy of the United States who is systematically undoing Kemalism and weakening those who would protect it, who were its guardians - the army, the judiciary, and the academic establishment of Turkey.
But he's not going home. He's staying here. To do what? To what end? You know what. You know to what end.
During the Cold War, a charge made against American businessmen who were willing to make commercial deals with the Soviet government was that they were doing as Lenin said capitalists would do: be willing "to sell us the rope with which we -- the Communists -- will hang them."
But in the case of Fethullah Gulen and the American government, as thirty years ago the case with Ayatollah Khomeini and the French government, is not a case of "selling them the rope with which they will hang us."
Rather, it is a case of establishing of building a whole series of brand-new rope factories, manufacturing rope that is then sold at rock-bottom prices to Muslims, and that they will understand is being sold to them so that they may do what they want with it. And what the deep and true believers in Islam necessarily have been inculcated to want to do with it is, of course, to use it to hang us and all the other ungrateful Infidels who were born Muslim (as we all are) but somehow fell away from the One And Only Truth. And even when Muhammad, the Messenger of God, arrived with that message, they refused to accept it, refused to believe. So they deserve that rope, they deserve to have that sudden drop, or that footstool kicked out from under them.
The Chinese may be out-producing us in many things. But in the production of rope for our enemies, so that they may use it to hang us, the Western world is still far ahead of China. I will even predict that no matter how they try, the Chinese, in this area, will never catch up.
-Hugh Fitzgerald
But there was one country that was wiling to take the Ayatollah Khomeini in. And that country was not a Muslim state, but France. Famous for offering refuge to all sorts of revolutionaries and dissidents in the nineteenth century, the French government, or some in it, no doubt were moved by the Morality Play that was artfully constructed. According to it, the Shah, being vainglorious (he was that), and his court, being corrupt (it was that), and the regime, being allied to the Americans (it was that), was certifiably on the side of the Devil. And therefore Khomeini must have been a brave, tiers-monde debout-les-damnés-de-la-terre fighter for freedom, with - who could expect otherwise? - a special fondness and interest in Islam. But why not, and what was wrong with Islam anyway?
So he settled down, did this fanatic, into a comfortable existence at Neauphle-le-Chateau. And there he was not prevented from acting, not prevented from receiving visitors, not prevented from recording tapes full of calls for the violent overthrow of the Shah. Those tapes were then smuggled back to Iran, re-recorded by the tens of thousands, and then sent all over Iran to be listened to by others, including the rural poor and the urban bazaris. They were eager to listen to this fiery orator who was also a learned Shi'a theologian, and could appeal without any effort to the texts and tenets of Islam for support as he painted the Shah as an enemy of Islam because the Shah was a friend of, and defender of, Infidels.
Thirty years of the Islamic Republic of Iran have passed, and the hell is there for all to see. The hell of Khomeini, no sooner coming to power than reducing the marriageable age of girls to nine years, because that was good enough for Muhammad. And the hell of the execution of many of the members of the former regime, including people who were not wicked at all - such as Amir-Abbas Hoveyda - but the very best of the ancien regime, to be supplemented, later on, by the killing of some of the best Iranians in exile, such as Shahpour Bakhtiar, who had during World War II joined the French Resistance, and who, as a member of the Iranian resistance to Khomeini, having escaped the Gestapo, was many decades later murdered in Paris by Khomeini's agents.
It is amazing to me that no one in France has seen fit to utter a mea culpa (much less a mea maxima culpa) for this idiocy. For despite all his faults (and they were many), the Shah was, compared to what followed, practically Winston Churchill. And if there was one thing that characterized the Shah and the ancien regime of hoveydas and tabatabais, it was francophilia, French education, the French language. The Shah himself had attended Le Rosey in Switzerland. French lycees flourished in Teheran. The Shahbanou herself was part of the francophilia that in Iran was as notable a feature as it had been of pre-Revolutionary Russia. England was always, in Iranian eyes, the suspect, the enemy. England was the country of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. But France offered the "perfected civlisation" of Chamfort.
And yet it was France that, in offering the Ayatollah Khomeini what he could not have obtained anywhere in the Muslim world -- that is, asylum -- made possible the rise of Khomeini and the founding of the dangerous Islamic Republic of Iran. In Neauphle-le-Château Khomeini recorded those tapes which were then smuggled back into Iran and tens of thousands of copies made, and those copies sent all over Iran. The lessons of the Great Leader and Learned Theologian (an ayatollah, forsooth) Khomeini were listened to, with attention, with rapture, with fanatical faith by those sharpening their knives for the Shah, and those hoveydas, and those tabatabais.
Whoever, in the French government, had the bright idea of granting asylum to the Ayatollah Khomeini, helped to bring down the country where la francophonie and francophilia were kept alive. It was madness. And it should have been foreseen, for it was all utterly predictable, save for one thing, the other development so necessary to the resistible rise of Khomeini.
And that was the fact that from January 1977 to January 1981, during the period when the Shah's regime toppled and then fell, the people in charge of the American government, the ones most concerned with foreign policy and, specifically, with policy in Iran, were simply not up to the task.
There was Jimmy Carter, whose ostentatious piety, his treacly holier-than-thou aspect, led him even to write to the Infidel-despising Khomeini and appeal to him, ludicrously, as a "fellow man of faith." There was Zbigniew Brzezinski, harboring his resentments against those who had always been more obviously intelligent than he -- the worldly success Henry Kissinger, and even the young Stanley Hoffman, who stayed in Cambridge but was always, and obviously, to everyone from Carl Friedrich on down, intellectually superior to Brzezinski. This came out in Brzezinski's anti-Israel theme which, of course, naturally made him far less alarmed about Islam -- why, to this day he is not alarmed about, and completely ignorant of, Islam.
And the third person in this witches' brew or grim galere was the "Iran expert" Gary Sick, an Iran expert who knew nothing about Khomeini, could not read what Khomeini had so clearly set out in his own writings, and who, furthermore, was animated by the same animus toward Israel as was Brzezinski and Carter, and that always and everywhere somehow has a way of playing itself out, expressing itself, in not wanting to understand the threat of aggressive Islam. For if one were to truly understand that, then perforce one would have to be, antisemite or not, a defender of Israel as a key ally and obstacle to what is, after all, a worldwide Jihad that does not stop with Israel, or India, or even with Western Europe.
It was Carter, Brzezinski, and Sick who did not respond adequately to the appearance and challenge of Khomeini, but abandoned the Shah, vainglorious as he was, when the ancien regime, under someone more enlightened -- say, Shahpour Bakhtiar or someone of that illustrious ilk -- could certainly have survived. The fall of the regime, the rise of Khomeini, was not inevitable.
But two Western powers -- France and the United States -- helped Khomeini, the first in a sin of commission (that asylum, that refuge, at Neauphle-le-Château) and the second in a sin of omission (what the American government failed to do early on to help the Shah's forces suppress, not least by understanding and disseminating that understanding, what Khomeini was all about, not least to the Iranian left and its foreign supporters).
Why go over this business of how France so helped Khomeini by giving him refuge?
Because right now in the United States, beginning in 1998, there is a Turkish version of Khomeini. Trying to escape possible prosecution in Turkey for his assault on the secular state, he fled to the United States. He was taken in. He was allowed to remain, and he settled outside Washington, D.C. Now he has moved to a very large compound in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania. And from there, surrounded by dozens of Turks who are his followers and who act as his private retinue, he plans his course, his Muslim schools. He has founded these schools in Turkey, in Germany (aimed at the local Turks), in the United States (for example, in Minnesota, the Tarek Ibn Ziyad Academy (named after the Muslim conqueror of Spain), which has gotten into such hot water for what it preaches and teaches that even the ACLU has filed a brief against taxpayer support for such a place), and indeed, all over the globe. Now you might think of him as simply a pedagogue, a regular Jules Ferry or Maria Montessori or Rudolph Steiner, but I'm afraid that would leave out the sinister side of this man, who is perhaps more important to the Islamic revival in Turkey than either Erdogan or, before him, Erbakan. You can find out more about him by googling his name, or putting "Fethullah" or "Fethulleh" followed by "Gulen" (there are various spellings of the name) into the search box at Jihad Watch. And Paul L. Williams wrote about him in an article that fills in some details.
And among the other articles that mention Fethullah Gulen, I found one I put up at JW on July 23, 2007, and which contains a quote from him - the only change I made to the article, in the hope that you will pay special attention to those words, is to have now put them in bold:
Fitzgerald: Ataturk's legacy "Ironically, the far-right nationalists are now vehemently against the Islamists, and that's some good news. Because the Turks are fiercely nationalistic, there may be a way to resurrect nationalism and get rid of the Islamists once more."-- from a posting at Jihad Watch by a citizen of Turkey
Not sure why it should be "ironically" that the "far-right nationalists are now vehemently against the Islamists," because that was always the case, wasn't it? That has been true since the initial flourish of laws in the time of Ataturk himself -- to limit the power of Arabs, Arabic, and arabization by providing a Qur'an in Turkish and with a Turkish commentary, to make an end for Turkish of the Arabic script and adopting the Latin script, to give women the right to vote, and to create a ministry of religious affairs that would monitor or even write the sermons. In the armed forces those who gave signs of deep belief (such as frequent reading of the Qur'an) would be cashiered, and higher education was strictly secular. It was put in the hands of those who were leery of Islam. (Surely one of the first things that the new regime will attempt to do will be to take on again the universities and those who still control them. It will attempt to discharge those, especially certain brave Rectors, who have so far remained firm in keeping Erdogan and others of the Islamist line from gaining control in the Wars of the Rectors.) And of course there were new laws regarding clothing -- the banning of the hijab in government offices or on official business (see the wife of Abdullah Gul, see the wife of Tayyip Erdogan), and the forcible imposition of Western dress on men, with such measures as the Hat Act. It is much harder to pray five times a day with a Western visored cap or hat than with a fez.
The steady and relentless pressure of such laws, and of the attitude of suspicion and hostility toward Islam -- recognized as the very thing that was holding Turkey down and out -- helped create the class of "Muslim-but-secular" Turks who are a much greater proportion of the Muslim population than in any member of the O.I.C. save, possibly, Kazakhstan. (Kazakhstan registers the best results among the five stans possibly because of its large non-Muslim population -- Russians, Jews, and many other "nationalities," including, even, Koreans.)
But those laws were not end of it. Dealing with the primitive masses, the Kemalist Turks in control developed an alternative narrative to the narrative of Islam. It went like this: the "best of people" were no longer the Arab Muslims (for the Turks, like the Iranians contemptuous of the "desert" Arabs, also dimly recognized that Islam was a vehicle for Arab supremacism), but the Turks themselves, the "Sun People." Inonu worked on this. It offered the myth of "the Turk," a category that both appeared to exclude non-Muslims (Christians and Jews could be citizens of Turkey, with theoretical legal equality, but they were not "Turks.") At the same time, it backdated the claim of the Turks, back through the Osmanlis and the Seljuk Turks, back through Byzantium, all the way to the Hittites, so that everything that happened in Anatolia seemed to be appropriated into the "history of the Turk."
But more important than this has been the cult of Ataturk: the books about him, the formerly omnipresent pictures of him, the warrior at Gallipoli, the wise lawgiver pondering his nation's course at Dolmabahce Palace, the all-knowing all-wise never-to-be-questioned leader who ended up -- unsurprisingly -- as a replacement for Muhammad, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil.
In the end, the secular Turks didn't do enough. They complacently relied on the army to protect them, the army that would stage a coup and come to their rescue. But an army can stage a coup only when Islam is still in a state of weakness. Now the same infiltration that has gone on in many parts of Turkish society has also been going on, still at the lower levels, of the army. And given the way in which the Islamic forces have so cleverly used their time in office to appear, quite wrongly, as a "moderate" force, a "new kind of Islam" -- the kind of thing that the defeated secularists and Western governments all want desperately to believe because the truth is too unpleasant, too hard to take -- one wonders if the army can indeed stage another coup.
Why didn't those secularists, all these years, for the past half-century, work and work and work like madmen to change the minds of men, to continue the work of Ataturk, to substitute not a crude cult of "the Turk" and the "Sun People" and Ataturk as the Great Man, but to steadily create a class of Western men, encouraging skepticism and a spirit of criticism and self-criticism, that could exist with a reasonable patriotism? Why didn't they, long ago, begin to discuss, for example, the Armenian question? Instead of shunning the issue and trying to shut down all discussion inside and outside Turkey, they could have studied those mass murders as being prompted -- as indeed they were -- not by "the Turks" engaged in ethnic warfare, but by Muslim Turks (and Muslim Kurds too) against Armenians because they were Christians, as the detailed first-person memoirs, with the shouts of "giavour" and the fiendish glee with which the pregnant wives of priests were immolated, help to make clear. Why not, in other words, blame Islam-maddened Turks and Kurds, and not "Turks and Kurds"? That is, why not blame Islam for what happened, since it is clearly to blame?
And why did secular Turks not look closely at the example of Iran, where secular, leftist Iranians were snookered into helping overthrow the Shah by Khomeini and the True Believers, and then destroyed? (Yes, the Shah was corrupt and vainglorious, but compared to what followed, he and his court, those hoveydas and tabatabais, look better every day.) It will always be that way. The Muslims will use, as they are now using some among the secularists, to deplore the army, to deplore the laws that the threat of Islam makes necessary. And those secularists, not having studied carefully the example of Iran, fall for it. For god's sake, what happened to the elegant Bakhtiar? To Bani-Sadr? To Ghotbzahadeh? What happened to all those Iranian intellectuals? Who was jailed? Who went mad in jail? Who was tortured, who was murdered, who -- along with his wife --was decapitated, and their heads carefully placed at each end of the mantelpiece in their house, the grimmest of book-endings? Haven't the past nearly thirty years of the Islamic Republic of Iran right next door taught the Turkish secularists, the ones who think that Turkey can be just as solicitous of civil rights as the United States, what they needed to know?
The Turkish secularists let the army be their final protection. They accepted Kemalism and the benefits it brought. It made their own existence possible. But they were not grateful enough. They did not continue to work to weaken the power of Islam over the minds of men. They were not sufficiently relentless and ruthless. They did not stress or even make the connection between all the failures of Turkish society and Islam. That includes its political and economic failures: Turkey's current boom deflects attention from the high permanent unemployment rate, and may also be partly the consequence of the giant sums being expended in Iraq by the Americans, and dislocations in Iraq that redound to Turkish benefit. It also includes its social and intellectual failures: the bookstores of Istiqlal Caddesi are one thing, the Islamic bookstores quite another. Then there are its moral failures: the refusal to discuss the mass-murder of Armenians, or the treatment of the Jewish refugees on the Struma, or the massacres in Smyrna, not to mention the Varlik Vergesi (a special, confiscatory tax imposed during World War II on Jews, Armenians, and Greeks), and the attacks on the Greek community of Istanbul in 1955 (see "The Mechanism of Catastrophe" by Spyros Vryonis). All that was part of the continued discrimination and persecution that has helped to reduce the non-Muslim proportion of Istanbul's population from 50% in 1914 to 1% today.
Surely these things need to be written about, studied, discussed in Turkey -- and not only intermittently, and then by Orhan Pamuk of or someone of similar protecting fame, but continually, as part of the accepted daily fare, as openly as in Western countries their historic misdeeds are analyzed and discussed. For Turkey's secularists should wish to imprint on the collective mind the importance of study, investigation, analysis. That includes what, in the history of such mistreatment of non-Muslims, is owed to the promptings of Islam and not to some "ethnic" conflict as, at times, one is lead to believe: that "the Turks" made war on "the Armenians" when in fact it was Muslims, Turks and Kurds who made war on Christian Armenians and for reasons having to do with their being Christians more than their being Armenians.
In the schools, beginning with higher education, secularists need to insist that this subject -- Islam and its influence on Turkish behavior -- be discussed. Along with this, why should there not begin to be open discussion of how a land completely un-Muslim became Islamized, and how, indeed, so many of those who proudly call themselves Turks would discover, if they could or would investigate, that they are in fact the descendants of forcibly converted, or seized, Christians and Jews? How many fiercely nationalist or Islamic Turks, for example, were Armenians two or three generations ago?
The problem of the Turkish secularists is that they represent, at most, perhaps 25% of the population. After 80 years of Kemalism. That isn't enough. It won't be enough to withstand a cunning, tireless, relentless enemy of secularism. The Islamic side knows how to wait, and work, steadily, for their ends. For one startling example of this, see Fethullah Gulen's counsel of cunning and patience (recently translated by the scholarly Samaritans at www.MEMRI.org). Here is the most telling part:
"You must move in the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centers... until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria... like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete, and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it... You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey... Until that time, any step taken would be too early - like breaking an egg without waiting the full 40 days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all - in confidence... trusting your loyalty and sensitivity to secrecy. I know that when you leave here - [just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and feelings expressed here."
One thing the secular Turks can now do is make sure that all the Westerners they know, those long resident in Istanbul (of the Freely sort), those who come to study or trade, those whom they will continue to meet abroad, Western politicians, military men, academics, journalists, are made fully aware of their plight, and warned about the dangers of taking this "moderate Islamist" (as the BBC is now calling it) victory as anything other than a danger, a menace. The secularists should work away among the thinking portion of the Turkish population abroad -- for example, among the millions in Western Europe -- to enroll them in a campaign that can be billed as "upholding the legacy of Ataturk." (If the secularists ever manage to return to power, chastened, they must do much more than merely "uphold the legacy of Ataturk" but extend it, far beyond what they have done so far.) And those Turkish secularists who once looked to the army to rescue them in case of need, and now think that they can be rescued, or at least the problem shared with others by having Turkey admitted into the E.U., should instead realize that Turkey will not be, and should not be, admitted into the E.U., and that they will have to rely mostly on themselves, and that they cannot expect the menaced Infidels of Western Europe to share their danger in quite so immediate and menacing a way.
They should understand this rejection of Turkey's application -- understand it sympathetically. Would they, were they the citizens of Italy or France, want a Muslim country, with a population of 80 million, to become part of the E.U.? Would they want Muslims from Turkey, or other Muslims who could far more easily move into the E.U. from Turkey, moving freely about, visa-less, what would be one big Schengenland? (Think of the security problems as Arabs and Iranians -- hard for the Westerners to distinguish from Turks -- would try to enter the E.U. as "Turks.") Of course they wouldn't, and any resentment at the West for not wishing to share the problem of Islam more than it already does, is misplaced.
The Turkish secularists, like the Iranian secularists, did not realize that the primitive masses will always return to Islam -- or rather, that the hold of Islam is so great, that they will not have left it in the first place. And what happens in the capital (Istanbul,Teheran) is not what happens elsewhere. Never have the secularists, or "leftists" as they are often crudely and inaccurately called by the Western press, managed to outfox the upholders of Islam. It is always the other way round.
You don't necessarily have to see Gulen as the "most dangerous figure" etc. in the world, nor need you accept as true the more sensational claims made about him. But you know enough. You know that he is not up to any good, that is, good for us Infidels. And you know that for a dozen years he has been living safely in the United States, and even travels back and forth to Turkey. You know that when he first came here, he might have been in danger from Turkey's secularists, but now it is they who live in danger, and he could if he wished move back to Turkey. Why doesn't he?
Because here he is comfortable. Here he is entirely safe. Here the rule of law protects him. Here he can also plan and plot his moves, moves that will affect the future of Turkey, the future of Germany, and - by now you understand this - the future of the United States.
He has been extended every courtesy, provided with everything that a well-run non-Islamic polity can give - a well-run and safe and secure polity because it is non-Islamic, though Fethullah Gulen would be reluctant ever to recognize that. And all that courtesy, that generosity, that tolerance, has had no effect on him, and on his implacable desire to further the Cause of Islam. He can do no other. And that is why when he was addressing Turks about the future of Turkey - these words bear repeating, so you don't forget them -- he told them:
"You must move in the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centers... until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria... like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete, and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it... You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey... Until that time, any step taken would be too early - like breaking an egg without waiting the full 40 days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all - in confidence... trusting your loyalty and sensitivity to secrecy. I know that when you leave here - [just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and feelings expressed here."
He is not speaking about Turkey alone. He is speaking about every country where Islam does not yet dominate, where Muslims do not yet rule. It makes no difference, in the end, whether that country is now a Muslim country but with a regime that constrained Islam, as Turkey did as long as the system Ataturk put in place held, or is a country that has scarcely known any Muslims until the last few decades, and certainly has no historic connection to Islam, and was founded and developed by people who would not have lasted a minute under Islam. I mean, of course, the United States.
It is not Turkey for whom Fethullah Gulen represents a threat. In Turkey, those pressing for more and more Islam, an Islam unchained, are already winning. No, it is elsewhere that Fethullah Gulen is more of a threat, and that may explain why he chooses to continue to live, surrounded by a vast security apparatus at a compound in the Poconos, and doing, planning, plotting, scheming, about his next school, his next venture, his next move.
That should not surprise anyone. Tariq Ramadan preaches his message of an Islam that is non-threatening, and by choice does it in the Western world, addressing unwary and ignorant Infidels. Tariq Ramadan has no need to tell, and no interest in telling, fellow Muslims, whether within or without the Muslim lands, how tolerant and peaceful and splendid Islam is. They know better, and he knows they know better, and besides, he has never preached this to Muslims - it's what he preaches or teaches to non-Muslims only. They, after all, haven't read the Qur'an, the Hadith, the Sira. And they are eager to believe.
Now that Turkey is going just as Fethullah Gulen wished, you may ask why he doesn't fly home to a hero's welcome. And the answer is that he now has other, and bigger, fish to fry. He has the entire Western world to help conquer from within. He has fellow Muslims to guide. And what he says in the quote - repeated twice above -- shows that he is cunning, clever, and very very sinister.
Khomeini was given refuge at Neauphle-le-Château by the unthinking French government when he had nowhere else to go. And from that refuge, he was able from there to conduct his war against the Shah, one of the most francophilic of political leaders, with a court that looked to France for cultural guidance and inspiration. The French lycees have closed down in Iran, copies of French newspapers, access to French television, no longer available as under the bad old days of the Shah, which in France back in 1978 was seen only as consisting of "Savak, Savak, Savak." But on the other hand, in Tehran you can now find a street named, in honor of that French period of Khomeini's existence, Neauphle-le-Château.
And Fethullah Gulen was given refuge in the United States from the secular class of Turks who were, supposedly, the people who in Turkey, our "ally" and fellow member of NATO Turkey, were closest to us, and to our ways of thought and of living and of governing ourselves. And he has used his time here to support Erdogan, an enemy of the United States who is systematically undoing Kemalism and weakening those who would protect it, who were its guardians - the army, the judiciary, and the academic establishment of Turkey.
But he's not going home. He's staying here. To do what? To what end? You know what. You know to what end.
During the Cold War, a charge made against American businessmen who were willing to make commercial deals with the Soviet government was that they were doing as Lenin said capitalists would do: be willing "to sell us the rope with which we -- the Communists -- will hang them."
But in the case of Fethullah Gulen and the American government, as thirty years ago the case with Ayatollah Khomeini and the French government, is not a case of "selling them the rope with which they will hang us."
Rather, it is a case of establishing of building a whole series of brand-new rope factories, manufacturing rope that is then sold at rock-bottom prices to Muslims, and that they will understand is being sold to them so that they may do what they want with it. And what the deep and true believers in Islam necessarily have been inculcated to want to do with it is, of course, to use it to hang us and all the other ungrateful Infidels who were born Muslim (as we all are) but somehow fell away from the One And Only Truth. And even when Muhammad, the Messenger of God, arrived with that message, they refused to accept it, refused to believe. So they deserve that rope, they deserve to have that sudden drop, or that footstool kicked out from under them.
The Chinese may be out-producing us in many things. But in the production of rope for our enemies, so that they may use it to hang us, the Western world is still far ahead of China. I will even predict that no matter how they try, the Chinese, in this area, will never catch up.
-Hugh Fitzgerald
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