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DESCRIPTION:7/13 Picket Of Oakland Gulen School-Stop The Theft Of Our Public Schools 
 And Privatization-National Action Against Fethullah Gulen Movement\nStop 
 The Gulen Movement\nProtest and Press Conference\nSaturday July 13, 2013 
 11:00 AM\nPicket of \nBay Area Technology School In Oakland\n8251 Fontaine 
 St. Oakland\n\nIn Conjunction with picket of Fethullah Gulen's Compound In 
 Pennsylvania\n\nCalled By United Public Workers For Action 
 www.upwa.info\n\nNational Protests Against Gulen Movement in US 
 Schools\n\nThe Facebook page for the event (with mostly Turkish text) 
 is\nhttps://www.facebook.com/events/146697112191008/\n\nFive hundred people 
 are expected to picket Fetullah Gulen's estate in Pennsylvania.\n\nMary 
 Addi, the outspoken former Gulen charter school teacher who was interviewed 
 in the 60 Minutes segment is planning to attend, as is former FBI 
 translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds who has written a lot about 
 Gulen's shenanigans will also be attending the picket.\n\n\nUS CIA 
 Supported Turkish Pro-Islamist  Iman Fethullah Gulen's Newspaper Aman Now 
 Critical Of Erdogan 
 Tactics\nhttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/world/europe/taksim-square-protests-istanbul-turkey.html?hpw\nJune 
 12, 2013\nTurkish Police and Protesters Clash in Istanbul’s Taksim 
 Square\nBy TIM ARANGO, SEBNEM ARSU and CEYLAN YEGINSU\nISTANBUL — Prime 
 Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered his interior minister on Wednesday to 
 end all antigovernment protests within 24 hours, as thousands of protesters 
 returned to Taksim Square after riot police officers dispersed crowds 
 overnight with tear gas and water cannons.\n\nAt a meeting in Ankara with 
 representatives of the Confederation of Turkish Tradesmen and Craftsmen, a 
 labor union, Mr. Erdogan dismissed international criticism of his handling 
 of the protests and claimed that Turkish intelligence knew three months ago 
 about local and foreign efforts to inflict chaos in Turkey, according to a 
 union official who attended the meeting and who spoke on the condition of 
 anonymity.\n\n“There are people who claim this is the Turkish Spring, but 
 what they do not see is that Turkey has been living through its spring 
 since 2002,” said Mr. Erdogan, referring to the year his Justice and 
 Development Party won a majority of seats in Parliament.\n\n“By tomorrow 
 at the latest, the Gezi Park incident will end,” he continued. “This is 
 a public park, not an area of occupation.”\n\nFor nearly two weeks, the 
 prime minister has remained largely defiant, demanding that protesters 
 leave the square, placing armed police officers on standby to sweep the 
 area and insisting that the demonstrations were nothing like the Arab 
 Spring protests, which ousted entrenched leaders across the Middle East and 
 northern Africa. But as homemade firebombs and tear gas wafted through the 
 city center, it seemed that Mr. Erdogan and his supporters had 
 miscalculated the opposition’s tenacity and conviction.\n\n“Thugs! 
 Thugs!” a protester shouted at the police as she was shrouded in a cloud 
 of tear gas. “Let God bring the end of you!”\n\nThe demonstrations 
 began over a plan to tear out the last significant green space in the 
 center of the city, Gezi Park in Taksim Square, and to replace it with a 
 mall designed like an Ottoman-era barracks. Mr. Erdogan, who once advised 
 the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, to negotiate and compromise, sent 
 the police to clear the park.\n\nThe tactic backfired, leading to large 
 protests and expressions of frustration at Mr. Erdogan’s rising 
 authoritarian streak. Environmentalists and conservationists were joined in 
 the protest by radical leftists and street hooligans. Mr. Erdogan pulled 
 the police back, but for days Taksim has been a sprawling hub of grievance 
 against him and his party.\n\nOn Monday, he offered to talk on Wednesday 
 — but then he sent the police back to clear out the protesters. By 
 Wednesday morning, the operation had succeeded, but anger over Mr. 
 Erdogan’s handling of the protests had not abated.\n\nIn Taksim Square, 
 the police cleared out most of the barricades set up by protesters on 
 streets that surround the park, while anti-riot police and their armored 
 vehicles stood guard around the old opera house, which was stripped of 
 political banners and posters that had been decorating its facade for more 
 than 10 days.\n\nA smaller group of police officers circled the Republic 
 monument in the heart of the square, preventing groups from putting their 
 banners on a statue of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern 
 Turkey.\n\nThe medical aid tent inside the park had to be moved after the 
 police fired tear gas in and around it, injuring the medical workers and 
 protesters.\n\nOn Wednesday, the Bianet news site reported that Ethem 
 Sarisuluk, a protester who was reported to have been struck on the head by 
 a plastic bullet on June 1, was brain dead. Two other protesters and a 
 police officer have been killed, while at least 4,947 have been injured in 
 the violence.\n\nThousands of black-robed lawyers left courthouses around 
 the country on Wednesday to protest the behavior of the police, television 
 images showed.\n\nAfter the meeting with the labor union, Mr. Erdogan met 
 separately with a group of 11 people, including academics, artists and 
 students, in Ankara. Taksim Solidarity, an umbrella group of protest 
 organizers that had been excluded, said the meeting with the smaller group 
 was an effort to mislead Turkish public opinion and would not produce 
 anything while police violence continued.\n\nThe smoldering violence 
 represents Mr. Erdogan’s worst political crisis since coming to power a 
 decade ago. It also highlights the kind of class politics that have divided 
 society, with his conservative religious followers strongly supporting his 
 position. But his political base — a majority — has not protected the 
 economy, which is suffering as the currency loses value and the cost of 
 borrowing rises.\n\nAnalysts now worry that Mr. Erdogan, instead of finding 
 a way out of the crisis, has only made it worse by hardening divisions 
 among his constituents, and by digging in.\n\n“The leaders may be 
 searching for a way out of the deadlock,” Melih Asik, a columnist, wrote 
 in Milliyet, a centrist newspaper. “However, has inciting one half of the 
 people against the other half ever been a remedy for overcoming such a 
 crisis? If limitless anger does not give way to common sense, Turkey will 
 have a very difficult job ahead.”\n\nMr. Erdogan, in rally after rally 
 over the weekend, sought to energize the conservative masses who propelled 
 him to power by invoking his personal history as an Islamist leader opposed 
 to the old secular state and its undemocratic nature. His supporters 
 represent a social class that was previously marginalized, and Mr. Erdogan 
 has used his speeches to play on those class resentments.\n\n“The 
 potatohead bloke, itching his belly — this was how they regarded us for 
 decades,” he said in a speech on Tuesday. “They think we do not know 
 anything about politics, arts, theater, cinema, poetry, paintings, 
 aesthetics, architecture.”\n\nThough he was democratically elected, 
 unlike the Arab leaders he has counseled, commentators say he appears to 
 have appropriated several tactics of those ousted by popular uprisings. In 
 addition to sending in the police, he has blamed foreigners for stoking the 
 unrest — a refrain also heard in Cairo and Damascus, Syria.\n\n“Those 
 who attempt to sink the bourse, you will collapse,” Mr. Erdogan said at 
 one of several speeches he gave on Sunday. “If we catch your speculation, 
 we will choke you. No matter who you are, we will choke you.”\n\nBut 
 there is a danger, analysts say, because even with a strong majority as his 
 base, he is vulnerable if the crisis drags on. Several columnists for 
 Zaman, a pro-Islamist newspaper linked to Fethullah Gulen, an important 
 spiritual leader in Turkey who is exiled in the United States, have become 
 critical of Mr. Erdogan’s intimidation of the news media and his pursuit 
 of a powerful presidential system.\n\nThe White House called Tuesday for 
 dialogue to resolve differences between the government, a close ally of the 
 United States, and the protesters.\n\n“We continue to follow events in 
 Turkey with concern, and our interest remains supporting freedom of 
 expression and assembly, including the right to peaceful protest,” a 
 White House spokeswoman said in a statement.\n\nSpeaking in Paris on 
 Wednesday, Egemen Bagis, Turkey’s chief negotiator with the European 
 Union, said protesters in Taksim Square had a democratic right to protest. 
 But he said that terrorists had infiltrated the square and that Turkey had 
 a right to defend itself from violence and provocation.\n\n“Those who 
 resort to violence will be dealt with like they are in all democratic 
 societies,” he said, arguing that the situation was analogous to allowing 
 Al Qaeda to put banners or posters at the Statue of Liberty or Times 
 Square.\n\nAsked how it was that Mr. Erdogan had supported democracy 
 movements in Egypt and Syria, yet appeared to be resorting to the kind of 
 language used by some dictators, Mr. Bagis said such analogies were 
 baseless.\n\n“After the first night of demonstrations, people in Western 
 media said the Turkish Spring had started,” he said. “I highly condemn 
 that approach. Comparing what is happening in Turkey to Arab Spring is out 
 of sight, out of logic. Turkey is a democracy. There is a campaign to 
 tarnish a democratically elected government.”\n\nMr. Bagis blamed 
 unspecified outside interests for seeking to undermine and destabilize 
 Turkey and said that in due course, Mr. Erdogan would make public the names 
 of those responsible. Attempts to label Mr. Erdogan as authoritarian are 
 slanderous and unacceptable, he said.\n\nHe warned that those who tried to 
 impede Turkey’s progress would not succeed. “I have bad news for them. 
 They will not be able to stop us.”\n\nWhen the day began it appeared that 
 the government had a cautious strategy aimed at reining in the protests by 
 clearing the square, but leaving the demonstrators in the park. A Twitter 
 message from the provincial governor, Huseyin Avni Mutlu, said, “This 
 morning you are in the safe hands of your police brothers.”\n\nBut there 
 was so much distrust in the park that demonstrators began girding for an 
 attack. Some scribbled their blood types on their arms in ink, in case they 
 needed emergency care.\n\nOn Tuesday night, the police began firing tear 
 gas in the park, where many demonstrators were as critical of the protest 
 violence as of the police. “It started with throwing stones, but now the 
 extremists are sinking to the level of the police by throwing fireworks and 
 firebombs,” said Ece Yavuz, 36. “We will not participate in this 
 violence.”\n\nDan Bilefsky contributed reporting from Paris.\n\nMore 
 Scrutiny for Gulen Schools in the US\nJune 6, 2012 - 2:42pm, by Yigal 
 Schleifer \n	\n\nhttp://www.eurasianet.org/node/65507\nWith increased 
 success comes increased scrutiny, Turkey's powerful Gulen movement is 
 learning. Over the years, the movement -- founded by the charismatic 
 Islamic theologian Fetullah Gulen, who currently resides in Pennsylvania -- 
 has been able to build what is thought to be the largest public charter 
 school program in the United States, with more than 120 schools across the 
 country that receive hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money. 
 (The movement also runs a very successful schools program in 
 Turkey.)\n\nLately, though, the Gulen schools in the US have been coming 
 under increased media scrutiny, facing questions not so much about the 
 quality of education they offer, but rather about violations of financial, 
 legal and ethical standards. One of the first major pieces to take a hard 
 look at how the Gulen charter schools operate came in March of last year in 
 the Philadelphia Inquirer, which claimedthat federal authorities were 
 investigating several of the movement's schools for violating immigration 
 laws and for forcing employees to send part of their paycheck back to 
 Turkey. \n\nIn an article from a year ago, the New York Times took a look 
 at several Gulen-affiliated charter schools in Texas, also suggesting that 
 the schools are using taxpayer money to benefit the movement (known as 
 "Hizmet" in Turkish) and businesses and vendors affiliated with it. Perhaps 
 as a sign that the Gulen has truly hit the big time, last month 60 Minutes 
 ran a piece looking at the movement's US charter schools, also raising 
 questions about funny business going on in some of them (such as bringing 
 over teachers from Turkey to teach English).\n\nGulen school administrators 
 (who frequently deny their schools have any connection to the movement) 
 have defended their institutions by pointing out to to what they say is a 
 track record of academic excellence. Other defenders say the criticism of 
 the schools is fueled by a wider anti-Islam bias in the US. \n\nBut in some 
 places, Gulen schools are now in the process of actually being closed down 
 (or having their public charters revoked, which means they would have to 
 become private schools.) In Philadelphia, a movement school was one of 
 three to have their charters revoked in April "based on problems with 
 academics and administration and failing to meet state requirements, such 
 as having 75 percent certified teachers." And, as the New York Times 
 reports today, a Gulen school in Georgia has also recently had its charter 
 revoked because of questions regarding its finances. As the Times further 
 reports, an audit by the Fulton County Schools, near Atlanta, found that 
 the Fulton Science Academy Middle School and two other Gulen-affiliated 
 schools "improperly granted hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts 
 to businesses and groups, many of them with ties to the Gulen 
 movement."\n\nThe Gulen charter schools program has been able to achieve 
 its spectacular growth by staying decidedly in the shadows and keeping any 
 questions about the movement wrapped up in a gauzy haze of vagueness. From 
 now on, though, it appears that will no longer be a viable strategy.\n\n 
 IMPERIAL PHILANTHROPY: USING EDUCATION REFORM TO BUY THE EARTH AND 
 SKY\n\nTeaching as CIA Cover–Gülen Charter Schools, Dan Burton, and 
 State Secrets\nBy: Doug Martin Saturday May 5, 2012 5:07 
 pm\nhttp://my.firedoglake.com/dougmartin/2012/05/05/teaching-as-cia-cover–gulen-charter-schools-dan-burton-and-state-secrets-2/	\n 
  \nTweet1  \nThe following continues Doug Martin’s look into the Gülen 
 charter school movement, which began withIslam and the Free Market of 
 Privatized Education: “Friending” the Gülen Charter Schools. It first 
 appeared at Common Errant.\n\nBesides noting U.S. charter school 
 connections to the Fethullah Gülen Movement during her testimony in the 
 Schmidt v. Krikorian case in Ohio on August 8, 2009,* former FBI language 
 specialist-turned whistleblower Sibel Edmonds—an Iranian raised in Turkey 
 before becoming a U.S. citizen—alleges a 1990s U.S./ Gülen al-Qaeda 
 operation in Central Asian and a bribery scheme involving Indiana’s own 
 U.S. House member Dan Burton.\n\nEdmonds testified in candidate David 
 Krikorian’s defense case before the Ohio Election Commission when Rep. 
 Jean Schmidt, an Ohio Republican, filed charges against him for claiming, 
 during a 2008 campaign bid, that she accepted money illegally from people 
 with Turkey interests.\n\nEdmonds’ deposition held many bombshells, since 
 she had been translating wiretap conversations between those associated 
 with the Turkish lobby.\n\nIt seems Gülen and the U.S. State Department, 
 from 1997 to 2001, had been training al-Qaeda in Central Asian, with the 
 help of the Turkish military, Pakistani ISI, and Azerbaijan officials (96), 
 Edmonds says in response to questions from Krikorian’s attorney, Dan 
 Marino. In a subsequent interview with retired CIA-counter-terrorism 
 specialist Phil Giraldi (who believes her story),  Edmonds details Gülen 
 /U.S training missions and Turkish drug-smuggling into Chicago and 
 Paterson, New Jersey, two hot-beds of the Gülen Movement, each containing 
 Fethullah’s followers’ charter schools:\n\nGIRALDI: You also have 
 information on al-Qaeda, specifically al-Qaeda in Central Asiaand Bosnia. 
 You were privy to conversations that suggested the CIA was supporting 
 al-Qaeda in central Asia and the Balkans, training people to get money, get 
 weapons, and this contact continued until 9/11…\n\nEDMONDS: I don’t 
 know if it was CIA. There were certain forces in the U.S. government who 
 worked with the Turkish paramilitary groups, including Abdullah Çatli’s 
 group,Fethullah Gülen.\n\nGIRALDI: Well, that could be either Joint 
 Special Operations Command or CIA.\n\nEDMONDS: Maybe in a lot of cases when 
 they said State Department, they meant CIA?\n\nGIRALDI: When they said 
 State Department, they probably meant CIA.\n\nEDMONDS: Okay. So these 
 conversations, between 1997 and 2001, had to do with a Central Asia 
 operation that involved bin Laden. Not once did anybody use the word 
 “al-Qaeda.” It was always “mujahideen,” always “bin Laden” and, 
 in fact, not “bin Laden” but “bin Ladens” plural. There were 
 several bin Ladens who were going on private jets toAzerbaijan and 
 Tajikistan. The Turkish ambassador in Azerbaijan worked with them.\n\nThere 
 were bin Ladens, with the help of Pakistanis or Saudis, under our 
 management. Marc Grossman [Assistant Secretary of State for European 
 Affairs at the time and former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey] was leading it, 
 100 percent, bringing people from East Turkestan into Kyrgyzstan, from 
 Kyrgyzstan to Azerbaijan, from Azerbaijan some of them were being channeled 
 to Chechnya, some of them were being channeled to Bosnia. From Turkey, they 
 were putting all these bin Ladens on NATO planes. People and weapons went 
 one way, drugs came back.\n\nGIRALDI: Was the U.S. government aware of this 
 circular deal?\n\nEDMONDS: 100 percent. A lot of the drugs were going to 
 Belgium on NATO planes. After that, they went to the UK, and a lot came to 
 the U.S. via military planes to distribution centers in Chicago and 
 Paterson, New Jersey. Turkish diplomats who would never be searched were 
 coming with suitcases of heroin.\n\nEdmonds, before this interview took 
 place, had been fired from the FBI in 2002 for revealing to higher ups 
 security breaches and Turkish espionage at the bureau’s language 
 division. This Turkish-American conspiracy included, as well, paying off 
 U.S. officials to leak secrets and allow nuclear weapons technology to be 
 sold on the Pakistani, Iranian, and North Korean black markets. Besides Dan 
 Burton, others she implements include Illinois Republican Dennis Hastert, 
 Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Marc Grossman, Bush’s Deputy 
 Undersecretary of State.\n\nEdmonds has been gagged under a “state 
 secrets privilege” order by the Bush Administration’s attorney general, 
 John Ashcroft, from disclosing detailed information to the public, but her 
 finger-pointing has been backed up or deemed credible by many, including 
 the government’s own Department of Justice’s Inspector General and 
 Senators Patrick Leahy and Chuck Grassley.  In fact, former Turkish 
 Intelligence Chief  Osman Nuri Gundes, in a recent memoir, writes that 
 Gülen, in his Central Asia charter schools in the mid-1990s, gave cover to 
 over 130 CIA agents posing as teachers, an irony given that today Turkish 
 men on H-1B visas pose as educators in the US charter schools run by Gülen 
 followers.\n\nWhy was the CIA interested in Central Asia?  Oil and gas, 
 according to Edmonds.\n\nIt turns out, one of the Turkish groups being 
 wiretapped was the American Turkish Council (ATC). When Edmonds told 
 higher-ups that an ATC spy was working as a translator in the FBI and 
 attempting to conceal ATC’s illegal activity, Edmonds was fired. The spy, 
 Jan Dickerson, Edmonds told officials, had tried to buy her out. 
 Dickerson’s husband was an Air Force official.\n\nAs part of the Turkish 
 lobby, the ATC is a big-player in D.C. Its board is made up of and funded 
 by U.S. weapons contractors and energy companies (including Imagine 
 Schools’ Dennis Bakke’s former company AES Energy, Eli Lilly, and 
 Lockheed Martin). It is believed that Valerie Plame Wilson’s outing, 
 among other things, was a result of her investigation into the ATC. At the 
 time of the conspiracy, Brent Scowcroft, a former national security 
 adviser, was ATC’s chair. Lincoln McCurdy, who we will soon meet, was 
 ATC’s CEO.\n\nIn an interview with Electric Politics, Edmonds also 
 discusses the Association of Turkish Americans and its nationwide 
 interfaith and business chapters, which have ties to the Gülen charter 
 schools.  Citizens Against Special Interest Lobbying in Public Schools 
 (C.A.S.I.L.I.P.S) has traced Gülen-affiliated Magnolia Science Academy’s 
 Dean Sumer, in California, to the Association of Turkish 
 Americans.\n\nBURTON AND THE TURKISH LOBBY\n\nDan Burton (R, IN): “If I 
 lived in Turkey and if I were a Turk, I would want to get those terrorists 
 who cross the border to blow up my family, kill my kids.”\n\nDue to the 
 Ashcroft “gag-order,” Edmonds has not been able to say exactly what 
 illegal activity Burton was enmeshed in with the Turkish lobby.  
 Supposedly, the crimes occurred from 1997 to 2002 (page 159 PDF), the same 
 time-span in which the CIA was allegedly helping Gülen train al-Qaeda. 
 Referring to a picture gallery she set up online exposing those entangled 
 in the scandal, Edmonds, in her Ohio deposition, says this concerning 
 Burton:\n\nA. I can’t discuss the details of those individuals not legal 
 activities in the United States, but those pictures, his and others, are 
 there because State Secrets Privilege was mainly involved to cover up those 
 individuals illegal, extremely illegal activities against the United States 
 citizens who were involved in operations that were, again, against order 
 foreign government and foreign entities against the United 
 States’interests.\n\nQ. And Dan Burton is a representative, member of 
 Congress from Indiana; is that correct? Is that the right place?\n\nA. I 
 believe he is. (46-47)\n\nGülen’s name does not surface alongside 
 Burton’s during the testimony, but as I noted in a previous article, 
 Burton has accepted campaign donations from many individuals tied to Gülen 
 charter schools in Indiana. Lyndsey Eksili, wife of main Indiana Gülen 
 leader Bilal, has given Burton $1000, and Hasan Yerdelen, treasurer for the 
 American Turkish Association of Indiana, donated $1,000 in 2010, as well.  
 A former Holy Dove official, Yerdelen’s new group belongs to the Assembly 
 of Turkish-American Associations (ATAA), also mentioned by 
 Edmonds.\n\nBurton has been getting money from the Turkish PAC, too, which 
 has ties to the American Turkish Council implemented in the Edmonds case. 
 In an article about a recent D.C. gala party, the Gülen-influenced 
 Today’s Zaman details the plans of the TC-USA PAC. The TC-USA PAC goes by 
 many names. Incorporated out of Houston, Texas, it sometimes is called the 
 Turkish Coalition PAC, the Turkish American Political Action Committee, and 
 the Turkish Coalition USA PAC.  Until May 2008, its name was the Turkish 
 PAC – Turkish American Heritage Political Action Committee.  Federal 
 Election Commission records show Burton has recently gotten $11,000 from 
 this group.\n\nThe Turkish Coalition USA PAC is managed by the Turkish 
 Coalition of America’s Lincoln McCurdy, a Hanover College, Indiana, 
 graduate and former U.S. diplomat in Istanbul, who was ATC’s CEO from 
 1998 to 2004, during the alleged Burton bribery scandal. McCurdy’s name 
 appears as the treasurer of the PAC in FEC documents. The Turkish Coalition 
 of America was founded with money from Hittite Microwave head Yalcin 
 Ayasli, which since 2004, according to the Sunlight Foundation, has 
 received $30 million in contracts from the U.S. government. McCurdy is no 
 stranger to Dan Burton. Burton visitedTurkey with McCurdy and the Turkish 
 Coalition of America. Plus, in a 2009 talk at the Gülen Institute 
 Congressional Dinner, Burton praised how Dick Lugar was to be a future 
 keynote speaker at the Holy Dove Foundation, and how he himself is treated 
 like a “king” when he visits Turkey.\n\nIn the summer of 2010, Burton 
 even hired Baran Cansever to go on fact-finding missions at congressional 
 hearings.  Cansever was a former American Turkish Council intern in 2009, 
 where he helped plan ATC-funded trips for congressional staffers and worked 
 with the ATC “Chairman during Energy and Defense sessions at the Annual 
 Conference on U.S./Turkish Relations.” As I and many others have noted, 
 those associated with the Gülen-led charter schools use trips to Turkey to 
 dupe legislators across the country into buying into the Gülen story of 
 peace and love.\n\nIn November of last year, Burton and Dick Lugar were 
 hosts at a Turkish American Federation of the Midwest-sponsored event which 
 also included the American Turkish Council’s James Holmes as speaker, 
 British Petroleum’s Greg Saunders, and Fatih Baltaci, CEO of Enerco 
 Energy, along with many government officials. The Turkish American 
 Federation of the Midwest is a local branch of the Gülen-led Assembly of 
 Turkic American Federations (ATAF); the Niagara Foundation, with ties to 
 leaders of the Indiana Gülen charter school movement, is an arm of the 
 Turkish American Federation of the Midwest.\n\nAlthough Edmonds does not 
 mention Lugar in the bribery scandal, his appearance at the ATAF’s gala 
 party held at the Willard InterContinental Washington in May 2010 did not 
 go unnoticed to Today’s Zaman, which noted: “It was no coincidence that 
 Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) talked about the Holy Dove Foundation’s 
 impressive interfaith and ethnic outreach efforts in Indianapolis.” Holy 
 Dove, to refresh your memory, is one of the main Gülen groups behind the 
 Indiana charter schools. Last month, Lugar, in fact, received over $9,200 
 in campaign donations from Indiana Gülenists Mehmet Dundar, Oznur Dundar, 
 Ali Kemal Durhan, and Zehra Durhan at the Indiana Math and Science 
 Academy.\n\nCONCLUSION\n\nLast year, the FBI began investigating the Gülen 
 charter schools for visa fraud, so it will be interesting to see what, if 
 anything, is done about Gülen’s U.S. campaign to profit his movement 
 with U.S. taxpayers’ dollars. In Indiana, D.C. and across America, 
 don’t expect legislators to have the interest/and or safety of the public 
 or public schools in mind anytime soon, though. Despite Barton retiring 
 (becoming a Turkish lobbyist?) and Lugar fighting re-election with another 
 tea-party Republican, the Gülen empire in Indiana and around the world 
 will continue. According to a 2010 piece in the Hurriyet Daily News, Gülen 
 himself has called on all 180 of his organizations to be put under the 
 Assembly of Turkic American Federations (ATAF) umbrella. Gülen is 
 everywhere. When asked if Fethullah Gülen was a threat to United States 
 interests, Edmonds, in her Ohio testimony said, “One hundred percent, 
 absolutely.” Discussing the Gülen charter schools, Sibel had this 
 back-and-forth with Krikorian’s attorney, Dan Marino:\n\nQ. Did you say 
 that Gulan had set up schools in the United States as well?\n\nA. 
 Yes.\n\nQ. Are some of those in Cincinnati, if you know?\n\nA. I’m not 
 sure. I know of some in Texas. I know one in Virginia, but I don’t know. 
 They are multiplying, and they’re spreading rapidly. (97-99)\n\nThey are 
 multiplying, indeed, and more of them are being proposed in Burton’s own 
 backyard.\n\nNotes\n\n* Edmonds’ Gülen testimony segment has been posted 
 on YouTube. Video tapes of Edmonds’ whole deposition are available on 
 Brad’s Blog. Edmonds’ own Boiling Frogs blog is well-worth a close 
 read.\n\n** Edmonds’ story has been mentioned on 60 Minutes and made into 
 a documentary entitled Kill the Messenger. In January, a 60 Minutes episode 
 on the U.S. Gülen charter schools was also filmed. No word yet on when or 
 if it will air.\n\nFor Further Reading on the banal corruption of Dan 
 Burton, see:\n\n“The Hypocrisy of Dan Burton.”\n\n“Two Year Sentence 
 for Man Accused in Pakistan Spy Plot”\n\nFor more on Gülen charter 
 schools, see Charter School Scandals, Charter School Watchdog, and Citizens 
 Against Special Interest Lobbying in Public Schools 
 (C.A.S.I.L.I.P.S).\n\nThe Global Imam\nBY SUZY 
 HANSEN\nhttp://www.newrepublic.com/article/world/magazine/79062/global-turkey-imam-fethullah-gulen#\n	\n\nThe 
 leader of what is arguably the world’s most successful Islamic movement 
 lives in a tiny Pennsylvania town called Saylorsburg, at the Golden 
 Generation Worship and Retreat Center, otherwise known as “the Camp.” 
 The Camp consists of a series of houses, a community center, a pond, and 
 some tranquil, woodsy space for strolling. From this Poconos 
 enclave—which resembles a resort more than the headquarters of a 
 worldwide religious, social, and political movement—Fethullah Gülen, a 
 69-year-old Turkish bachelor with a white moustache, wide nose, and gentle, 
 sad expression, leads perhaps five million followers who, in his spirit if 
 not his name, operate schools, universities, corporations, nonprofits, and 
 media organs around the globe.\n\nLast spring, I visited the center and was 
 warmly shepherded around by Bekir Aksoy, the president of the Camp. Just 
 past a checkpoint, a portly Turkish man in a “Sopranos”-esque tracksuit 
 was stretching, preparing for a jog. Along a road leading to the pond, we 
 encountered a group composed mostly of Turkish men who had come from Japan 
 to see Hocaefendi, as Gülen is respectfully called by his followers; they 
 had been escorted onto the premises by a Columbia University student in a 
 white Mercedes. The guest of honor for the day was a professor from the 
 Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He was fishing for trout.\n\nThe 
 three-story building where Gülen lives resembles a cozy ski lodge. The 
 first floor features a large, sunny breakfast room with a number of long 
 tables. Three men sat at these tables, quietly talking. One greeted me and 
 introduced himself. He was a journalist for a once-admired, now-defunct, 
 Turkish political magazine; the others were Turkish 
 businessmen.\n\nUpstairs, on the hushed second floor, about 15 young men 
 sat on divans against the windows and on the carpeted floors, reading. One 
 had a laptop; he looked up and smiled, as did some others, but a few 
 scowled at me. We were clearly disturbing them. When a young man suddenly 
 stood up and whispered something to Aksoy, I could have sworn he was 
 complaining about my presence. Aksoy seemed to admonish him. Later, I 
 asked, “Was that young man upset that I was there?” “Our people do 
 not complain,” Aksoy replied. “They obey commands 
 completely.”\n\nFethullah Gülen lives on the third floor of the lodge, 
 but I hadn’t come expecting to see him. Gülen is ill, I was told, and 
 only sees journalists when he has something specific to say. He stays 
 abreast of the news through summaries that are provided to him each day by 
 assistants. Sometimes, these assistants, fearful of upsetting him—Gülen 
 is famously sensitive—try to shield him from the harshest events. Yet 
 despite his limited contact with the world, a sense of his wisdom persists. 
 “He knows everything,” Aksoy told me.\n\nIn a 2008 online poll devised 
 by the British magazine Prospect and the American magazine Foreign Policy, 
 Gülen was voted the most significant intellectual in the world. Graham 
 Fuller, a former CIA agent and the author of several books on political 
 Islam, says that Gülen is leading “one of the most important movements 
 in the Muslim world today.” Yet there is much about him that is not 
 known. One of the biggest mysteries is how much sway he holds over his 
 followers. Some visit Pennsylvania as much as once a month; what do they 
 want from their visits? At the end of my tour, as Aksoy was driving me back 
 to a McDonald’s near the Camp where I had left my car, I asked him 
 whether Gülen tells people what to do.\n\n“He would never tell; he 
 suggests,” Aksoy replied. “And then what do people do with that 
 suggestion?” I asked. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “If a man 
 with a Ph.D. and a career came to see Hocaefendi, and Hocaefendi told him 
 it might be a good idea to build a village on the North Pole, that man with 
 a Ph.D. would be back the next morning with a suitcase.”\n\nThe leader of 
 what is arguably the world’s most successful Islamic movement lives in a 
 tiny Pennsylvania town called Saylorsburg, at the Golden Generation Worship 
 and Retreat Center, otherwise known as “the Camp.” The Camp consists of 
 a series of houses, a community center, a pond, and some tranquil, woodsy 
 space for strolling. From this Poconos enclave—which resembles a resort 
 more than the headquarters of a worldwide religious, social, and political 
 movement—Fethullah Gülen, a 69-year-old Turkish bachelor with a white 
 moustache, wide nose, and gentle, sad expression, leads perhaps five 
 million followers who, in his spirit if not his name, operate schools, 
 universities, corporations, nonprofits, and media organs around the 
 globe.\n\nLast spring, I visited the center and was warmly shepherded 
 around by Bekir Aksoy, the president of the Camp. Just past a checkpoint, a 
 portly Turkish man in a “Sopranos”-esque tracksuit was stretching, 
 preparing for a jog. Along a road leading to the pond, we encountered a 
 group composed mostly of Turkish men who had come from Japan to see 
 Hocaefendi, as Gülen is respectfully called by his followers; they had 
 been escorted onto the premises by a Columbia University student in a white 
 Mercedes. The guest of honor for the day was a professor from the Jewish 
 Theological Seminary in New York. He was fishing for trout.\n\nThe 
 three-story building where Gülen lives resembles a cozy ski lodge. The 
 first floor features a large, sunny breakfast room with a number of long 
 tables. Three men sat at these tables, quietly talking. One greeted me and 
 introduced himself. He was a journalist for a once-admired, now-defunct, 
 Turkish political magazine; the others were Turkish 
 businessmen.\n\nUpstairs, on the hushed second floor, about 15 young men 
 sat on divans against the windows and on the carpeted floors, reading. One 
 had a laptop; he looked up and smiled, as did some others, but a few 
 scowled at me. We were clearly disturbing them. When a young man suddenly 
 stood up and whispered something to Aksoy, I could have sworn he was 
 complaining about my presence. Aksoy seemed to admonish him. Later, I 
 asked, “Was that young man upset that I was there?” “Our people do 
 not complain,” Aksoy replied. “They obey commands 
 completely.”\n\nFethullah Gülen lives on the third floor of the lodge, 
 but I hadn’t come expecting to see him. Gülen is ill, I was told, and 
 only sees journalists when he has something specific to say. He stays 
 abreast of the news through summaries that are provided to him each day by 
 assistants. Sometimes, these assistants, fearful of upsetting him—Gülen 
 is famously sensitive—try to shield him from the harshest events. Yet 
 despite his limited contact with the world, a sense of his wisdom persists. 
 “He knows everything,” Aksoy told me.\n\nIn a 2008 online poll devised 
 by the British magazine Prospect and the American magazine Foreign Policy, 
 Gülen was voted the most significant intellectual in the world. Graham 
 Fuller, a former CIA agent and the author of several books on political 
 Islam, says that Gülen is leading “one of the most important movements 
 in the Muslim world today.” Yet there is much about him that is not 
 known. One of the biggest mysteries is how much sway he holds over his 
 followers. Some visit Pennsylvania as much as once a month; what do they 
 want from their visits? At the end of my tour, as Aksoy was driving me back 
 to a McDonald’s near the Camp where I had left my car, I asked him 
 whether Gülen tells people what to do.\n\n“He would never tell; he 
 suggests,” Aksoy replied. “And then what do people do with that 
 suggestion?” I asked. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “If a man 
 with a Ph.D. and a career came to see Hocaefendi, and Hocaefendi told him 
 it might be a good idea to build a village on the North Pole, that man with 
 a Ph.D. would be back the next morning with a suitcase.”\n\n \n\nLike 
 many foreign journalists based in Istanbul, I first became acquainted with 
 the Gülen movement through a group called the Journalists and Writers 
 Foundation(JWF), which invites foreign journalists to seminars on political 
 topics and generally serves as the Gülenists’ unofficial p.r. firm. At 
 the time, new to the country, I didn’t know the JWF was a Gülen-linked 
 group. (In fact, Gülen serves as its honorary president.)\n\nBut it 
 wasn’t just the JWF. As I became more acquainted with Turkey, it began to 
 seem as if everything there was somehow linked to Gülen. Not only NGOs, 
 businesses, and schools, but also people. “This article is good,” I 
 would say. “Yes, but you know, that writer is Gülen,” would come the 
 reply. Sometimes, calling someone “Gülen” seemed to reflect fear or 
 prejudice, and pinning down whether or not any given organization was tied 
 to the Gülen movement was rarely a simple matter. As someone at the Rumi 
 Forum in Washington—another organization where Gülen serves as honorary 
 president—put it, “If you say you are in [the Gülen movement], if you 
 say that at 12:20, and say you are out at 12:21, you are out.” One 
 Turkish acquaintance joked to me, “Who knows? Every day, when I go to the 
 bakery or get my groceries, I could be giving money to Gülen. Who 
 knows!” “They’re everywhere” is a common refrain. At times, 
 suspicions about the Gülenists sound like anti-Semitism—they run the 
 media, they’re rich, they stick together, they only help their own.\n\nIf 
 you ask Gülenists—who blanch at the words “follower” and 
 “member,” as well as the term “Gülenist” (in Turkish, the term is 
 Fethullahçı, referring to his first name)—they will call themselves a 
 “faith-based, civic society movement” or a “volunteers movement” 
 made up of people who admire the thoughts and writings of Gülen. They are 
 an organic network of people, they say, whose goal is to do good works at 
 Gülen’s noble behest while spreading his message of love and tolerance, 
 as well as his vision of Islam. According to academics who have studied the 
 movement, there are, more or less, three levels of involvement: 
 sympathizers, who admire Gülen; friends, who, to some degree, support or 
 work for the movement; and the cemaat, or community, the core adherents who 
 are closest to Gülen himself.\n\nThe Gülen movement reminds people of 
 everything from Opus Dei to Scientology to the Masons, Mormons, and 
 Moonies. Mark Juergensmeyer, an expert on international religious 
 movements, says that the Gülenists echo the Muhammadiyah of Indonesia, the 
 Soka Gakkai of Japan, and various Indian guru - led or political-religious 
 groups. I’ve seen Gülen referred to as the Turkish Billy Graham. “If 
 you look at some of their educational work, they remind me of Quakers and 
 missionaries who went off to Africa,” says Bill Park of King’s College, 
 London, a scholar who has written about the group, “but if you go all the 
 way to the other end, it is a political movement as well.”\n\nGülen’s 
 views are moderate and modern. He is fiercely opposed to violence and 
 enthusiastic about science. According to Gülen, “avoiding the physical 
 sciences due to the fear that they will lead to heresy is childish.” He 
 is emphatically not a radical Islamist. “The lesser jihad is our active 
 fulfillment of Islam’s commands and duties,” he has written, and “the 
 greater jihad is proclaiming war on our ego’s destructive and negative 
 emotions and thoughts ... which prevent us from attaining perfection.” He 
 has exhorted women to take off their headscarves, a ritual he considers 
 “of secondary importance,” in order to attend university in compliance 
 with Turkey’s secular laws. His followers run nonprofit organizations 
 that promote peace, tolerance, and interfaith dialogue, and Gülenist 
 businessmen devote their resources to building secular schools.\n\nIt’s 
 no surprise, then, that Gülen has many admirers in the West. “It’s a 
 civic movement,” says Islam scholar John Esposito, one of many American 
 academics who praise the Gülenists. “It’s an alternative elite within 
 Turkish society, as in many Muslim societies, that can be modern, educated, 
 and successful, but also religiously minded.” Particularly after 
 September 11, Gülen’s movement had a lot of appeal in the United States, 
 which was suddenly desperate for “good Muslims.” “It was 2003, two 
 years after 9/11; we were just in the beginning of the Iraq war, and 
 here’s this ecumenical Muslim movement that seems to be open to modernity 
 and science and is focused on education,” said one senior U.S. government 
 official who has had dealings with Gülenists. “It seemed almost too good 
 to be true.”\n\n \n\nFethullah Gülen was born in 1941 in a village 
 outside of the eastern city of Erzurum. He began praying when he was four 
 years old, and learned Arabic from his father. At school, he met students 
 of the Kurdish intellectual Said Nursi, and effectively joined Nursi’s 
 movement, which was similar to a Sufi brotherhood. He became a 
 state-licensed imam in 1958, and, after his military service, moved to 
 İzmir. In 1969, he began preaching his own version of Nursi’s ideas. 
 Soon, he acquired a following.\n\nWith the help of Turkish businessmen, 
 Gülen began building dorms, or “lighthouses.” At the time, Turkey was 
 urbanizing at a breakneck pace. Country kids often floundered, socially and 
 financially, when they moved to the big cities. The “lighthouses” 
 provided a religious community for these young people, one that offered 
 help with academics and didn’t, say, watch porn or get carried away with 
 leftist causes.\n\nWithin these safe havens, the Gülen movement introduced 
 the pious to the possibilities of modern life. “My father was a teacher 
 in a primary school. His father was a stonecutter,” says Kerim Balcı, a 
 journalist who works for the newspaper Zaman, which is owned by Gülenists 
 and claims to have the largest readership in Turkey. “And here I am a 
 Ph.D. student, columnist, and academician probably earning my father’s 
 yearly salary in a month.” Balcı’s life story—he hails from the 
 small Black Sea city of Samsun, yet went on to receive his master’s from 
 a university in Israel and is working toward his Ph.D. from Durham 
 University in Britain—echoes the trajectory of many middle-aged Gülen 
 followers from conservative families. The Turkish state had been founded on 
 the notion that modernity meant rejection of religion—and, for a long 
 time, it was dominated by a military and a political class that enforced 
 this ideal, sometimes harshly. Gülen suggested there was an alternative 
 path. “It may be possible to be both religious and a TV commentator,” 
 Balcı says.\n\nGülenists also started to found schools. Students at these 
 schools needed books and other materials, and from İzmir, the Gülen 
 community began building publishing companies and creating audiocassettes 
 of Gülen’s sermons. Stores that are now called “NT” started to sell 
 these materials; today, there are 110 such stores in Turkey and other 
 countries. By the 1980s, the statist economy had opened up and restrictions 
 on religious groups had eased. The Anatolian middle class began to start 
 businesses and make money. Gülen encouraged his people to go abroad and 
 get doctorates in science. He instilled in his followers an almost 
 Calvinist work ethic. To this day, even detractors of the movement will 
 talk about how hard Gülenists work.\n\nTheir achievements have been 
 remarkable. In 1983, Gülen’s followers founded a conglomerate called 
 Kaynak Holding, which today includes some 15 companies involved in the 
 retail, I.T., construction, and food industries. The main division, Kaynak 
 Publishing, maintains 28 publishing labels. It produces hundreds of books 
 per year on and by Gülen, in addition to books on subjects like Sufism and 
 Ottoman history. Kaynak Publishing’s office, a beautiful white stone 
 mansion and mosque that sits on a hill on the Asian side of Istanbul, also 
 houses Akademi. According to the sociologist Joshua Hendrick, who spent 
 eleven months researching the Gülen movement and whose dissertation is 
 perhaps the most comprehensive independent analysis of it, Akademi 
 constitutes the movement’s “central ideational node,” the 
 intellectual leaders closest to Hocaefendi himself.\n\nIn 1986, Gülenists 
 acquired Zaman. Feza Media Group, which publishes the newspaper, also 
 operates an English edition, Today’s Zaman, a news agency, and the 
 magazine Aksiyon. In addition, Feza is connected to Samanyolu Broadcasting, 
 which operates several TV stations. (Here is how a spokesman for the JWF 
 describes the relationship between Gülen, Kaynak, and Feza: “Kaynak 
 Holding and Feza Media Group can be considered Gülen-inspired companies. 
 None of these companies are controlled by Gülen or have any direct link 
 with him. As with all Gülen-inspired projects, Gülen simply provides 
 inspiration, motivation, vision, and some guiding and overarching 
 principles.”) In 1996, according to University of Houston sociologist 
 Helen Ebaugh, who has studied the movement, men encouraged by Gülen 
 established Bank Asya, now Turkey’s largest Islamic bank, with billions 
 of dollars in assets. Meanwhile, TUSKON, a Turkish businessmen’s 
 association, boasts 50,000 companies as members. (“Most of our members 
 admire Gülen,” says Hakan Taşçı, the group’s Washington, D.C., 
 representative.) In 2002 came a charity called Is Anybody There?, which 
 distributes international aid—and whose sponsors include Zaman, Bank 
 Asya, TUSKON, and other Gülen-inspired groups. According to Ebaugh, 
 Gülenists generally give between 5 percent and 20 percent of their income 
 to the movement’s projects; she met one businessman who gave $3.5 million 
 annually. Every year, something called the International Gülen Conference 
 takes place in a different city; in November 2010, the Niagara Foundation, 
 whose honorary president is Fethullah Gülen, with the help of an 
 assortment of universities, will sponsor the event at the University of 
 Chicago. These conferences are often keynoted by respected intellectuals 
 such as Reza Aslan, the popular writer on Islam.\n\nEven as the movement 
 has sprouted numerous organizations and companies, the schools have 
 remained at the center of the Gülen orbit. Starting with the collapse of 
 the Soviet Union in 1991, Gülen dispatched his students to the former 
 Soviet republics of Central Asia, where he rightly suspected that they 
 might find some post-communist youths in need of religion. But it is not 
 just Central Asia that hosts Gülen schools. They also exist in far-flung 
 Muslim countries like Indonesia, Sudan, and Pakistan, as well as mostly 
 non-Muslim countries like Mexico and Japan. In total, according to Ebaugh, 
 Gülenists operate over 1,000 explicitly secular schools and universities 
 in more than 100 countries. They emphasize science and technology, teach 
 the Turkish language, and, by many accounts, are very good schools. 
 Gülenist businessmen build these institutions and sponsor scholarships to 
 them. Whenever you ask who’s funding anything, Gülenists reply “a 
 group of Turkish businessmen,” “a Turkish businessman,” “a 
 Turkish-American businessman,” or “our Turkish friends.”\n\nWhen I 
 recently visited Afghanistan, I was surprised to learn that Turks had been 
 operating schools there since the ’90s, even during the Taliban era. They 
 currently have schools not just in Kabul, but in Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat, 
 Shebhergan, and Kandahar. Behind the lovely painted-pink school in Kabul 
 were dorms where kids from all over the country sat outside, some of them 
 eager to say hello in English. Every Afghan I spoke to in Kabul, from 
 politicians to cooks, told me that “the Turkish school” was the best in 
 the city. As we left the premises, the teachers gave my Afghan translator 
 some books by Fethullah Gülen.\n\n \n\nIn February 2009, the Texas finals 
 for the Turkish Language Olympiad took place in Houston. Hundreds of 
 students were competing to land spots in the final round, which is held 
 annually in Ankara, and attracts contestants from 115 countries. In the 
 George R. Brown Convention Center, 2,500 spectators cheered and waved 
 American and Turkish flags. The hosts of the competition, two Fox-affiliate 
 TV personalities, were both decked out in “traditional Turkish” 
 costumes. “How do you like my outfit?” Mike Barajas called out to the 
 crowd. “He looks like a king, doesn’t he?” Melissa Wilson drawled. 
 “We will have four students reciting poems,” Barajas said. “In 
 Turkish. How about that.”\n\nBarajas and Wilson enthusiastically 
 mispronounced Turkish words but did much better with the names of the young 
 contestants, mainly because many of the Texas kids participating in the 
 event—singing Turkish ballads, performing Black Sea folk dances—were 
 Latino and black. As one of the young contestants, Dante Villanueva, 
 recited a very long Turkish poem—earnestly and fluently teasing out the 
 awkward 35-syllable words—middle-aged Turkish men in the audience 
 wept.\n\nThere’s a decent chance that Dante Villanueva, like many of the 
 other kids in the competition, attended a Gülen charter school. Such 
 schools—many with fuzzy-happy names like Harmony, Magnolia, Pinnacle, and 
 Amity—are only part of the cornucopia of cultural offerings that the 
 movement has brought to the United States. Houston, one of the country’s 
 major Gülen hubs, is home to the Gülen Institute; the Raindrop Turkish 
 House, which sponsors the Olympiad; and the Institute for Interfaith 
 Dialog. (“Many participants of the Institute’s activities are inspired 
 by the discourse and pioneering dialogue initiatives of the Turkish Muslim 
 scholar, writer and educator Fethullah Gülen,” is how the interfaith 
 institute’s website explains the connection.) There are similar 
 organizations across the country. Both Raindrop and the interfaith 
 institute are housed in a 30,000-square-foot building called the Turquoise 
 Center that looks like something you might see in Istanbul. Inside, photos 
 of Madeleine Albright, Kofi Annan, and James Baker—all of whom have 
 participated in the Gülen Institute’s luncheons and lectures—proudly 
 hang on the walls. At the back of the building is a mosque. Last year, the 
 building hosted a Houston mayoral debate.\n\nAlp Aslandoğan and Ali 
 Candir—respectively, the president of the interfaith institute and the 
 executive director of Raindrop—took me on a tour and showed me the 
 sketches for their new facilities. Among other things, they planned 
 construction of a mosque, a synagogue, and a church, as well as replicas of 
 the library from Ephesus and the Trojan horse of Troy. All it needed was a 
 sign that said TURKEYLAND on it, and they could start charging. “Who’s 
 paying for all this?” I asked. “A Turkish businessman,” they 
 replied.\n\nI asked to see a Gülen-affiliated charter school and was 
 brought to the Harmony Science Academy, a K-12 school and one of 33 charter 
 schools operated across Texas by a group called the Cosmos Foundation. (At 
 both Harmony and another charter school I visited in Washington, D.C., 
 people told me they were nervous about having their schools labeled Gülen 
 institutions. At the same time, almost all of the Turkish men I met at 
 these schools said they sympathized with or were followers of Gülen.) 
 “Did you wonder why this school was founded by a bunch of Turkish men?” 
 I asked the three mothers who’d been dispatched to give me a tour. 
 “Totally oblivious, didn’t even think about it!” a tall, energetic 
 woman named Colleen O’Brien immediately replied in her undulating Texas 
 accent. In a subsequent e-mail, O’Brien would tell me that she was 
 “aware that some of the Harmony staff believe in the teachings of 
 Gülen,” but said she had been involved in the school for four years and 
 had never seen any evidence of a “hidden agenda.” Indeed, each of the 
 mothers was completely enthusiastic about Harmony. And the school was 
 lovely. The couches in the foyer were unmistakably Turkish; I had seen ones 
 just like them in homes in Istanbul. Everything was strikingly clean. I 
 noticed that one of the Turkish teachers spoke rather broken English, but 
 this hardly seemed to matter. “My kid will know better than to schedule a 
 business lunch during Ramadan!” said O’Brien at one point. “I 
 didn’t even know what that was until now!”\n\nIn recent months, some 
 Gülen schools in the United States have attracted bad press in local 
 papers, amplified by Islamophobic hysteria on blogs. But both Houston and 
 Texas charter-school officials told me that they had not received any 
 complaints about Gülen charter schools, and, in fact, many of the schools 
 were high performers compared to others in the state. The public funding of 
 charter schools prohibits religion classes, and the Houston Turks I met 
 seemed careful to leave their beliefs at home.\n\nOn the way to the 
 airport, Ali Candir, the Raindrop Turkish House director, tried to explain 
 his own motivation as a Gülenist. Candir had married a Mexican Muslim when 
 he was establishing a secondary school in Mexico City, an experience he 
 spoke of with sincere and touching nostalgia. “Hocaefendi used to say the 
 idea was that Turkey was once very successful, and then it became so badly 
 considered in the world,” he said, echoing the painful feelings of lost 
 empire that so many Turks nurture. “You had to do something. You cannot 
 expect to sit in one place and things will change. You have to go off and 
 try and represent your culture and values in a good way.” Candir’s 
 statement captured a decency that characterizes many of Gülen’s 
 followers. Why, then, are so many Turks so wary of them?\n\n \n\nIn April 
 2010, I went on a JWF-sponsored jaunt to Adana, a city in Turkey’s south, 
 with a group of journalists who had, a month earlier, taken a trip to 
 Senegal on the JWF’s dime. Our bus arrived at the offices of a local 
 health care NGO; there, we were greeted by some 15 men in suits who 
 proceeded to show us a film about hospitals they were sponsoring in Senegal 
 and Congo. The film was set to melodramatic music and ended on an image of 
 a small black child holding a red balloon with a crescent and star on 
 it—the colors and symbol of the Turkish flag. We then visited a massive 
 high school and a tutoring house in a poor Kurdish neighborhood; had lunch 
 with a group of 20 businessmen who donate $12,000 per month to Senegal; 
 stopped by the local Gülenist newspaper offices; and listened to a panel 
 about media and Turkish society. Everywhere we went, we were given some 
 sort of trophy or vase or sweet.\n\nThe last event on the agenda was billed 
 as a “dinner,” but, when we arrived, I realized it was more of a 
 convention sponsored by a TUSKON-affiliated group. About 400 
 people—almost all of them men—were seated at dinner tables in a 
 ballroom. A large stage and screen had been set up at the front. I was 
 seated at one of the only female tables, a half-empty one. Another film 
 with maudlin music boomed to life.\n\nSuddenly, I heard my name. The woman 
 next to me pushed me to get up. Stunned, I stumbled to the front of the 
 room, and found myself shaking hands with some Turkish businessman while I 
 accepted another gift, cameras flashing. I suspected that, someday, this 
 photo would pop up in a Gülenist brochure, with me heralded as another of 
 the movement’s many sympathizers. I turned, exasperated, to a JWF 
 representative. He laughed at me. “Oh, no, now you’re part of the 
 movement too!” he joked. “It might ruin your career!”\n\nAt that 
 moment, I viscerally understood why the Gülenists make so many people in 
 Turkey uncomfortable. It wasn’t a question of their religious beliefs, or 
 even their earnest, if perhaps overdone, sense of Turkish patriotism, which 
 sends them to Texas and Senegal to promote their culture. No, it was 
 something else: something about the way they have gone about accumulating 
 and wielding power, while setting up what many Turks see as a parallel 
 society.\n\nIn 2000, Fethullah Gülen was charged with running a covert 
 operation that threatened the integrity of the Turkish state. The year 
 before, a video had surfaced in which Gülen said: “You must move in the 
 arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you 
 reach all the power centers. ... 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.” Gülen denied the charges, and claimed the 
 video had been tampered with. (His defense was certainly plausible, given 
 the military’s crackdown on various religious groups in the late 
 1990s.)\n\nAround that time, Gülen, who was suffering from health 
 problems, left for America, where he has lived ever since. In 2001, he 
 applied for a green card. After much wrangling with the Department of 
 Homeland Security, and with the signed support of American luminaries like 
 former ambassador to Turkey Morton Abramowitz, he got it. He was acquitted 
 of all charges of conspiracy in Turkey in 2006.\n\nBy then, the tables had 
 begun to turn in Turkish politics. The authoritarian heyday of the 
 secularists and their allies in the military was over. With the rise to 
 power of the religious Justice and Development Party (AKP)—and, in 
 particular, its charismatic and savvy leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—the 
 secular elites were now on the defensive. Erdoğan was not himself a 
 Gülenist. But both he and the movement had a common enemy in the old 
 elites. Theirs was a natural alliance. And so the Gülenists, once a target 
 of the Turkish state, now found themselves in a position of power—or so 
 it seemed to the many secular Turks who would, in the years to come, 
 gradually grow more and more paranoid about them.\n\nIn 2007, Turkish 
 police began arresting members of something called the Ergenekon 
 organization for planning to foment chaos that would bring down the AKP 
 government. More than 200 nationalist and secularist characters—from 
 ex-military officers to journalists to university rectors—were arrested, 
 and many of them are still in jail. Newspapers reported that Ergenekon had 
 plotted to kill Armenians, Kurds, religious leaders, and Nobel laureate 
 Orhan Pamuk, among others. The AKP, the Gülenist media, and many 
 liberals—who were tired of the way the secular nationalists had thwarted 
 democracy for generations—welcomed the trials.\n\nAnd many of the accused 
 were, in fact, thugs who had long terrorized Kurds, Armenians, leftists, 
 and others with their uniquely insane brand of Turkish ultra-nationalism. 
 But some argued that among the accused were innocent targets of the AKP, 
 which was trying to strike a final blow against the secularist elite. When 
 policemen raided the house of Türkan Saylan—a doctor, feminist activist, 
 and staunch secularist who at the time was dying of breast 
 cancer—suspicions about the investigation intensified. Moreover, none of 
 the people arrested as part of the investigation has ever actually been 
 convicted. Turkey scholar Gareth Jenkins has argued that there is no proof 
 that the Ergenekon organization “as described in the indictments actually 
 exists.” Yet since Ergenekon, there have been other similar cases, mostly 
 targeting former military officers.\n\nThere was no evidence that the 
 Gülenists had played any role in the Ergenekon arrests, but that did not 
 stop many Turks from being suspicious. The Gülenist media were some of the 
 loudest champions of every odd detail propagated about the Ergenekon gang. 
 Meanwhile, it became conventional wisdom in Turkey that there were 
 significant numbers of Gülenists in the police force. “It is no secret 
 that politically-motivated judicial cases such as the Ergenekon 
 investigation are primarily driven by members of the Gülen movement, both 
 in the police and the judicial system and in the media,” argued 
 Jenkins.\n\nThe senior American government official who described the warm 
 reception given to the Gülenists after September 11 says that while the 
 movement seemed benevolent at first, “then it became clearer they had 
 penetrated the intelligence apparatus of the Turkish National Police and 
 that they were using it for some purpose, clearly for wiretaps and leaks to 
 newspapers.” “There has been, or is now, a long march through the 
 institutions,” says Bill Park of King’s College. “Even in places like 
 the foreign ministry, it seems that Gülenists are starting to appear. What 
 a lot of people tell me, in a way that I am starting to believe, is that 
 they set up parallel structures within government institutions which might 
 sometimes bypass the official structure of which they are part.”\n\nThe 
 Gülenists deny these allegations, claim to support the Ergenekon arrests 
 in the name of democracy, and suggest that there is nothing suspicious 
 about the fact that followers of Gülen now work inside the state 
 apparatus. And indeed, it often seems that both sides in Turkish 
 politics—the old secular elite and the new religious elite—are given to 
 paranoid thinking about their opponents.\n\nWhat is undeniable, though, is 
 that the Gülenists have not helped their case by eschewing transparency. 
 So little is known about how the movement is structured, or whether it is 
 structured at all. “No society would tolerate this big of an organization 
 being this untransparent,” says Hakan Altınay, the former executive 
 director of the Open Society Foundation (OSF) in Istanbul. “There needs 
 to be more information about who they are, what they are doing—mission 
 statement, board, and some kind of financial statement.” Columnist Aslı 
 Aydıntaşbaş, who praises the Gülen-linked schools and the movement’s 
 moderate version of Islam, nevertheless notes that “they’re not a 
 political party, so I can’t vote them in and vote them out.” Süheyl 
 Batum, an expert on constitutional law and the former president of 
 Istanbul’s Bahçeşehir University, puts it this way: “I don’t think 
 a group this influential and closed is good for democracy.”\n\nGülenists 
 have a number of replies to these complaints about transparency. Some admit 
 that the movement may need to become more transparent, but others take a 
 harder line. When I told a group of men at the JWF that their critics 
 wanted them to properly label themselves as part of the Gülen movement, 
 one of them replied heatedly, “Why? I support the ideas of Gülen, and I 
 support the ideas of Kant. Should I wear a sign that says I support the 
 ideas of Kant?” Sometimes, they also justify their evasiveness by citing 
 a fear of persecution. But that defense seems left over from an earlier 
 time, when the secular elites had far more power than they do now.\n\nIn 
 fact, a 2009 study published by the OSF and written by Binnaz Toprak, a 
 respected sociologist, well known for her sympathy for the rights of 
 religious people, collected hundreds of interviews with people across 
 Anatolia, many of whom complained that those affiliated with the Gülen 
 movement are discriminating against non-Gülenists. Businessmen feel 
 obligated to be seen with Gülenist newspapers, and those who do not 
 support the AKP or the Gülen community cannot win state contracts, some 
 respondents alleged.\n\n \n\nWhat do the Gülenists want? One Gülenist 
 told me that the movement’s goal was the “betterment of humanity,” 
 but that does not appear to be the whole story. In the beginning, it seemed 
 that the movement was responding to a particular set of circumstances. 
 Gülen discovered that at the center of the secular Turkish Republic was a 
 desperate void. Much of the populace needed something besides Atatürk, or 
 Western values, to believe in. The story of the Gülen movement is thus 
 very much the story of Turkey’s evolution: religious Muslims using 
 capitalist enterprise to establish a foothold in a country where they’d 
 previously been left behind. These Turks were inspired by Gülen’s 
 exhortation to assert themselves as full members of Turkish society. The 
 movement’s “goal is not to establish an Islamic state,” writes Joshua 
 Hendrick. “Such a development would be counter to its real aim, which is 
 social power.” As one Turkish academic said to me back in 2007: “Why 
 would they want to take over the state? They have media, schools, 
 businesses, and the society. What do they need the state for when they have 
 everything else?”\n\nThe Gülenists also seem motivated by a sense of 
 nationalism and a desire to burnish Turkey’s image abroad. “What is the 
 impact of, say, African kids learning the Turkish national anthem, of U.S. 
 kids watching soccer games involving the top Turkish teams and being taken 
 on trips to Istanbul?” asks Park. “Turkey doesn’t yet have the 
 broader political, economic, and cultural footprint to follow through on 
 this, but one can wonder whether there is a longer game being played—that 
 the movement is putting Turkey on the map culturally and in advance of a 
 great\n https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/07/03/18739278.php
SUMMARY:Picket Of Oakland Gulen School-Stop The Theft Of Our Public Schools And Privatization-Nati
LOCATION:Bay Area Technology School\n8251 Fontaine St. Oakland\n
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/07/03/18739278.php
DTSTART:20130713T180000Z
DTEND:20130713T190000Z
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