The Fethullah Gulen movement, which seeks to restore the Ottoman Empire, has found a friend and benefactor in Bill Gates of Microsoft fame. Mr. Gates is ranked the third wealthiest person on planet earth.
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 nigh 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/.
Paul Williams, PhD
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