US Woman Targeted by Gulenist Hackers?

Here is a story that we’ve been following for a few weeks now.

An American woman who has been an outspoken critic of Gulenist charter schools was apparently targeted with a malicious email originating from a server in Turkey…

http://www.spamfighter.com/News-18398-US-Women-Alleges-Being-Tricked-by-Spying-Software-Tool.htm

 

 

Gulenists undermining peace talks with Kurds in Turkey?

For all the talk of peace and understanding, the Gulenist movement appears to have played a key role in derailing peace talks with the Kurds through their influence over Turkey’s national police and judicial bureaucracy…

http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/turkey/18062013

Washington Post: Big questions about proposed Loudoun charter school

The Washington Post has published a good article which asks pointed questions about the proposed Turkish-Gulen charter school in Loudoun County, Virginia.

The questions do not center around the Gulen Movement per se, or its mysterious founder, Fethullah Gulen, but, rather, around the curiously slip-shod way in which the administrators of this proposed school are already conducting themselves. It’s almost as if the education aspects of the school are an afterthought.

But an afterthought to what? That is the key question.

…it turns out, questions about ties to the influential preacher, Fethullah Gulen, are not the most immediate issue facing the board…

What is most pressing is the fact that the Turkish men applying to open the school have had trouble answering, to the satisfaction of board members, questions about budget, curriculum, student transportation, and other basic elements that go into running a school. Recent hearings before a three-member select committee of the board revealed gaping holes in the planning of this proposed school.

A look into one area, curriculum, reveals the problem. At one of the hearings, applicants were questioned in part about a seeming incoherence in their proposed curriculum. Then, a week later,  the applicants junked that curriculum plan and presented a new one: using Loudoun’s own “scope and sequence” (which allows consistency of instruction in each subject through the grades) along with curriculum they said they would purchase from Pearson, the world’s largest education company. This new “vision” was delivered at a hearing last Thursday, a week before the select committee is set to decide on its recommendations to the full board.

The applicants say that the curriculum won’t really be developed until well after the full Board of Education is likely to make a decision on whether the school can open, sometime in February. That’s a problem, said board vice president Jill Turgeon, a teacher and, it is worth noting, an enthusiast of charter schools — at least those with fully drawn-out  plans.

To understand just how fluid the vision for this school is, consider that it was only last Wednesday that the applicants dumped on the board members 400 pages of information related to the application. (The new data within those pages was not, it was noted at the hearing, red-lined for the benefit of the board members.) Inexplicably, about half of the 400 pages were documents directly related to the charter school in Anne Arundel that the Loudoun applicants run and are using as a model for the Loudoun school. Many of the documents don’t seem to have any application to the Loudoun school.

The Anne Arundel school, the Chesapeake Science Point Public Charter School, has had academic success but has clashed repeatedly with the Anne Arundel education officials on big issues. The school is suing the district, alleging that it has been underfunded. Meanwhile, the school won a three-year extension on its contract this past summer though it’s not entirely clear why, given all the problems cited by the county superintendent, Kevin Maxwell. In a June post I noted:

Maxwell wants the school, among other things, to hire qualified and fully certified teachers, allow parents to elect the board of directors “to reflect the community it serves,” use appropriate procurement and bidding processes for outside contracts, use the same data system that other public schools in the country use, follow board policy for the hiring of foreign nationals, and agree not to allow any of its contractors or subcontractors to “knowingly employ” anybody who has been investigated for criminal activity.

 

Those are pretty serious problems.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2012/12/10/big-questions-about-proposed-loudoun-charter-school/

A Turkish ‘Trojan Horse’ for Loudoun?

Center for Security Policy

By Frank Gaffney, Jr.

It is a commonplace, but one that most of us ignore:  If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  That applies in spades to a proposal under active consideration by the school board in Virginia’s Loudoun County.  It would use taxpayer funds to create a charter school to equip the children of that Washington exurb with enhanced skills in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.  Ostensibly, they will thus be equipped to compete successfully in the fields expected to be at the cutting edge of tomorrow’s workplace.

What makes this initiative, dubbed the Loudoun Math and IT Academy (LMITA), too good to be true?  Let’s start with what is acknowledged about the proposed school.

LMITA’s board is made up of a group of male Turkish expatriates.  One of them, Fatih Kandil, was formerly the principal of the Chesapeake Science Point (CSP) Public Charter School in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.  Another is Ali Bicak, the board president of the Chesapeake Lighthouse Foundation, which owns CSP and two other charter schools in Maryland.  The LMITA applicants expressly claim that Chesapeake Science Point will be the model for their school.

The taxpayers of Loudoun County and the school board elected to represent them should want no part of a school that seeks to emulate Chesapeake Science Point, let alone be run by the same people responsible for that publicly funded charter school.  For one thing, CSP has not proven to be the resounding academic success the applicants claim.  It does not appear anywhere in the acclaimed US News and World Report lists of high-performing schools in Maryland, let alone nationwide – even in the subsets of STEM or charter schools.

What is more, according to public documents chronicling Anne Arundel Public Schools’ dismal experience with CSP, there is significant evidence of chronic violations of federal, state and local policies and regulations throughout its six years of operations, with little or inconsistent improvement, reflecting deficiencies in fiscal responsibility and organizational viability.

Why, one might ask, would applicants for a new charter school cite so deeply problematic an example as their proposed institution?  This brings us to aspects of this proposal that are not acknowledged.

Chesapeake Science Point is just one of five controversial schools with which Mr. Kandil has been associated: He was previously: the director at the Horizon Science Academy in Dayton, Ohio; the principal at the Wisconsin Career Academy in Milwaukee and at the Baltimore Information Technology Academy in Maryland; and one of the applicants in a failed bid to establish the First State Math and Science Academy in Delaware.

These schools have something in common besides their ties to the peripatetic Fatih Kandil.  They have all been “inspired” by and in other ways are associated with Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish supremacist and imam with a cult-like following of up to six million Muslims in Turkey and elsewhere around the world.  More to the point, Gulen is the reclusive and highly autocratic leader of a global media, business, “interfaith dialogue” and education empire said to be worth many billions and that is run from a compound in the Poconos.

This empire – including its roughly 135 charter schools in this country and another 1,000 abroad – and its adherents have come to be known as the Gulen Movement.  But those associated with it, in this country at least, are assiduously secretive about their connections to Imam Gulen or his enterprise.  For example, the LMITA applicants, their spokeswoman and other apologists have repeatedly misled the Loudoun school board, claiming that these Turkish gentlemen and their proposed school have nothing to do with Gulen.

There are several possible reasons for such professions.  For one, the Gulen schools are said to be under investigation by the FBI.  A growing number of them – including Chesapeake Science Point – have also come under critical scrutiny from school boards and staff around the country.  In some cases, they have actually lost their charters for, among other reasons, chronic financial and other mismanagement and outsourcing U.S. teachers’ jobs to Turks.

The decisive reason for the Gulenist lack of transparency,however, may be due to their movement’s goals and modus operandi.  These appear aligned with those of another secretive international organization that also adheres to the Islamic doctrine known as shariah and seeks to impose it worldwide: the Muslim Brotherhood. Both seek to accomplish this objective by stealth in what the Brotherhood calls “civilization jihad” and Gulen’s movement describes as “jihad of the word.”

This practice enabled the Gulenists to help transform Turkey from a reliable, secular Muslim NATO ally to an Islamist state deeply hostile to the United States – one aligned with other Islamic supremacists, from Iran to the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas to al Qaeda.  Fethullah Gulen’s followers clearly don’t want us alive to the obvious dangers posed by their penetration of our educational system and influence over our kids.

The good news is that members of the Loudoun County school board have a code of conduct which reads in part: “I have a moral and civic obligation to the Nation which can remain strong and free only so long as public schools in the United States of America are kept free and strong.”  If the board members adhere to this duty, they will reject a seductive LMITA proposal that is way too “good” to be true.

http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/p19160.xml

A Telling Quote From Fethullah Gulen

Should Americans be concerned about Fethullah Gulen and his followers?

For some it is tough to say, simply because Gulen himself is so secretive. He is essentially a billionaire recluse who lives in the backwoods of Pennsylvania, reportedly behind 100 armed guards.

But this quote from Gulen would appear to suggest a hidden agenda that every American must think long and hard about…

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.

Turkish-Gulen Charter Schools Targeted By Federal Investigation

The Turkish-Gulen charter school movement is now under federal investigation.

This investigation may be a good start, but it is only a start at this point…

That investigation, carried out by FBI and the Departments of Labor and Education, is centered around charter school employees who are allegedly engaged in kicking back part of their salaries to the Muslim movement also known as Hizmet (service to others), founded by Gulen.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/stealth-islamist-charter-schools-under-investigation/

Welcome to Gulen Watch

Gulen Watch is a blog dedicated to investigation and education with regard to the global Islamist movement led and financed by Turkish Islamist billionaire Fethullah Gulen.

Check back frequently for posts on both background and the latest news surrounding the Gulen Movement.