Turkey Opens Case in Pennsylvania Against Radical Muslim School Leader

Although he paints himself as a religious figure, Gulen oversees a vast financial empire that holds billions of dollars worth in assets. Not content with this lucrative endeavor, the Muslim cleric has opened hundreds of schools around the world to spread his hardline Islamic, Turkish nationalist ideology. Infowars reports:

“While the Gulen network’s influence in Turkey is allegedly based on infiltration of police and judiciary, in the rest of the world its influence is felt in schools. Estimates are that there are 300 Gulen schools in Turkey and 1,000 worldwide. In the United States there were 146 Gulen taxpayer funded charter schools as of Sep 2014.

The lawsuit states that ‘Mr. Gulen controls dozens of business entities and more than 120 charter schools in various states, many of which are or have been under investigation by state and federal criminal and regulatory authorities.’ Some of the Gulen schools have been investigated and closed but new ones continue to open. The heaviest concentration of Gulen charter schools is in Texas where there were 45 in 2014. A new Gulen school just opened in Austin, Tx last month.

Documentary filmmaker Mark Hall is nearing completion of a film, ‘Killing Ed’, that looks at problems with the charter school movement. The film focuses on the Gulen schools as a worst case example of charter schools. In our interview with Mark Hall, embedded below, he pointed out that the Gulen network is ‘educating roughly a little over 60,000 students across United States now and they’re bringing in many thousands of teachers, who are followers of Fethullah Gulen, on H1-B visas to teach at the schools.’

Gulen charter schools in the US are completely funded by taxes which Mark Hall estimates ‘excess of $500 million a year’. ‘These are funds that you and I are giving to our government and they’re going directly to this organization’, he said. So while in Islamic countries the Gulen schools are Islamic madrassas, Gulen schools in the US have to carefully avoid any overt religious proselytizing to Islam. But as Hall pointed out, ‘what you see in the schools here in United States and elsewhere is intense national Turkification of their children.’ ‘These are not Turkish kids, these are kids that have a variety of backgrounds — Hispanics, Asians, African-Americans — and you know the question is why are they being so intensely taught a lot about Turkey’.”

Source: Infowars