Necessary, freedom-loving pushback. Fethullah Gulen urges Muslims to build schools to indoctrinate an entire generation using US taxpayer dollars. More here on the "Imam's Army." More on Gulen here:
Gulen left Turkey in March 1998 citing health reasons (like many, many millions of people, Gulen has diabetes). At the time he was being investigated for plotting to overthrow the secular republic to replace it with an Islamic state (he had been imprisoned for six months in 1971 under a similar charge). In the spring of 1998, a video was aired on Turkish TV in which Gulen appeared to state the following:
"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. 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."
The Gulen Charter School application was defeated by the school board, 8 to 1. Here’s the video from the Loudoun County Public Schools site.
| 4th Tuesday School Board Meeting 2013-02-27 | Feb 26, 2013 | 04h 10m | Agenda | Video | MP3 Audio | MP4 Video |
28 people signed up to speak, with the overwhelming majority against it.
Federal agencies - including the FBI and the Departments of Labor and Education - are investigating whether some Gulen charter school employees are kicking back part of their salaries to a Muslim movement founded by Gulen known as Hizmet, or Service, according to knowledgeable sources.
..... Gulen's followers have been accused of pushing for an authoritarian Islamic state, there is no indication the American charter network has a religious agenda in the classroom.
[...] Rather, it is focused on whether hundreds of Turkish teachers, administrators, and other staffers employed under the H1B visa program are misusing taxpayer money.
Here is Gulen infiltration state-by-state. Much thanks to Atlas reader Denise Lee (see below) for her eyewitness coverage:
The Loudoun County School Board met Tuesday night to decide on whether to accept the charter school application from a group with questionable ties to Fetullah Gulen. I attended the hearing and the working meeting the week before on February 19th. There were over twenty speakers signed up that night, only three of which were for the charter school, also known as LMITA (Loudoun Math and IT Academy.) I was impressed by the intelligent remarks and well thought out concerns of parents and other Loudoun County residents. They brought up the problems with the application itself that was not complete, had spelling errors and that did not address major concerns like transportation, whether a cafeteria would be provided, a budget or most importantly, what the curriculum would be. These were legitimate concerns especially since the head of the application team, Fatih Kandil, in the working meeting that followed the hearing couldn’t answer these questions and basically said that Loudoun County should give him the $8 million he was requesting and then he would show them his plan. Mr. Kandil is the former principal of the failing Chesapeake Science Point Charter School and front guy who goes around the U.S. opening these charter schools for Fetullah Gulen and his movement. You can read about what goes on in Mr. Gulen’s mind here: http://counterjihadreport.com/2012/10/08/gulens-false-choice-silence-or-violence/
The hearing went along smoothly until two men got up to speak, John Stevens and John Grigsby. Mr. Stevens accused those who opposed the school of being bigots and said that he would never want to be on their side. He also encouraged the school board to “stick it to ‘em” meaning to vote to approve the application. Mr. Grigsby spoke about how ashamed the Christians in the audience should be for opposing this school. You can see for yourselves what these two dhimmis had to say here: http://www.muslims4liberty.org/loudoun-school-board-hearings-used-by-islamophobes-to-spread-hate/ There were several really good speakers who got up and talked about why the application should be denied. Dana Weinberg is a businessman who said if this application came across his desk it wouldn’t even make it through the first round for consideration and he cautioned board members to look into their souls before making up their minds. And the last speaker, Rachel Sargent, who is a former Loudoun County school teacher and who was born in the U.S. but whose family were Christian pastors in India who were abused by Muslims, gave a brilliant rebuttal to Mr. Stevens’ and Mr. Grigsby’s obnoxious speeches and who reminded us that those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it. My favorite part of her speech, besides listing and describing all the current Gulen sponsored charter schools that are failing or have failed around the country, is when she described Mr. Kandil’s role in traveling to try to set up more charter schools by comparing it to the Beach Boy’s song, “I get around”. You can see and hear these speeches here: http://lcps.granicus.com/ViewPublisher.php?view_id=23
Fast forward to February 26th. The Loudoun County School Board again invited citizens to speak and twenty eight signed up to do so. The majority asked the board to vote no on the application. A handful of men who work in the cyber security industry got up and spoke about the need for qualified applicants who’ve been trained in math and science and how much we needed the charter school. I agree. We could definitely use a good math and science charter school, just not this one. And we had the obligatory whining from Muslims who spoke about discrimination, bigotry and the usual character assassination that results when they don’t get their way. This group included the last speaker who was a member of Muslims 4 Liberty who thought he was so cute when he got up to present a poem in the form of a rap song that basically skewered anyone who disagreed with his group as hatemongers, fearmongers, bigots, Islamaphobes, you know, the usual stuff.
When it came time for the vote, the board was having none of it. They voted 8 to 1 to deny the application although several of the board members invited Mr. Kandil’s group to try again and resubmit their application in the future. I don’t know if they really felt this way or if they were simply covering their backsides. Almost every one of the school board members said most emphatically that this had nothing to do with religious discrimination or denial because of the groups ethnicity or where they were from. Several of them seemed genuinely irritated that they had to deal with that aspect at all. No, it was all about the lack of curriculum, the serious (and sad) lack of public support, (only 135 supporters out of their goal of 5000 since August 2012, although one of our old friends, David Ramadan sent a formal letter of support in here: http://www.lmitacademy.org/images/support/delramadansupportletter.pdf)
the inadequacy of the applicant’s proposal and their inability to provide a plan for starting the school that was financially sound. You can hear what the board members had to say here: http://lcps.granicus.com/ViewPublisher.php?view_id=23
I was surprised but heartened that the Loudoun County School Board voted the way they did. But you have to understand Loudoun County, too. This is the most affluent county in the U.S. at this time. The people who live here take great pride in their schools and they didn’t want a substandard charter school going in when, as several board members and citizens said, it has to bring added value to Loudoun County Public Schools, not be the equivalent thereof. Those associated with the Gulen Group did their best to label anyone who opposed them as somehow flawed but this time it didn’t work. But, the Gulen Group will be back, trying again to bring a supremacist school to Loudoun County and getting the taxpayers of that county to pay for it. We need to keep watching them and showing up to these meetings. The price of preventing the establishment of another Gulen sponsored charter school in Virginia is eternal vigilance.
