The Gülen Cult Comes to Loudoun County Public Schools

Fethullah Gülen is a charismatic Turkish nationalist and Islamic supremacist who has created and funded a worldwide network of schools “inspired” by his example. A number of these educational institutions have been established in the United States under the guise of publicly-funded charter schools emphasizing science and technology.

The Gülen movement is moving in on Loudon County, Virginia, a wealthy suburban area near Washington D.C. Last night Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy presented his analysis of the Gülen movement and its connections with Turkish radicalism and the Muslim Brotherhood. The penetration of the American public school system is part of the overall plan devised decades ago by the Muslim Brotherhood as a “civilization jihad” to destroy American culture and political institutions from within.

Below is the press release about last night’s event from CSP, along with a video of Mr. Gaffney’s presentation:

Center shows threat posed by Islamist Gülen movement charter schools — in Loudon County and elsewhere

WASHINGTON, D.C.: Last night, the Center for Security Policy sponsored a briefing to inform, most immediately, members of the Loudoun County School Board who are actively considering whether to provide taxpayer funding to a new charter school linked to Turkish Islamist Fethullah Gülen. A version of the explosive power point briefing presented by Center President Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. and a former public school teacher, Rachel Sargent, at the Loudoun County School System Administration Building in Ashburn, Virginia is available at YouTube:

The briefing illuminates the pattern employed by Gülen and his cult-like Turkish supremacist Movement to induce school boards to charter and pay his followers to establish vehicles for indoctrinating impressionable American students, usually under the guise of enriched science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education.

At its core, this pattern involves deception with respect to the true character of the proposed school, its association with the Gülenists, and the myriad problems such Gülen academic institutions have presented to school system administrators and taxpayers from Texas to Maryland.

In the case of the so-called Loudoun Math and Information Technology Academy (LMITA), the briefing established that denials on the part of LMITA’s applicants of any relationship with Fethullah Gülen and its followers obscure the truth. On the basis of a link analysis performed by Kent Clizbe, a retired career CIA intelligence officer who has specialized in ferreting out and countering terrorist networks, at least two of the LMITA applicants have extensive ties to Gülen educational operations elsewhere across the country.

The briefing also presented the attached letter to the Loudoun School Board by Mary Addi, a former teacher in a Gülen school in Cleveland, Ohio. It draws on her own experience and that of Ms. Addi’s husband, an expatriate from Turkey who was also a teacher at that school, to make clear the Islamist character and mission of the Gülen Movement and its pedagogy.

Mr. Gaffney, whose column published in The Washington Times on December 11, 2012 addresses the danger posed by Gülenists to the students and taxpayers of Loudoun County and those of the nation as a whole, said:

The Loudoun County School Board is not the first to be subjected to the Gülen bait-and-switch. The lack of transparency fits a pattern in such applications of concealing connections to an organization promoting Turkish and Islamist agendas deeply hostile to the United States. Gülen schools prove deeply problematic to their school systems and exceedingly difficult to disestablish Armed with the knowledge that this application is, in fact, for a Gülen Movement institution, the Board has a responsibility to deny it taxpayer funding. In so doing, it can set a model for the rest of the country.

The Center for Security Policy is a non-profit, non-partisan national security organization that specializes in identifying policies, actions, and resource needs that are vital to American security and then ensures that such issues are the subject of both focused, principled examination and effective action by recognized policy experts, appropriate officials, opinion leaders, and the general public.

For more information visit the Center for Security Policy.