Showing posts with label Fethullah Gulen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fethullah Gulen. Show all posts

Sep 30, 2019

CultNEWS101 Articles: 9/28-29/2019




NXIVM, Ozen, Cult Recovery, Apocalyptic Groups, Podcast, Gülen, Fethullahist

"Convicted sex-cult leader Keith Raniere will not be sentenced until 2020, U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis said at a hearing in Brooklyn Friday [September 13, 2019].

Sporting a new buzz haircut, convicted sex trafficker and former NXIVM cult leader Raniere wore wrinkled tan scrubs and sneakers to court, in a departure from the sweaters and slacks he donned at trial.
After an emotional six-week trial, a jury in June found Raniere guilty of sex trafficking, forced labor, wire fraud, creation and possession of child pornography, conspiracy to commit identity theft, extortion, and trafficking and document servitude.

Now, one of his defense attorneys wants to become a prosecutor.

"This is a very unusual circumstance," said Garaufis on Friday in the conflict-of-interest hearing, called a curcio hearing.

It is more common for lawyers to leave the government and go to the private sector, as lead Raniere prosecutor Moira Penza did earlier this summer when she joined the boutique firm Wilkinson Walsh + Eskovitz. Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York Tanya Hajjar appeared for the government at Friday's hearing.

Hajjar signed a letter to Garaufis on Sept. 4 advising him her office had received an application from Teny Geragos, an attorney at the well-known New York defense firm Brafman & Associates. Alongside lead counsel Marc Agnifilo, Paul DerOhannesian and Danielle Smith, Geragos represented Raniere throughout his trial.

"The government respectfully submits that the pending application on the part of Ms. Geragos to the Office gives rise to a potential conflict of interest. However, in view of the nature of the conflict, Raniere may waive his rights and continue to be represented by Ms. Geragos," said the letter, adding the government thinks Raniere could waive the conflict."


Radar Online: BRANDING BODIES & FILMED NUDITY: EX-NXIVM MEMBER EXPOSES ALLISON MACK'S CORRUPT BEHAVIOR IN NEW TELL-ALL
"Allison Mack is currently awaiting prison sentencing for her racketeering crimes in the NXIVM sex cult, months after she pleaded guilty. Now, former member Sarah Edmondson is ripping the lid off of the former Smallville star's corrupt actions in the disgraced organization for the first time – and RadarOnline.com has exclusive details of the revelations.

In Scarred: The Truth Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult that Bound My Life, out on Sept. 17, Edmondson bravely comes forward about the horrific abuse she both witnessed and endured at the hands of the organization's highest executives, during the 12 years she was a member.

Edmondson, a Canada native, wife and mother of two, tells the story about how she abruptly left NXIVM in 2017 after learning that the "women's empowerment group" known as DOS that she joined was actually an inner sex ring, where women were branded with cult leader Keith Raniere's initials."
"NXIVM leader Keith Raniere is due to appear in Brooklyn federal court.

Raniere was convicted in June on charges that included racketeering, sex trafficking and sexual exploitation of a child.

Prosecutors say while NXIVM was billed as a self-help group, it was really a sex cult set up like a pyramid scheme.

Friday's hearing is to determine if there may have been a conflict of interest within Raniere's legal team.

Raniere is due back in court for sentencing on Sept. 25."

Vice: How a 'Fake Guru' Set Up a 'Wild Wild Country'-Style Commune in the Mexican Jungle
"Michael Gerard, 23, first heard about the guru Ozen online in August 2014, when he was searching for a cure to his depression.

The tall, thin student from Germany with an interest in science and politics had a diagnosis of agoraphobia and a history of suicidal thoughts. A friend described him as one of the brightest people at a boarding school they attended together. Family said Gerard badly wanted a girlfriend, but was struggling with dating.

By then, he was already a follower of Osho, the controversial spiritual leader who had built communes in India and Oregon and was featured in the popular Netflix series Wild Wild Country. Because of Osho, who died in 1990, Gerard had become a vegan, and had started meditating and practising yoga.

That day in August, he ran to his mom, laptop in hand, exclaiming that he had found a disciple of Osho, and begged her to let him go to Mexico.

The Osho disciple is named Ozen Rajneesh or Swami Rajneesh, and his legal name is Rajnish Agarwal.

In his book Tears of the Mystic Rose, Ozen claims to be the successor of Osho, writing that when the original guru died, his spirit entered him.

When Gerard found him online, Ozen and roughly two dozen followers were in the middle of building a massive ashram in the Mexican jungle, a 35-minute drive down a rough dirt road from the coastal resort town of Playa del Carmen. Drone footage shows massive concrete structures emerging from the forest canopy, arranged in a circle around a deep cenote. There was an art centre, a restaurant, a Buddha meditation hall, and dozens of cottages and studios. Wood pathways wound through the jungle connecting the buildings, and swans and peacocks roamed the property. The guru called it OZEN Cocom, after a Mayan dynasty that previously controlled the Yucatán Peninsula.

Ozen told his followers the Mexican commune would offer Osho-like meditations for free, unlike Osho International Foundation, in Pune, India, which charges $700 US to $2,200 US a month.

He immediately reached out to Ozen, telling him he was depressed, had a history of suicidal thoughts, and was desperate to join the commune.

According to emails between Gerard and Ozen, Ozen told him if he wanted to visit the commune, he had to buy a cottage. It would cost between $16,000 US and $33,000 US, and $5,000 US cash to reserve one. They were selling fast. Gerard said his mother had doubts, but the guru assured him that Ozen Cocom was a legally-registered non-profit with a board of directors and shareholders.

Gerard flew to Mexico on April 11, 2015, with about 400 euros (about $450 US). It's unclear if he ever put any money down for a cottage. Ozen did not respond when we asked if Gerard gave him money.

When Gerard arrived, he volunteered to work construction, without pay. In emails to his mom, Gerard said people at the ashram were nice to him, and they often went dancing on weekends. "Mom, I cannot express how deeply you were mistaken," he wrote. He asked her to send him money, saying everyone was investing in the project. She transferred 60 euros (about $70 US) into his account every month, but he asked for more.

In September, four months after he started working on the commune, Gerard told other residents he had reached enlightenment. But it was short-lived. Soon after, residents say Gerard locked himself in his cottage and refused to come out for days.

The next thing his fellow residents heard was that Gerard had left his cottage and walked alone into the dark, dense jungle.

No one has seen him since."
"For the past five years, I have received a daily email filled with stories about those who succumb to extreme religious ideologies. Whether it's the Nxivm sex-cult trial in New York earlier this year or the Netflix documentary series "Wild Wild Country," Americans have shown an expansive appetite for cult stories. While my interest in the topic isn't unique, it's personal: I grew up in a cult."

"The host of Snap Judgment opens up about being agnostic and rethinking the role of belief after growing up in an apocalyptic cult. Plus, the parts of your spiritual upbringing stick that with you in unexpected ways. Hosted by Lee Hale. From KUER and PRX."
Wikipedia: Gülen movement
"The Gülen movement (Turkish: Gülen hareketi), commonly know as FETÖ in Turkey (Turkish: Fethullahçı Terör Örgütü) Fethullahist Terrorist Organization, is a self-described transnational social movement based on moral values and advocation of universal access to education, civil society, tolerance and peace, inspired by the religious teachings of Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish Islamic preacher who has lived in the United States since 1999. Owing to the outlawed status of the Gülen movement in Turkey, some observers refer to those the movement's volunteers who are Turkish Muslims as effectively of a sub-sect of Sunni Islam; these volunteers generally hold their religious tenets as generically Turkish Sunni Islam. The movement also includes participants from other nationalities and religious affiliations."




News, Education, Intervention, Recovery

Intervention101.com to help families and friends understand and effectively respond to the complexity of a loved one's cult involvement.
CultRecovery101.com assists group members and their families make the sometimes difficult transition from coercion to renewed individual choice.
CultNEWS101.com news, links, resources.
Cults101.org resources about cults, cultic groups, abusive relationships, movements, religions, political organizations and related topics.

Selection of articles for CultNEWS101 does not mean that Patrick Ryan or Joseph Kelly agree with the content. We provide information from many points of view in order to promote dialogue.
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Sep 24, 2019

CultNEWS101 Articles: 9/24/2019




Event, NXIVM, Apocalyptic Group, Podcast, Gülen, Fethullahist, Psychic, Legal

Topics discussed include: assessing a family's unique situation; understanding why people join and leave groups; considering the nature of psychological manipulation and abuse; being accurate, objective, and up-to-date; looking at ethical issues; learning how to assess your situation; formulating a helping strategy; learning how to communicate more effectively with your loved one; learning new ways of coping.  
September 27, 2019, 7 pm – 9 pm.
New York, NY

"Sarah Edmondson spent a dozen years as a top recruiter in NXIVM, an executive success and self-improvement program that was later revealed to be a sex-cult catering to the whims of its secretive leader Keith Raniere.

Now Edmondson is baring all in Scarred, a gripping memoir that details her indoctrination into the cult, her psychological enslavement, and the terrifying naked ritual that left her permanently scarred with Raniere's initials, and determined to bring him down.

"We took turns holding each of the other members down on a table as NXIVM's resident female doctor dragged a red-hot cauterizing pen across the sensitive area just below their bikini line. The women screamed in pain as the smell of burnt flesh filled the air," she writes.

The branding felt like a traumatic assault. Her NXIVM superior, and closest friend, Lauren Saltzman, had told her the ritual that would ensure her admission to a secret sorority called DOS — short for Dominus Obsequious Sororium, Latin for Lord of the Obedient Female Companions — involved getting only a small tattoo.

Edmondson knew she had a decision to make: "slip away quietly or blow this whole thing up."

She chose to blow it up."
"The host of Snap Judgment opens up about being agnostic and rethinking the role of belief after growing up in an apocalyptic cult. Plus, the parts of your spiritual upbringing stick that with you in unexpected ways. Hosted by Lee Hale. From KUER and PRX."
Wikipedia: Gülen movement
"The Gülen movement (Turkish: Gülen hareketi), commonly know as FETÖ in Turkey (Turkish: Fethullahçı Terör Örgütü) Fethullahist Terrorist Organization, is a self-described transnational social movement based on moral values and advocation of universal access to education, civil society, tolerance and peace, inspired by the religious teachings of Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish Islamic preacher who has lived in the United States since 1999. Owing to the outlawed status of the Gülen movement in Turkey, some observers refer to those the movement's volunteers who are Turkish Muslims as effectively of a sub-sect of Sunni Islam; these volunteers generally hold their religious tenets as generically Turkish Sunni Islam. The movement also includes participants from other nationalities and religious affiliations."
"A fake psychic has shared how she manages to convince her clients she actually is clairvoyant - despite being just a normal woman.

The anonymous "psychic" (referred to as Sandra) offered to give journalist Katy Ward a free session, to try and show her how easy it is to fool people.

Writing for The Overtake, Ward describes how Sandra alludes to the death of her father when she was a teenager.

She asks if I'd lost a parent at a young age and whether this coincided with a 'major event' in my life. This cuts. My dad did indeed die when I was 18, with this funeral three days before my Oxbridge interview.

Sandra explains that she googled Ward before their appointment, and came across an article she'd written about it.

Looks like journalists would be a fake psychic's dream."
"As crystals, horoscopes, and other associated wellness frauds to make people feel better about their lives keep popping up, so do scammers who want to weaponize them. Last year a New York City fortune teller was arrested after conning a man out of $800,000, while another in Maryland swindled more than $300,000 from clients. But nothing compares to Sherry Tina Uwanawich, a fake psychic from Florida who now must repay $1.6 million to a woman who she convinced was cursed.

The New York Times reports that Uwanawich met the woman, an anonymous 27-year-old medical student, in a Houston mall in 2007. After giving her a psychic reading, she convinced the student her entire family was cursed. Over a seven-year period the psychic charged the student money for meditation materials, crystals, and candles, all needed to lift this apparent curse."



News, Education, Intervention, Recovery
Intervention101.com to help families and friends understand and effectively respond to the complexity of a loved one's cult involvement.
CultRecovery101.com assists group members and their families make the sometimes difficult transition from coercion to renewed individual choice.
CultNEWS101.com news, links, resources.
Cults101.org resources about cults, cultic groups, abusive relationships, movements, religions, political organizations and related topics.
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Oct 5, 2018

Turkey May Target Mormons Next After Case Against U.S. Pastor

Andrew Brunson arrives at his home in Izmir, Turkey, on July 25. PHOTOGRAPHER: EMRE TAZEGUL/AP PHOTO
Prosecutors allege that evangelical missionary Andrew Brunson conspired with Mormons against the country’s president.

Marc Champion and Cagan Koc
BLOOMBERG
September 26, 2018

The apartment where Kenneth and Marilyn Abney once worked as Mormon missionaries sits opposite the local high school for Alsancak, a lively neighborhood in Izmir, western Turkey. They were also just a few hundred yards from fellow American Andrew Brunson, the evangelical pastor currently on trial for his alleged involvement in a terrorist plot to destabilize the country. A police cordon marks the home where he still lives, under house arrest.

Alsancak’s tiny world of missionaries and converts seems an unlikely setting for so vast a conspiracy. And yet prosecutors allege that Abney, a retired U.S. special forces major, conspired here with Brunson to coordinate a group of malefactors that included not only evangelicals and Mormons—that is, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS)—but also the Muslim Fethullah Gulen faith group (designated as terrorists by Ankara after Turkey’s failed 2016 military coup), the Kurdish-Marxist PKK terrorist organization, an Israeli, an Iranian, and current and former agents of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Abney has not been indicted, but prosecutors say he is “under investigation.”

The Brunson case has taken on wide geopolitical significance, becoming the focus of a dispute between two of the world’s more impulsive presidents: Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the U.S.’s Donald Trump. “You dare to sacrifice 81-million Turkey for a priest who is linked to terror groups?” Erdogan thundered at the U.S. in a speech last month. He threatened to abandon ties with the West, turning his country to “new markets, new partnerships, and new alliances.”

For all the political fireworks, when the two leaders met backstage at the United Nations on Sept. 25, they shook hands. They had seemed to get on well until last month, when Trump imposed sanctions on Turkeybecause, in his view, Erdogan welched on a previous deal to release Brunson. On Sept. 21, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he thought the pastor could be released as early as this month.

But even if the pastor is freed, the danger to the U.S.-Turkish alliance is likely to remain. So will the threat to Turkey’s Mormons, who play a surprisingly large role in the Brunson case’s complex alleged conspiracy.

The pastor is merely a symptom of the rot that’s afflicted the relationship for years. Since the failed coup attempt, two Turkish U.S. consulate officials have been arrested, and a Turkish-American sentenced to jail. In March, a New York court jailed a Turkish bank executive for helping Iran to evade U.S. sanctions. Fines against the state-run lender itself are expected. Congress, meanwhile, is threatening sanctions on Turkey over its planned purchase of a missile defense system from Russia. The two supposed allies are also at odds over whether to arm or destroy Kurdish fighters in Syria. More recently, Erdogan has sought to deflect responsibility for a collapsing domestic economy onto an alleged U.S.-led “economic war.”

In those circumstances, Turkish law enforcement is more likely to roll out than roll up foreign conspiracies. “The case won’t be over” if Brunson is released, says Cem Halavurt, Brunson’s defense attorney. “There are so many accusations. I think they will start an operation against the other religious groups.”

The indictment, filed in May, ties Brunson to three alleged coup attempts against Erdogan since 2013. Yet the sole evidence for the Brunson-Abney meetings at the center of the prosecution’s conspiracy argument consists of cellphone tower records showing that, on the days the planning allegedly occurred, the two men’s phones were in Alsancak. Given that both men lived there, that would have been true most days of the year. “We never met Brunson” or even knew of his existence until his 2016 arrest, says Abney, now 71 and on a Mormon mission in the U.S. Nor, says Abney, had he conspired in any way against Turkey. “We just wanted to help people,” he says, by bringing wheelchairs to the disabled, pomegranate trees to poor villagers, and computers to schools.

According to Abney, the main witness against Brunson is almost certainly a former LDS member whom the prosecution has code-named “Dua,” a word meaning “prayer,” to protect his identity. Some of the evidence Dua produced comes from the Abneys’ computer, according to Kenneth Abney, who says the laptop was taken for repair by an interpreter who was later expelled by the church for allegedly embezzling $10,000.

Dua makes some spectacular claims—for example, that an umbrella organization for Christian churches that’s led by Mormons but involves the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency controls the deployment of all U.S. Christian missionaries; that they identify each other in the field with a secret handshake, a curl of the middle fingers into the palm; that LDS members sent to infiltrate Turkish military high schools as language teachers all had a finger missing; that Mormons make up 40 percent of the U.S. military stationed overseas; and that evangelicals and Mormons are driven to Turkey by a common desire to bring about the end-of-days prophesies in the Bible’s Book of Revelation, by reuniting the Kurds—the lost 13th tribe of Israel.

“It’s all crazy,” says Murat Cakir, an Istanbul LDS church member who is named in the indictment. For one thing, according to the U.S. Department of Defense, only about 18,000 (1.3 percent) of the 1.4 million American active-duty personnel were Mormons in 2009, the year the Abneys arrived in Izmir. That makes Dua’s figure for Mormon servicemen overseas statistically impossible.

Many evangelicals do believe in the prophecies in Revelation but not Brunson, according to Erich Wieger, who used to preach at the same evangelical church in Izmir. “We had quite a few friendly arguments about that,” Wieger said by phone from California, where he now lives. Brunson, he said, is “anti-millennial,” meaning someone who considers the Book of Revelation to be allegorical. Wieger denied an allegation in the indictment that he is a U.S. intelligence agent.

In Turkey’s judicial system, where Halavurt says defense lawyers have been battling cases concocted to meet political demand since long before Erdogan came to power, crazy can also be scary. Dua has addressed the court by video, his face and voice obscured. He alleges that Cakir met Brunson and Abney for three secret meetings in late summer on a Sunday in three consecutive years, 2010 through 2012. Cellphone tower records placing all three men in Alsancak on those Sundays are the sole evidence so far produced to support the claim. Yet not only were Abney and Brunson full-time neighbors, Abney had left the country by the time of the alleged third meeting in 2012. Cakir says he has never met or spoken to Brunson. He does confirm being in Alsancak one Sunday a year—to attend church when he and his family are at the nearby home where they spend part of their annual summer holidays.

It was at their alleged secret meetings that, Dua said, Brunson and Abney discussed a list of gas stations. Prosecutors conclude in the indictment that the list was collected as “entirely an act of espionage” to identify logistics centers for a future occupation force. But there is a simpler explanation: It was drawn up by Turkish LDS staff moonlighting for a British data collection company.

The company, now called Kalibrate Technologies Ltd., confirmed in a letter reviewed by Bloomberg that in 2004 it hired an LDS interpreter named Ara Topakian to survey gas stations across Turkey. Contacted by phone at the company’s office in Manchester, the executive who signed the letter explains that the company collects data on gas station locations, their opening times, and basic facilities such as shops and carwashes. Kalibrate then sells the data to energy companies that use it to identify gaps in the market, and to companies that produce satellite navigation systems for cars. “We’ve done this work in virtually every country around the world,” including Australia, Morocco, and South Africa this year alone, says the Kalibrate executive. “We’ve not tried to take over any of those countries.” Topakian, who fell out with the LDS and is suing the church for lost income, didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment. His cellphone has been disconnected.

Much of the indictment concerns the LDS community, and many of the most salacious allegations against them have gone unchallenged in court because Brunson’s legal team is focused on proving he had nothing to do with his alleged co-conspirators, rather than contesting what each of them is alleged to have done. Cakir worries that prosecutors will harness the public distrust generated by the case to fuel a campaign against the LDS church next.

On a recent Sunday, six LDS worshipers gathered in a small room on the ground floor of the Izmir hotel that serves as their church. It’s a short walk from there to the Abneys’ old apartment. The small group of foreign tourists, NATO families, and one or two local Turks sang together in their own languages. Others joined by Skype. None gave their names for fear of reprisals. One said some Turkish members had stopped coming to services after police stopped them to ask if they were spies.

The prosecutor’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment. Through their lawyers, Brunson and his wife, Norine, declined to comment for this article. When a reporter visited the Brunsons’ packed church in Alsancak on a recent Sunday, Norine asked him to leave.

“They’re good people,” says Ali Demir Kent, a 54-year-old cobbler whose store sits next to the Brunsons’ church, of the congregation. He says he’s never seen the Kurdish flags that witnesses in the indictment said are flown inside the sanctuary. Still, many Turks are convinced of Brunson’s guilt, not least because he worked with Kurdish refugees and his godson is a Syrian Kurd who openly supports PKK-linked militias fighting alongside the U.S. in Syria.

Brunson has now been in jail or under house arrest for almost two years. His case is being heard in a former prison basketball court, converted to accommodate 270 defendants in a separate mass trial connected to the 2016 coup attempt. The pastor cuts a solitary figure amid the rows of empty seats in the court’s vast dock, speaking up mainly to protest the lack of evidence for the allegations against him, to signal to his wife, and to ask to go home. “It reminds me of the courthouses the military junta built in the 1980s,” says his attorney Halavurt, who sits so far away from the judge he has to push a button to ask permission to object to prosecution arguments. “The moment you enter, it tells you there is no justice here.”



https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-26/missing-fingers-and-secret-handshakes-turkey-s-case-against-an-american-pastor
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Oct 11, 2016

Classroom or cult? Turkey's campaign against Fethullah Gülen

Southeast Asia Globe

By: Paul Millar  

October 11, 2016

Southeast Asian schools linked to Fethullah Gülen, the cleric accused of masterminding the attempted coup in Turkey, are being targeted by the country’s furious regime

Cradled in the cupped hands of a late-night news anchor, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addressed his fractured nation from the unlikeliest of platforms: a FaceTime chat on an iPhone 6. As his face dissolved into pixels, the president rallied a country on the brink of falling to a military coup d’état.

“We will overcome this,” he declaimed. “Go to the streets and give them their answer.”

Since that night of 15 July, the Turkish government has launched a brutal inquisition set on rooting out those suspected of being connected with the secretive sect accused of masterminding the abortive coup: the Gülen movement. In the eyes of a shaken administration it is a terrorist cult that seeped into Turkey’s highest state institutions, financed by countless cells scattered around the world. In the eyes of its followers, though, the movement is little more than a loose collection of schools and charities bound only by a creed of love, service and sound education.

The fear of Fethullah Gülen

Inspired by the teachings of Fethullah Gülen, a cleric and former ally of convenience of Erdogan now living in self-imposed exile in the US, the Gülen movement – often referred to as the Hizmet movement after the Turkish word for ‘service’ – combines elements of Islamic Sufi teachings with resurgent Turkish nationalism. Responsible for the running and administration of thousands of schools and universities in as many as 160 countries, as well as on Turkish soil, the organisation had fallen from favour with the current administration in the past few years amid accusations the firebrand preacher was attempting to set up a parallel state within Turkey’s state institutions. Since July, those accusations have seen tens of thousands of students, judges, teachers and military officials stripped of their positions as the government strives to cut the legs out from under the organisation. Now, the government has turned its gaze to the schools and universities beyond its borders.

Fadi Hakura, associate fellow at the Europe Programme of UK-based international affairs think tank Chatham House, told Southeast Asia Globe that the Hizmet movement’s educational wing served as the main vanguard for the organisation’s international outreach. Routinely praised for the high standard of education on offer, the movement’s international schools have historically enjoyed a high level of support from the governments of the countries in which they are based.   

“Education is one way for the Gülen movement to build roots in various countries and communities around the world, and it tends to target geographic areas defined by poverty and social inequality,” Hakura said. “With their relatively disciplined education programme, they’re able to achieve some spectacular academic results and popular support in that part of the geography.”

Gülen schools in Southeast Asia

The spread of the Gülen movement to Southeast Asia has been driven by the Pacific Countries Social and Economic Solidarity Association (Pasiad), a self-proclaimed civil association that “aims to help establish good relationships between Turkey and Pacific countries on education, social, cultural and economic issues”. To this end, it has historically provided funding and support to schools linked with the Hizmet movement across Southeast Asia.

Despite its impressive achievements, Hakura warned that the group’s opaque inner workings raised disturbing questions about the end goals of the organisation.

“The Gülen movement has always been a very secretive, elusive movement grouping,” he said. “Never engaged in open transparency in terms of membership, goals, objectives – it’s a very hierarchical… grouping with the primary purpose of enhancing its influence in the circles of power.”

It is this image of the Gülen movement as a shadowy cabal bent on seizing power that has driven Turkish embassies across the globe to petition for the closure of international schools associated with the group. In Cambodia, where the movement established a beachhead into Southeast Asia as far back as the late 1990s, several institutions linked with the Hizmet movement have come under pressure by Turkish ambassador Ilhan Kemal Tug to cast off their association with what the Turkish government has labelled the Fethullah Gülen Terrorist Organisation.

Speaking to Southeast Asia Globe, Tug alleged that the Zaman international schools in Phnom Penh were part of a vast web of Gülen-aligned institutions responsible for financing the group he believes tried to overthrow President Erdogan’s regime in July.

Tug accused the Gülen movement of operating a hollow front disguising their ambitions behind a network of educational and charitable organisations.

“The Hizmet civil movement is a moderate, tolerant, non-violent and pro-dialogue social movement,” he said. “[But] there’s also the dark underbelly of this organisation, which involves money laundering, bribing and destroying their rivals through abusing state authority by fabricating evidence and wiretapping, video recording and blackmailing.”

Inside Hizmet’s private schools

A former English teacher at Zaman International School in Phnom Penh, who requested anonymity, relayed conversations with the other teaching staff suggesting the school had deliberately targeted people from vulnerable backgrounds.

“What I got from them is that their recruiting mostly takes place in Turkey and in [central Asia],” he said. “They have exams there that are pretty rigorous – to get into university, or maybe to pass university – and what they do is they approach people mainly from poorer families and they give them free tutoring to pass these exams, and they’re then offered the chance to work for them afterwards at these schools that are supposed to be linked.”

He said the faculty were tight-lipped on matters of politics and religion.

“When I started there the school was saying it was a non-profit,” he said. “When I left, it had turned into a private company.”

Tug alleged that the Gülen movement groomed promising students for positions of power that would allow the group to extend its influence into the highest institutions of state – including, Tug claimed, the military and judiciary.

“Today, what you read in the newspapers, these are all part and parcel of our effort to get rid of these cancers in the state institutions,” he said.

The fight for Islam’s middle path

Zaman spokesperson and president of the Hizmet-linked Mekong Dialogue Institute, Hakan Atasever, denied any connection with the events of 15 July, saying that the schools had always condemned the attempted coup in the strongest terms.

“The school has invited the ambassador to prove his baseless claims,” he said. “As he is the accuser, it is his duty to share any evidence showing the link between the school and the coup attempt.”

For its proponents, the idea of the Hizmet movement as a tyrannical cult intent on political domination is little more than the waking terrors of an increasingly paranoid regime. Writing in Islam and Peacebuilding: Initiatives of the Gülen Movement, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies’ Malaysia Programme coordinator Mohamed Nawab bin Mohamed Osman wrote that, far from being a force of disunity, the teachings of Fethullah Gülen were essential in creating a “middle way” for Islam between extremism and outright secularism.

Osman argued that the Hizmet movement’s opposition to rising extremist ideology, particularly in Muslim-majority Indonesia, could potentially defuse fundamentalist interpretations of Islam as a political force within Southeast Asia.

“The precedence given to universal values in these schools [in Southeast Asia], inherent in all religions, is important in shaping the educated, cultured Muslim who is tolerant and progressive, as Gülen envisages,” he wrote. “The common values which the Gülen movement emphasises are also likely to renew the shape of Islamic understanding in Southeast Asia, and make it once more tolerant and accommodating to other religions.”

Ali Ünsal, director of the high-profile Fethullah Gülen Chair at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta, denied in a 2014 report that Pasiad-partnered schools in Indonesia imposed their own system of Islamist values on students. 

“In this system, they follow closely the national curriculum of Indonesia,” he wrote in Pasiad Partner Schools’ Education System. “These schools are mostly private schools and not religious schools. They have generally steered away from teaching religious studies, except some classes which are in the national curriculum of Indonesia, but focus on the teaching of ethics and universal human values.”

Sixteen-year-old Samnang – not his real name – a student at Cambodia’s Zaman High School, described an environment of strict segregation between male and female students, but said that a compulsory weekly class on Muslim history and values was the full extent of the school’s religious education.

“We have a lesson – it is called ‘Guidance’ – they talk about their religion,” he said. “Once a week, they tell us about their religion, how they live. How Muslims live.”

Turkey tightens its grip

According to Hakura, schools linked to the Hizmet movement were unlikely to lay out an explicit ideological agenda in their curricula, instead adapting their teachings to fit in with the educational standards of the society in which they are based.

“The Gülen movement has been defined by flexibility and decentralisation in the administration and the implementation of policy objectives set out by the hierarchy,” he said. “And that’s where its perennial strength [lies] – in establishing themselves in various communities and countries around the world.”

Atasever stressed that the running of Cambodia’s Zaman schools was entirely a local affair.

“There is no formal link between [the schools and] any organisation around Cambodia,” he said. “The institutions… may have several partnership agreements with some [others] across Southeast Asia, but so far there has been no solid cooperation except for some workshops or conferences.”

Despite what has been reported in Western media, Tug maintained that the Turkish government had little desire to see the schools themselves shuttered. Instead, he pointed to the Maarif Foundation, a body proposed by Turkey’s education ministry as an alternate source of funding to international schools historically managed by the Gülen movement. In this way, the Turkish government could potentially seize control of Gülen’s support network across the world in its own bloodless coup that would see teachers and administrators linked to the preacher turfed out in favour of government supporters.

“There are many ways we can do this,” Tug said. “I can assure you that the families and the students will not even realise that the process has finished. It will be seamless.”

According to Samnang, though, the damage to Zaman’s reputation may already have been done.

“Most of [my friends] – they want to leave now,” he said. “Some of my friends said that Zaman is having problems with the Turkish embassy, so they don’t feel safe.”

 

http://sea-globe.com/inside-turkeys-campaign-fethullah-gulen/

 

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