Analyst's note: Fetullah Gülen came to America in 1998, reportedly to seek medical treatment, but he never went back to his home country of Turkey. Instead, a federal judge granted him a green card in 2008.
As a result, we have yet another man claiming to be a "main-stream Muslim" and his devotees are teaching our youth here in America. We find yet another imam, with a grade school education, directing a global Islamic movement ... this time from the mountains in Pennsylvania.
He has about 125 Gülen schools spread out over 25 states. One school in Philadelphia is known to receive some $3 million annually in American taxpayer money. Gülen says he wants to "[...] revive the link between the state, religion, and society.
[....] "It's not just a religious movement; it's the Fetullah Gülen movement. They call themselves that. So it is, you can say, a cult. It is a highly personalized movement," Ariel Cohen, a Middle East analyst with the Heritage Foundation, said. Cohen has been tracking the Gülen movement closely.
"This is clearly the world according to the Koran, the world according to Islam, the world according to Fetullah Gülen," he told CBN News. "But what he's talking about is not the caliphate, is not the sharia state--he calls it the New World Islamic Order."
[....] a series of secretly recorded sermons featuring Gülen aired on Turkish television. In one of them, he told his followers:
"You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers...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 … Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all in confidence. Know that when you leave here -- as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here."
One has to wonder, what else Gülen might be teaching our youth in private? We learn that some in our government are trying to use this group to fight other Islamists, who are "not so friendly" to America.
Considering the on-going efforts of some in our government to walk with known operatives of the Muslim Brotherhood (a faction of our Islamist enemy) it appears that yet again the American people must demand answers. More "sun-light" will reveal what, if anything, is lurking in the dark corners of this form of Islam.
"[....] Cohen said some in the U.S. government and academia support reaching out to Gülen's followers as a way to counter al Qaeda and other jihadist groups.
"The idea being, just like people who say that we should have a good relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, that these are 'mainstream Islamists,'" he explained.
But according to leading French-Turkish scholar Bayram Balci, Gülen's ideas are anything but "mainstream" for a Western society. [....]"
