Turkish Imam Fethullah Gulen Under Federal Investigation

Turkish Imam Fethuallah Gulen may be the most dangerous Islamic figure in the United States and he has been flying underneath the radar for several years. In fact, one of the reasons he's residing in the United States is because his home country had indicted him for attempting to help turn the government there from secular to Islamist. Based on the current makeup of Turkey's political structure, it looks like he was somewhat successful.

It now appears that Mr. Gulen has caught the attention of Federal investigators in Philadelphia:

Fethullah Gulen is a major Islamic political figure in Turkey, but he lives in self-imposed exile in a Poconos enclave and gained his green card by convincing a federal judge in Philadelphia that he was an influential educational figure in the United States.

As evidence, his lawyer pointed to the charter schools, now more than 120 in 25 states, that his followers - Turkish scientists, engineers, and businessmen - have opened, including Truebright Science Academy in North Philadelphia and another charter in State College, Pa.

The schools are funded with millions of taxpayer dollars. Truebright alone receives more than $3 million from the Philadelphia School District for its 348 pupils. Tansu Cidav, the acting chief executive officer, described it as a regular public school.

The investigation centers around the possibility that some of the schools' employees are funneling their taxpayer dollars to Islamic groups:

But federal agencies - including the FBI and the Departments of Labor and Education - are investigating whether some 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.

Unlike in Turkey, where 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.

Religious scholars consider the Gulen strain of Islam moderate, and the investigation has no link to terrorism. Rather, it is focused on whether hundreds of Turkish teachers, administrators, and other staffers employed under the H1B visa program are misusing taxpayer money.

They may not be looking for terrorist ties but the Feds very well may find them if they keep digging. Gulen has mastered the art of appearing moderate but he is anything but. He was instrumental in transforming the Turkish government from secular to Islamist. Yet, he continues to fly under the radar here in the United States.

Inexplicably, he was even honored by the Texas State Senate earlier this year. Here are a few of his words from a sermon he gave in Turkey in 1999:

You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers … until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria … like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. 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 … Until that time, any step taken would be too early—like breaking an egg without waiting the full forty 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 secrecy. I know that when you leave here—[just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here.

Federal agents may not be looking for terror ties but if they're serious about digging into what Gulen is all about, they will get to an ugly truth.

Read it all.

h/t DG