The idea that the United States is effectively arming the Islamic State is a popular rumor, particularly on Iranian State-run media, but the extent of individuals who believe that mistruth reaches to the highest echelons of Iranian society, according to Crytzer.
“The Iranian Quds Force commander absolutely believes we’re supplying Daesh,” Crytzer told Defense One. “He’s not trying to play on it. He actively believes it.”.
Disinformation suits the feudal/medieval mode and its concentration of power and wealth in a very few “malignars” (malignant narcissists) devoted primarily to their own absolute power and breathtaking aggrandizement.
“The runners at the Boston Marathon put my police officers, my citizens and others at risk. This program invited an incendiary reaction. Citizens picked my community, which does not support in any shape, passion or form, this ideology.”
Is the United States Constitution an incendiary device or is the resurgence of Islam as practiced in the seventh century an incendiary device?
The overall media consensus has been to blame the intended murder victims for recklessly provoking the terrorists. Such provocation, we are told, is unacceptable and irresponsible behavior given the risk of retaliation by offended radical Muslims.
By this bizarre logic, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Selma marchers should be condemned for instigating the melee on the Edmund Pettus bridge. Same for the three murdered civil-rights workers in Mississippi, the victims of Bull Connor’s police dogs, and anyone else who has taken a stand that might irritate violence-prone people.
The Kelly File. “Is freedom of speech under attack in America?” Fox News, May 6, 2015.
As “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” both direct attacks on the American Homeland and intellectual forays into weakening cultural adhesion to bedrock principles and values has served primarily to strengthen the arguments and ranks of America’s conservatives, who, in fact have become America’s most thoughtful liberals in line with the “classical liberalism” on which the nation was founded.
For all intents, Lincoln’s back in town.
Allen West included this observation in a post published last August:
First of all, let’s establish this point: modern conservatism is classical liberalism as developed by English political philosopher John Locke. His basic principles were the personal rights of life, liberty, and property. Clearly, today’s “post modern liberal” has nothing in common with John Locke. Today’s liberalism has more in common with Marxism/progressivism/socialism — but as with all things Leftist, the lexicon is changed in order to mask true identity and intentions.
Search string “Lincoln, classical liberalism” yields a few delightful URLs. Count “6 Quotes That Will Remind Republicans Lincoln Was a Liberal” (February 11, 2015) among them (it kicks off with, “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”).
• We will promote our belief that pluralism and moderation are fundamental principles of the Holy Qur’an.
• We recognize and honor the principles of individual liberty and freedom. We believe that the practice of religion and its laws are a matter of free choice within an individual’s beliefs and conscience only. Our governmental laws should be based upon our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and derived from reason.
• We believe that every Muslim is equally entitled to his/her opinion concerning the religion of Islam, in an environment free of ostracism, intimidation, and reprisal. While we recognize the value of scholarship and learned discourse in Islam, we believe that all Muslims should play an active role in the debate and ijtihad of our own faith.
• We will work to educate the public regarding the special historical relationship between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
• We will publicly affirm our belief that the primary threat to America is from both violent and non-violent Islamists who exploit the faith of Islam, and who use identity politics, victimology, tribalism, and intimidation to further their goal of Islamist hegemony.
What the arc of time may be for the intellectual transformation of the Ummah toward the above stated values (there are twelve such on the page referenced) seems to BackChannels unknown, but the blog has been around for enough years to observe that those who bid into a modern course have stood by their own programs and sought growth and greater distribution for core religious institutional concepts fit to the “classical liberalism” on which the United States has been developed.
The Garland, Texas “Draw Muhammad” event and the attack associated with it continue to play in the press. However it unfolded, whatever the play by play and the who, what, when, how, it was small and professionally foiled by police.
The shooters were known and had been tracked.
Headlines from the reading side of the BackChannels screen: “Gunman in Texas Shooting was FBI Suspect in Jihad Inquiry”; “Texas Attacker Left Trail of Extremist Ideas on Twitter”; “FBI alerted Garland Police about jihad attacker 3 hours . . . “; “ISIS Inspired, but Did Not Orchestrate, Garland Shooting at Muhammad Event”; “Texas attacker had private conversations with known terrorists”.
Block and search if you need to read the story behind a headline . . . the point is the First Amendment, the American gold standard of freedom of speech, won the day, the terrorists lost, and the arguing online about the right to speak freely — to challenge thought, to criticize ideas, to observe and report — and to argue about politeness, provocation, and, I suppose, cultural sensitivity, which all makes for lively debate, is as it should be and much, much preferred to silenced debate.
One more clip (and more to follow) from Pat Condell, posted on YouTube July 11, 2013 —
Addendum – May 10, 2015
How can any thinking and civilized person ever believe there is a wisp of truth to the proposition: “There are times when it is ‘understandable’ that people would slaughter others because of a cartoon”? Everyone who follows world events in the United States, regardless of their political leanings, has seen the unimaginably vile actions of ISIS against “unbelievers” and “those who defame the prophet.” How can anyone take their side? To do so even to the smallest extent renders the defender equally vile. And yet, of course, that is what we have come to in the cesspool that is the American left.
In 2009, Yale University removed several illustrations from a book I had written about the global controversy over the Danish cartoons. The redacted illustrations included the cartoons as also other pictures featuring Muhammad, including an Ottoman print of Muhammad going into battle with Ali at his side and an illustration of Dante’s Divine Comedy made by Gustave Doré. The publisher was Yale University Press. The university argued that the images could be considered offensive by Muslims and lead to violence, including attacks on Yale and other American institutions. In an Orwellian twist, Yale University cited my own book as evidence that reproduction of the cartoons was dangerous. The press defended its decision with reference to the advice of an expert panel (of which more later) ‘that there existed a substantial likelihood of violence that might take the lives of innocent victims.’
There is no legitimate controversy over why the Kouachi brothers targeted Charlie Hebdo. They murdered not to redress the social grievances or right the historical wrongs the PEN authors named. They explicitly told us why they murdered — for Islam, to avenge the Prophet Muhammad. Progressives who think otherwise need to face that reality. Put another way, the Kouachi brothers may have suffered racial discrimination and even “marginalization,” yet had they not been Muslims, they would not have attacked Charlie Hebdo. They would have had no motive.
And now we are bystanders in the destruction of our own remarkable history. We are allowing the barbarians to destroy memory while we watch. We were warned decades ago when Israel began fighting against the destruction of history by Muslims destroying artifacts under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in their attempt to eradicate the Jewish past in order to promote a Muslim future.
In the 1980s the Waqf destroyed an ancient wall on the Temple Mount, probably from one of the courts of the Second Temple, (Herod’s Temple) during an unauthorized dig. “The wall was six feet thick, and more than 16 feet of it was exposed, but the entire wall was quickly removed and the area covered before Israeli archaeological authorities could study it.”
In September 2000, the Muslim Waqf closed off the Temple Mount entirely to any archeological oversight by the Israel Antiquities Authority and then removed 13,000 tons of rubble from the Temple Mount, including archeological remnants from the First and Second Temple periods. History was dropped into the dump.
The purpose of autocratic and capricious information control — to shut someone up; to censor or forestall expression — is personal or cultural erasure.
We express solidarity with the many American Muslims who feel wounded by this malicious disregard of their sacred heritage. Further, we are dismayed that a member of the American Jewish community led this incendiary effort. We can only imagine how upset we would be if a group set up a public display of cartoons mocking Jews, offering (as was the case here) a $10,000 prize for the “best” rendering.
Our long history as a persecuted and often taunted minority does not allow us to stand by in silence when such an act is perpetrated against another religious community in our society. Jewish history and teaching compel us to denounce such offensive and inflammatory behavior.
More than 25 rabbis signed the above letter, which hews to the social and transactional element in the Garland controversy: indeed, we should be careful of one another by being polite.
Then too we may be even more careful of one another by being plainly honest about present and past states of affairs. For that, many Jews would simply begin with the legend of the Banu Qurayza.
The Southern Poverty Law Center regards Pamela’s organization as a hate group . Since Morris Dees, the chief trial council of the center and most of the top officers in that organization are members of my own tribe, I wonder if he would still be so loudly condemning Pam Geller if Jihad attacked a synagogue and killed innocent Jews.
Since we are their favorite targets, this is a nightmare that is just waiting to happen. But, Dees and his left wing buddies would prefer to support condemning the one women with balls big enough to stand up to Jihad and tell them no , not today.
Texted last night and this morning by one of BackChannel’s friends —
5/4/2015/0018
In the cab. Men actually left vehicle and were on foot. Swat told e . . . .
5/4/2015/0837
Not having fun. Police officer shot led times two. Bomb squad. We have been moved to a hardened position.
The event was sponsored by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and attended by its president and co-founder, Pamela Geller — who is also president of Stop Islamization of America (SIOA). Both are listed as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Since when has earnest and honest — not disingenuous, not libelous — speech been framed as “hate speech” — and with the speakers branded as a “hate group”?
Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up.
I had been writing a series of columns in the Village Voice about certain thought police at that very paper. I had found out that on Monday nights, when the paper went to bed, some editors and copy editors — without telling the writers — were cutting out certain words, sometimes sentences and paragraphs, that might offend the Voice’s constituencies.
Hentoff, Nat. “Free Speech for Me — But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other.” New York, HarperCollinsPublishers, 1992.
Where are we today?
How did this happen that comment and criticism of Islam — the same would seem much more safe and secure when the target of critical speech involves Christianity, Judaism, and every other religion expressed in the brave and free United States of America — has been framed as provocation for violence and seems to be being made to serve to excuse it?
Just so no English language speaker is caught short or left behind while trading the dozens, The Racial Slur Database lists some 2,649 of these pejoratives.
Contempt, which is what epithets express, contribute to our defensive arsenal in language: they are the weapons we reach for when we are done with words and reason and, overall, ready to rumble.
Pamela Geller, the organizer of the Texas “Draw Muhammad” event in Garland, Texas, that ended in a terror attack on a police officer, said on national television Monday she’d do it again – that free speech is way too important to cede to Shariah law extremists.
“Clearly what happened is indicative of how needed this conference was,” said Geller, on “Fox & Friends,” in reference to the violence that came on the tail end of the cartoon drawing contest, as WND previously reported.
Said Pamela Geller: “Inoffensive speech needs no protection; offensive speech needs protection.” (about 1:40 into the Fox video).
Ad hominem attacks and epithets may be offensive and also protected speech too, but add virtue to Geller’s so-called hate speech: considered and contemplated, well researched, respectful, clearly delineating “the terrorists”, albeit in absolute terms, while — for readers who actually care to look into this issue — recognizing Islamic humanists and reformists and other Muslims often in the path of jihadists themselves.
On the web, where most of my experience of the world arrives mediated, I have seen the development of a new global across-the-broadest-campus intelligentsia, and perhaps that soon should be the focus of a BackChannels post.
When contentious issues and conflict are worked by the public, is God like a cook watching over a simmering pot on the stove?
Too cool, and the food doesn’t transform — it needs some serious heat; too hot, and the pot boils over or boils out — those conditions need some serious cool.
Pamela Geller is a 56-year-old Jewish arch-conservative from New York, a vehement critic of radical Islam who organized a provocative $10,000 cartoon contest in this placid Dallas suburb designed to caricature the prophet Muhammad.
Elton Simpson was a 30-year-old aspiring Islamic militant from Phoenix who fantasized to an FBI informant about “doing the martyrdom operations” in Somalia and was convicted in 2010 of lying to the FBI about his plans to travel to the volatile eastern African nation.
The “Islamists” — which noun we use to set them apart from Muslims who are not “Islamists” and have been frequently the targets of the same — have a deep investment in force of will and intimidation. Control, locus of control, need for control, motivation for sadism, etc. are more topics worth concentrating on.
Americans know — and I believe I’m within reason saying this — that Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer exercise and represent free speech in action accommodated to American constitutional principles. Ascribed to Patrick Henry: ““I may not like what a man says, but I shall defend to the death his right to say it!” That’s it.
We don’t shout down opponents; we don’t deny anyone a soapbox. We may choose not to listen to their rants; we may choose to not invite our “verbal adversaries” to our house parties. But we don’t shut them up lest we ourselves suffering being shut up.
While Geller and Spencer have been “framed” — called, described as, denoted as, accused — as “Islamophobes”, the truth is that practice will simply elicit its opposite, sooner or later, in political reaction. I’ve shared the Back-Channels concept “Shimmer” with Geller — didn’t hear back — and out of no cause or motivation not my own but solely curiosity and enthusiasm for the broadband web, I’ve made acquaintance and friends across the Islamic world.
Religious teleology adjusts to many forces across time. The Catholic Church maintained the charge of Deicide against the Jews until into the early 1960s, and the Lutheran Synod in America tooks its time ejecting, at least officially, the same. In other aspects, the Jesuits continue writing letters to Jesus and God only knows — or only God knows! — the ways in which people profess faith and integrate themselves with a spiritual program or script . . . or come to the immense opportunity to adjust and update the same in fact or emphasis.
A Religion News Service article reprinted in the Washington Post and elsewhere, including the Christian Century, described Zaytuna as “A college that requires the study of both Wordsworth and the Quran for graduation… now the first fully accredited Islamic university in America.”
Yet WASC approved only one program: a B.A. in Islamic law and theology.
When the Ferguson riots broke August 9, 2014, the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left got busy churning out “false flag” accusations involving New Establishment elements for incitement. In related search, “DHS Is Employing Agent Provocateurs and are Behind the . . .”; “Ferguson Witness: Government is Planting Provocateurs in . . .”; “Busted! ‘Agent Provocateur’ Caught Red Handed in Ferguson!” With such as those, BackChannels would happily invoke its mouthy “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation” and remind that the old KGB proved adept at “false flag” manipulation of the Russian constituency with, among other episodes, the “Moscow Apartment Bombings”, today relentlessly examined and rehashed by Miami University scholar Karen Dawisha in her book Putin’s Kleptocracy (listed in the “Russian Section”).
The injury and death of Freddie Gray will receive — is receiving — the scrutiny deserved regardless of the public press “for justice” (without injustice proven but certainly suspected) and the spillover into violence.
This is what promotes that violence:
Malik Shabazz, president of Black Lawyers for Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based group that called for the demonstration and advertised it on social media, told the crowd that he would release them in an hour, adding: “Shut it down if you want to! Shut it down!”
A city, a society, a long fought quest for equality and justice frequently achieved.
Yesterday in WND, conservative journalist Aaron Klein noted of Shabazz, “Not a single news media outlet quoted above informed its readers of that which a simple Google search of “Malik Shabazz” reveals. As highlighted on his Wikipedia page, until October 2013, Shabazz notoriously served as the national chairman of the New Black Panther Party.”
Klein goes on to note in relation to Shabazz episodes involving voter intimidation (“using such phrases as ‘white devil’ and ‘You’re about to be ruled by the black man, cracker'”), anti-Semitic invective, and incitement.
Violence and looting overtook much of West Baltimore on Monday, seriously injuring several police officers and leaving a store and several vehicles in flames.
Shutting Not Much Down, But Some appears to be continuing into the evening.
With generations of of the Left to Far Left in town, one’s ears may tune to the rhetoric to come: will it be accusing, ad hominem, venomous? Will it be responsible, encouraging inquiry, open observation, and discussion? In what part either?
He’s done more than screw up the region — or address larger political tectonics like the post-Soviet collapse of Soviet arrangements and behaviors. Boasting transparency, he has removed from popular observation the underlying policies of his Administration, transforming America’s democracy into its own neo-feudal world, a mirror perhaps of the feudal world he has engaged.
I remain both ambivalent and clinical cold in my “reading” of Obama’s domestic and foreign political policy involving his avoidance of confrontation and a kind of almost (!) but not quite complete rollover to the infiltration and possible perversion of intellectual assets (from advisors to campuses to think tanks). The U.S., perhaps others as well, has absorbed the agents of malicious movements, but it has also weakened the legs of the post-KGB Putin-Khamenei programs. The end of the Cold War and suspension of the Soviet failed to permanently transform Russia into a rule-of-law state. Colonel President Emperor Putin has extended the old program under cover of a neo-feudal nationalism and Obama has been either stuck with its disassembly or made part of its longevity.
Credit Obama with destabilizing the Soviet holdovers in international business and criminal relationships. The “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” arrangement has been looking a bit rough lately (I understand the preferred enemy — as opposed to a moderate popular revolutionary one — the “Islamist Front” — because it makes a better self-glorifying story for our malignant narcissists — has drawn close to the gates defending whatever remains of Assad’s governing power [he has really destroyed his own crib]).
Also looking unmasked and pale: Venezuela’s Maduro may handily deal with the direct opposition using the tools familiar to dictators, but with the economic woes derived from his own disastrous national policies, he appears bound to deal with enemies within his own circles as well.
Related Reading and Additions
Leopoldo López has been imprisoned in a military prison for one year and a month. Leopoldo is innocent, he shouldn’t remain as a prisoner for another day. He is imprisoned because of his words, because of what he thinks, for daring to say what the majority of Venezuelans wanted to hear.
He denounced Maduro’s regime as undemocratic, corrupt, inefficient, and repressive. Those words are now more alive than ever.
It was a sign of how bad things are in the Americas. Authoritarian governments now rule in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina and Bolivia. All employ, to varying degrees, at least some elements of the Cuban model in which the executive consolidates power, civil society is suppressed, and due process is passe.
Elections are rigged. Rulers expropriate at will. Media outlets that dare to differ from the party line face legal burdens that can wipe them out.
Hiding dictatorship — how it works its ugliness, what it really looks like — from the young appears increasingly difficult given American Presidential attention. While American conservatives frame Obama’s about-to-happen meet-and-greet with Raoul Castro as a gross compromise of the American democratic spirit, as much also highlights how really awful — “state capitalist” (actually), criminal, manipulative, and repressive Cuba’s governing elite have been all along:
But a second activist, from Argentina, reported on social media suffering similar treatment.
Micaela Hierro Dori said “the same happened to me”, and that she was threatened with being deported to Argentina.
“They are looking to silence the young,” she said.
Perhaps the young will wish not to be silenced this year.
Be that as it may, Obama’s friendly reach-out-and-touch-someone-awful tour appears to have a way of uncloaking or uncovering ageing despots: it appears some are getting the attention — the global spotlight — they themselves have long craved.
More From the Awesome Conversation:
Old southern joke about an drunk accused of arson: “Your honor,” he says, “the bed was already on fire when I got into it!”
For Obama, the middle east, so delicately balanced in power, was well screwed up when he got into office, and given both the clout and ruthlessness of the enemies of democracy and modernity, the direct “Arab Spring” may have been due to fail if too much associated with Washington. Instead, the demonic — those “malignant narcissists” — have been given their wish: highest visibility and plenty of room for showing the world how they do business and what the world — and its latest generations — really thinks of them.
We often let attitude and predisposition establish our beliefs when what is wanted may be a lot of observation and a little bit of “wait just a minute”.
While fretting over Khamenei getting The Bomb, have we given much thought to the impact on Iranians of various revelations about the Khamenei brothers wealth? What is that information doing to both colleagues and constituents within each despotic state?
Out of necessity, American presidents find themselves hitched to the momentum of American programs. They might fiddle with some things — get in some licks on behalf of their own inclinations and sentiments — but the machinery is larger than they are and, so far, it has survived every one of them.
Screen capture shows emblem of the United States Department of State as a partner in an organization with offices in Israel supporting a campaign against incumbent President Benjamin Netanyahu.
OneVoice is the civil society partner for peace, and the spectrum of our partnerships reflects the validation our work on the ground has received from like-minded organizations. We leverage a broad network that includes membership organizations, government agencies, charities and foundations, academic institutions, corporations, and thought leaders to mobilize support for the two-state solution, not just in the Middle East but across the globe. See below for a complete list of our current partners.
V15′s complete takeover of OneVoice’s Tel Aviv offices, however, may raise some questions not only about the grant usage, but also about the State Department’s current partnership with OneVoice.
Indeed, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has called for an investigation into the State Department’s ties to OneVoice and the group’s anti-Netanyahu effort.
The anti-Netanyahu campaign organization “Victory 2015” AKA “V15” has reportedly filled the offices fronted by the left wing base that is One Voice International.
“Then he turned to Abu Mazen and asked, what do you want of Netanyahu? At this point, Erekat intervened and said, in Hebrew, the following: One, nine, six, seven. 1967. Abu Mazen approved. That’s what we want. That’s what we insist on.
Abraham said he returned to Jerusalem, but Netanyahu was already in Tel Aviv.
One Voice International founder Daniel Lubetzky (the link is to his Peaceworks biography) appears to have little political profile apart from encouraging business partnerships between Israelis and the refugees of 1948. From the bio “At Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, the seeds of PeaceWorks were planted as Mr. Lubetzky wrote his 268-page thesis, “The Influence of Economic Factors in Resolving the Arab-Israeli Conflict.”
One might wish the partnerships entrepreneured in the Qualifying Industrial Zones programs and those fostered by Mr. Lubetzky would take hold already and modify, transform, or remove Hamas and the remnant PLO (which remnant “Abu Mazen” represents), so that the residents of Gaza and Ramallah might indeed go about their lives in peace, secure from the roaming shadows of political mafia.
*
Related and still recent in the news:
A leaflet, issued by a hitherto unknown pro-Abbas group called Protectors of Legitimacy, threatened to kill 80 Dahlan supporters. The group published the names of the supporters, claiming they worked for Israel.
“Your threats will not intimidate us,” the group said. “You are beginning to play with fire. But we are made of fire, which will burn you. The language of dialogue with you has ended and as of today we will start talking to you with the language of weapons and skull-breaking.”
The third notable mentioned by Aaron Klein, Alon Kastiel, wealthy by way of real estate, appears in the news as a quiet enabler, merely a host to connections:
It is still unclear whether any legal entity stands behind the establishment of V15, but the story of its establishment is intrinsically linked to two Meretz activists, Itamar Weizmann (formerly an activist affiliated with Meretz MK Nitzan Horowitz), and Nimrod Dweck (who has managed Meretz’s campaigns since 2012 via the marketing company he owns, Dice Marketing.)
The two met at a gathering organized by real estate mogul Alon Kastiel.
The issues surrounding the establishment of OneVoice have begun to become clear, raising difficult questions that will possibly require an investigation. Two possible avenues have emerged from this affair, showing a sophisticated system of election propaganda for the Leftist bloc, in a manner that allegedly intended to bypass the country’s Parties Financing Law (which prohibits parties from receiving campaign donations from foreign sources). It could very well be that the judicial system will have to determine its legality.
A closer look at Bird’s consulting firm as well as its working relationship with the Israeli groups finds he is just one of scores of former senior Obama election campaign staffers now working on the anti-Netanyahu effort.
Besides Bird, the 270 Strategies team includes the following former Obama staffers . . . .
The Israel News Agency filing goes on to list 13 Obama campaign staffers now placed in the “Victory 2015” and pursuing the mission, so it appears to BackChannels, of ousting an independent Israeli president and replacing the same with an American puppet.
In a normal public school district, you’d be able to tell who the vendors are, but in charter world, it’s purposely opaque. It must amount to millions of dollars of business that aren’t going out to bid, or that in all likelihood, aren’t even going out to Americans.
Basic research, basic due diligence, basic critical thinking skills— these are the only things required to figure out that there are multiple connections between this transnational social/political/religious movement and the three charter schools in Chicago, that these connections are purposely blurred to keep people uninformed, and that this phenomenon is consistent with the established patterns of behavior of the Gulen Movement worldwide.
“By even developing a certain code of rebellion of their own, they might begin to refuse even very plausible thoughts developed as a result of serious pondering and forget the fact that doing things for the sake of God is exalted above all.
Actually, what lies at the root of such wrongs is a lack of learning manners. In the past, people who were responsible for education were very good teachers of manners as well.”
Behave!
🙂
And obey Gülen — as regards aspects of the autocratic, authoritarian, unreasoning, and cult-of-personality dimensions evident in the Fathullah Gülen story, Rachel Sharon-Krespin’s Middle East Forum piece (Winter 2009) contains plenty for related reflection.
Today, despite the rhetoric of European Union accession, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has turned Turkey away from Europe and toward Russia and Iran and reoriented Turkish policy in the Middle East away from sympathy toward Israel and much more toward friendship with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria. Anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-Semitic sentiments have increased. Behind Turkey’s transformation has been not only the impressive AKP political machine but also a shadowy Islamist sect led by the mysterious hocaefendi (master lord) Fethullah Gülen; the sect often bills itself as a proponent of tolerance and dialogue but works toward purposes quite the opposite. Today, Gülen and his backers (Fethullahcılar, Fethullahists) not only seek to influence government but also to become the government.
Gulen, once respected by Erdogan, is now vilified and branded an “assassin” — a reference to Hassan Sabbah’s violent medieval cult. Thousands of public servants allegedly close to the Gulen community have been removed from their jobs. Some have been arrested.
“A Gülen organization controls the real estate companies that own their schools. They charge rent to their own schools and taxpayers foot the bill. They refuse to answer public records requests, falsify attendance records, and cheat on standardized tests. Yet, Ohio continues to grant them charters to operate.”
No more tender a national achilles heel offers itself to America’s enemies quite like public education.
That Fethullah Gülen’s organization has run itself into trouble against Turkish autocrat Erdogan fits with the same emerging neo-feudalism that has surfaced in Russia, i.e., cabal of shady nouveau riche rise to operate organization out of the public’s view, exploit the same, any which way (and they produce sufficient tell-tale propaganda to prove it), and live lavishly promoting their favored or more convenient ideological or religious program – but then they must contend with one another.
BackChannels 