From Sibel Edmonds: The King of Madrasas Now Operates Over 100 Charter Schools in the US?

madfloridian

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Sun Oct-24-10 10:53 PM
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From Sibel Edmonds: The King of Madrasas Now Operates Over 100 Charter Schools in the US?

This topic has been covered here before, but it still is alarming. Remember that charter schools get public taxpayer money, yet there is little accountability.

Did You Know: The King of Madrasas Now Operates Over 100 Charter Schools in the US?

The Controversial Muslim preacher has now extended his tentacles into schools in the United States, where he controls and operates more than 100 charter schools within a calculatively set up maze of dubious NGOs. Fethullah Gulen, whose organizations’ net worth is estimated to be somewhere between $22 billion and $50 billion, owns and operates over three hundred Madrasas around the world, including Pakistan, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. While Gulen’s suspicious and secretive Madrasas have been shut down and or restrained in countries such as Russia, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, based on these governments’ justified suspicions that his schools had more than just education on their agendas, his rapidly and secretively expanding charter school empire here in the US has gone quite unnoticed and unacknowledged.

In less than a decade Gulen’s Islamic network in the US has established over 100 publicly funded charter schools in 25 states. What makes this eyebrow raising phenomenon a very disturbing case is the fact that despite official documents and publicly available data Fethullah Gulen is going out of his way to deny his connections to these schools. The question is why? Here are a few excerpts from a USA Today article in August 2010:

The schools educate as many as 35,000 students — taken together they’d make up the largest charter school network in the USA — and have imported thousands of Turkish educators over the past decade.But the success of the schools at times has been clouded by nagging questions about what ties the schools may have to a reclusive Muslim leader in his late 60s living in exile in rural Pennsylvania.

Top administrators say they have no official ties to Gülen. And Gülen himself denies any connection to the schools. Still, documents available at various foundation websites and in federal forms required of non-profit groups show that virtually all of the schools have opened or operate with the aid of Gülen-inspired “dialogue” groups, local non-profits that promote Turkish culture. In one case, the Ohio-based Horizon Science Academy of Springfield in 2005 signed a five-year building lease with the parent organization of Chicago’s Niagara Foundation, which promotes Gülen’s philosophy of “peace, mutual respect, the culture of coexistence.” Gülen is the foundation’s honorary president. In many cases, charter school board members also serve as dialogue group leaders.

More from the USA Today article:

They have generic, forward-sounding names like Horizon Science Academy, Pioneer Charter School of Science and Beehive Science & Technology Academy. Quietly established over the past decade by a loosely affiliated group of Turkish-American educators, these 100 or so publicly funded charter schools in 25 states are often among the top-performing public schools in their towns.

The schools educate as many as 35,000 students — taken together they'd make up the largest charter school network in the USA — and have imported thousands of Turkish educators over the past decade.

..."The University of Oregon's Hendrick, whose writings explore the Gülen Movement, calls him "Turkey's most famous religious personality." His movement is considered the nation's "third force" alongside the military and Turkey's ruling Adalet ve Kalkýnma Partisi, or AKP Party.

In 1999, after traveling to the USA for medical treatment, Gülen was charged in Turkey with trying to create an Islamic state. Since then he has remained in Pennsylvania. After the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service in 2007 denied his bid for a visa as an "alien of extraordinary ability in education," Gülen sued, saying his followers "had established more than 600 educational institutions" worldwide. He eventually prevailed, earning a green card in 2008. But Turkish educators in the USA continue to disavow their ties.

"Gülen is both the reason behind his schools, and he has nothing whatsoever to do with them," Hendrick says.

The Perimeter Primate Blog has covered these schools extensively there.

Perimeter Primate

PLEASE READ THIS GULEN MOVEMENT & GULEN CHARTER SCHOOL UPDATE!
Under the radar of the American public, the Gulen Movement, an Islamic-based movement out of Turkey, has been quietly advancing its presence and influence in the U.S. via the establishment of charter schools, "cultural centers", and "interfaith dialogue" centers. Politicians, reporters, academics, community leaders, and charter school families have been strategically targeted and wooed by Gulenists who are building up their body of unsuspecting American sympathizers. Do the sympathizers who defend the GM's activities have an understanding of the controversies which surround this secretive movement and its worldwide political ambitions? Are they aware of the GM's current role in eroding the secularness of the Turkish state?

That blog also has a list of all the Gulen Schools in the US.

List of Gulen Charter schools in US

There are all kinds of religious schools getting public money now through charters.

I am not sure how they are getting away with it unless those in charge choose to turn away and not confront the issue.

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