The BBC, the police, academia, local and national government all conspire to hide the truth about Islam in our midst…..They tell us that Al Qaeda doesn’t exist, bombers are just criminals perverting a peaceful Islam, Muslim rape gangs targeting non-Muslims don’t exist, ‘extremists’ don’t represent the vast majority of Muslims….all untrue.
The real, inconvenient, Truth is much more complicated…and all the more frightening.
Read this from Der Spiegel and contemplate the future and not just for Turkey…or indeed Europe should Turkey be allowed to become a member but also for individual countries with large populations of activist Muslims:
The Shadowy World of the Islamic Gülen Movement
By Maximilian Popp
Millions of Muslims around the world idolize Turkish preacher Fethullah Gülen, who likes to present himself as the Gandhi of Islam. His Gülen movement runs schools in 140 countries and promotes interfaith dialogue. But former members describe it as a sect, and some believe the secretive organization is conspiring to expand its power in Turkey.
Germans have devoted a lot of attention to Islam in recent years. There are conferences on Islam and research projects on integration. But the German public knows almost nothing about Gülen and his movement, even though it has more influence on Muslims in Germany than almost any other group. “It is the most important and most dangerous Islamist movement in Germany,” says Ursula Spuler-Stegemann, an Islamic scholar in the western German university city of Marburg. “They are everywhere.”
The Gülen movement has two sides: One that faces the world and another that hides from it.
In one of his sermons, he called upon his students to establish a new Muslim age. He advised his supporters to undermine the Turkish state and act conspiratorially until the time was ripe to assume power. “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. (…) You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power (…) Until that time, any step taken would be too early — like breaking an egg without waiting the full 40 days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside.”
Gülen’s influence in Turkey was enhanced when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s conservative Islamic party, the AKP, won the Turkish parliamentary election in 2002. Observers believe that the two camps entered into a strategic partnership at first, with Gülen providing the AKP with votes while Erdogan protected the cemaat.
Many civil servants act at the behest of the “Gülen brothers,” says a former senior member. “They were our students. We trained and supported them. When these grateful children assume office, they continue to serve Gülen.” In 2006, former police chief Adil Serdar Sacan estimated that the Fethullahcis held more than 80 percent of senior positions in the Turkish police force. “The assertion that the TNP (Turkish National Police) is controlled by Gulenists is impossible to confirm but we have found no one who disputes it,” wrote James Jeffrey, the then US ambassador in Ankara, in a 2009 cable.
All of this sounds harmless, tolerant and peaceful. But Ilhan Cihaner experienced in Turkey what can happen to critics. “Anyone who messes with Gülen is destroyed,” says the former chief prosecutor. He has been a hero among secular Turks since he investigated the Gülen community in 2007. Cihaner says that he had received information about illegal financial transactions within the cemaat. But then, in response to pressure from the government, he was taken off the case. He was arrested in 2010.
Cihaner was accused of being a member of the ultranationalist Ergenekon organization, a group of conspirators who had allegedly planned to overthrow the government. Even Cihaner’s political rivals believe that the charges against him were absurd. The former prosecutor had acquired a reputation for his staunch campaigns against mafia-like networks. And now he was being accused of working with Ergenekon and planning to plant weapons in dormitories where Gülen supporters lived so as to discredit the movement. The prosecution based its case on statements by anonymous witnesses. Cihaner was eventually released because of insufficient evidence against him. He is now a member of the opposition in the Turkish parliament.
Istanbul-based journalist Ahmet Sik suffered a similar fate. He was arrested in March 2011, shortly before his book about the Gülen movement, “Imamin Ordusu,” (“The Imam’s Army”), was to be published. Security forces searched the offices of his publishing house, and the manuscript, in which Sik describes how the Gülen movement has allegedly infiltrated the police and the judiciary in Turkey, was confiscated. The investigative reporter was charged with being a member of Ergenekon. Ironically, it was Sik who, together with a colleague, had exposed the secret coup plans of an Ergenekon admiral in the weekly magazine Nokta in 2007 and who had repeatedly targeted the Ergenekon network. Sik was released a few months ago, following international protests.
In September 2010, Hanefi Avci, a former Turkish police chief and former Gülen sympathizer, was arrested and accused of having participated in the Ergenekon conspiracy. He had just published a book in which he accused Gülen members in the police of illegally wiretapping their enemies’ telephone conversations and manipulating trials.’
You will never see such a report on the BBC…it is too close to home and too likely to raise some very awkward questions about ‘multi-culturalism’.
“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.”
Remember, this is in essence what Mehdi Hasan says…Muslims must get into positions of power, especially in the Media, so that Muslim influence can increase and hence the power that Muslims can wield will also increase.
Yet again we have the ‘Establishment’ carrying out a policy that has highly controversial consequences, possibly dangerous ones for Democracies, and all criticism is suppressed and silenced. Not only that but Islam is actively promoted by the BBC and all without any balancing critiques.
When the end game starts to play out many of the people who implement these policies will ‘adapt’ and bow down before the new regime and take the silver pieces on offer. They know that just as in Communist society the privileged still live a life of privilege unencumbered by the normal rules and laws of society…look at Muslim royalty and high flying businessmen…..drinking, gambling, womanising…..and yet the morality police back home are hunting down women for driving cars or going out unescorted by a male relative.
Those at the top now figure that come what may they will still be in charge and enjoying the good life never mind what happens to the ‘small people’ and whatever new regime takes power.
The BBC is supposed to hold such people to account…and yet it has become those people itself.
In his now infamous speech, John Humphrys argued that: “If we were not prepared to take on a very, very powerful government indeed there would be no point in the BBC existing — that is ultimately what the BBC is for.’
Shame he doesn’t live up to his own ideals by taking on very, very powerful vested interests.
