Gulen Schools Worldwide
Restore the Ottoman Caliphate. Disclaimer: if some videos are down this is the result of Gulen censorship which filed a fake copyright infringement to UTUBE.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Turkish Olympiad-A Gulen "show": Gulen Turkish Olympiad concludes finals in the USA...
Turkish Olympiad-A Gulen "show": Gulen Turkish Olympiad concludes finals in the USA...: A national competition was held on Monday in Washington, D.C. to determine finalists for the International Turkish Olympiads that wil...
Gulen controlled police attack protesters against Islamic school bill
Demonstrators in Ankara protested a bill proposed by government that seeks to boost the influence of Islamic schools.
Turkish police have fired tear gas and water cannons to disperse thousands of people protesting an education reform bill that opponents say will boost the influence of Islamic schools, a move seen as contrary to Turkey's secular constitution.
Police broke up the demonstration in Ankara on Thursday, ending a two-day standoff with protesters who wanted to march toward Parliament where the bill is being debated.
The government wants to overturn a 1997 law that kept students under 15 years old from attending religious "imam
hatip" schools. That law led to a sharp decline in attendance at the schools.
hatip" schools. That law led to a sharp decline in attendance at the schools.
A Reuters witness said protesters threw stones at riot police on Thursday as they moved in to break up the demonstration after refusing the group's request to march on parliament. There were further clashes in side streets.
Similar demonstrations held elsewhere in Turkey on Wednesday were also broken up by police.
Several demonstrators were hurt in the clashes on Thursday, but t here were no reports of detentions or major casualties among protesters at the rally organised by the KESK public workers union confederation.
Parliament is hotly debating a bill overturning the 1997 law, that was imposed with the backing of the military.
Parliamentarians on Thursday accepted a proposal from Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's AK Party to offer optional courses on the Quran and the Prophet Mohammad's life for middle and upper school pupils - from about 10 to 18 years old.
The assembly was expected to approve the bill in the coming days and the AK Party is able to call on a large parliamentary majority to push the law through.
The 1997 law had led to a sharp decrease in the numbers at iman hatip schools which were originally set up to train Muslim clerics. Erdogan and half his cabinet attended such schools.
The main secular opposition People's Republican Party (CHP) agrees on the need for education reform, but says Erdogan is seeking revenge for the 1997 law and attempting to bring about his stated desire to raise a "religious youth".
While the AK Party has won three elections since 2002 and remains popular, there is a large minority of urbanised Turks who are wary of its roots in political Islam and suspect it has plans to overturn, piece-by-piece, the secular republic.
This biased educational bill in Turkey was eventually passed. Is this what Gulen wants worldwide?
Is this what Gulen is trying to do with the rest of the world?
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Gulen Scares Turkey's Women
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What Scares Turkey’s Women?
A Pennsylvania-based imam’s anti-feminist message is spreading in the U.S. and in his home country. Margaret Spiegelman reports.
by Margaret Spiegelman | March 21, 2012 7:34 PM EDT
No sooner were Ahmet Sik and Nedim Sener released from prison than a death warning arrived. The two Turkish journalists were among more than a hundred members of their profession who had been arrested on terrorism charges in the past year, but last week they were freed after their cases drew serious attention in the Western press, having spent a full year in jail. The two had dared to investigate the Gülen movement, a transnational network of schools, media outlets, and other businesses run by followers of the imam Fethullah Gülen. At least that was how Sik accounted for his arrest. “Those who touch [the Gülenists] burn!” he said at the time.
On Friday, according to the press-freedom group Reporters Without Borders, Şık and Sener found the following message on Twitter: “Attention, attention. I warn the government and those that can should also inform it. Ergenekon [an alleged gang accused of trying to overthrow the Turkish government] is planning to assassinate Ahmet Şık and Nedim Sener. [The organization] is going to kill them and then blame the [Gülen community].” The sender used the name "Faiz Düşmanı" – Turkish for “enemy of Interest."
At first glance the Pennsylvania-based imam, 72, might seem like a most unlikely target for such a plot. He preaches tolerance and the power of education to raise a “Golden Generation.” His religious values generally coincide with those espoused by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party. But the imam's critics worry that he actually wields even more power within his movement than the prime minister exercises over the country. They call it the Cemaat – Turkish for “community” or “cult” – and say it’s an organized political force that threatens to further erodeTurkey’s secular principles.
I had never heard of the Cemaat when I answered an ad in the fall of 2010 to teach English to grade-schoolers at Çağ Fatih College, a chic private academy run by Gülenist educators in suburban Istanbul. Before taking the job, I wrote to a Turkish professor in Dallas, asking what she knew about Gülen-inspired educators, who run 33 charter schools in the state of Texas alone, out of approximately 100 across the United States. "Moderate, education-oriented Turkish Methodists is my view of them," she wrote. When I asked my future employers about the status of women at the school, they referred me to a male member of the faculty. “There are lots of women teachers!” he assured me. I pressed further, and he mentioned only that I would have to cover my knees and arms at school. There were other rules, I would learn. I just hadn't asked the right questions.
I found out on my first day of teaching. When I knocked on the door to the English department’s office, a woman walked up behind me and touched my shoulder. “Do you want to go in there?” she asked. “You can if you want, but we go in here.” She led me around the corner to another office. The sign on the door was identical: “English Department.” Although the two rooms are only steps apart, the head of the department never entered the women’s office. Instead he called on the phone. I remember one day when no one rushed to pick up. He banged on the adjoining wall and shouted something in Turkish, then rang again.
Members of the Kurdish community in France burn a portrait of Turkish writer Fethullah Gulen on December 30, 2011 in Marseille, southern France., Boris Horvat / AFP / Getty Images
Tucked between a mosque and a supermarket, Çağ Fatih College resembles a competitive campus in the States –a gleaming atrium looking out onto manicured playgrounds, and on the inside, Internet-enabled "chalkboards," swimming pools, and a smartly dressed, health-conscious catering staff. Brochures advertise strong science and English departments, and students regularly outperform their state-educated peers on national exams.
“They'd be like, 'You're a special boy, come and study geometry at our place tonight, but first let's watch this video about God.'”
The school also sets itself apart by offering numerous extracurricular activities, including prayer and religious tutoring. My colleagues met regularly after school for gatherings that one teacher described to me as part “Gülen book club,” part prayer meeting, to which students were sometimes invited. Gülen's writing is unapologetically anti-feminist. In his book Pearls of Wisdom, he writes that women are jewels, flowers, and chandeliers, but the wrong kind of woman is death: “A dissolute woman who does not know her true self destroys existing homes and turns them into graves.”
Elsewhere he does acknowledge that “There is no reason why women cannot be administrators.” Nevertheless, there are no women administrators at Çağ Fatih College. I never even met the principal, nor any of the five teachers who filled the position of vice principal at my school. They are all men. The same is true at Istanbul’s six other Fatih Colleges. While the great majority of their elementary-school teachers are women, all the administrators are men. At department meetings and teacher conferences, men sit at the front of the room, women at the back.
Gülen’s influence is pervasive. Faculty members constantly pass his books among themselves, and many have previously taught at other Gülenist schools in Turkey and abroad; the Gülenist newspaper Zaman is delivered daily to the teachers’ lounges; even the park benches in the schoolyard are stamped with the name of the major Gülenist bank.
Despite all appearances, I soon learned that describing the school as part of a “religious community” (a term I had hoped wouldn’t have the judgmental ring of “network”) was enough to make the other teachers flinch. “It’s not a community,” one of my colleagues insisted. “We’re just people who are sensitive to our religion.” At Çağ Fatih College, this means that boys and girls are segregated as much as possible. Classrooms are coeducational , in accordance with Turkish law, but from sixth grade on, boys and girls eat in separate dining halls, as their teacher do, and they’re separated for social and afterschool activities.
In the younger grades, teachers often divide their classes into teams of girls and boys for classroom competitions. They urge the boys to be as “well-behaved” as the girls. Nonetheless, my oldest classes (fourth grade) invariably were dominated by loud, aggressive boys, while girls rarely spoke up. I was discouraged by how often teachers had to shout to be heard, and by the way quieter students (mostly girls) were generally left out. Although I’m a soft-spoken person myself, I was surprised and saddened to see gender roles play out even more stridently in Turkey than in America. A colleague tried to explain why the girls were so diffident in class and why the students paid so little mind to their women teachers: “They respect their fathers, not their mothers.”
There was only one teacher who didn’t always speak glowingly of the school. “This is a man's republic,” she said. She filled me in on some of the rules that didn't apply to foreigners like me. The other women were required to call the vice principal on duty and ask permission if they needed to run errands during their free periods, for example. The teacher was frustrated that as a woman she isn’t trusted to manage her own time, or come and go freely. She wouldn't be surprised, she said, if she lost her job for "talking too much.” Other teachers disapproved of her for not participating in their extracurricular Gülen meetings, she told me.
While Gülen schools may represent the most conservative corner of middle-class society, many Turks worry that the movement’s influence is growing. A friend of mine who teaches at Istanbul University fears she might lose her job. Newly appointed administrators—Cemaat, she calls them, for their religious and political conservatism—have told her students that she’s a communist and that her extracurricular music club was a subversive organization. (I played cello with my friend and her students, and to my ear, “subversive” is an undue compliment to our rendition of “Beyond the Sea.”) She believes she's being targeted because she’s a secular woman and because of her friendship with a Jewish colleague.
She wasn’t surprised to hear about the apparent homogeneity of the Fatih College faculty, which consists almost entirely of observant Muslims in their 20s and 30s. What she found alarming was the stringent separation of men and women. As one of her colleagues, a lifelong Istanbul resident, puts it: “This sounds like Iran, not Turkey.”
One of their students took a test-prep course with a Gülen organization when he was in high school. He describes their proselytizing efforts. “They'd be like, 'Murat, you're a special boy, come and study geometry at our place tonight, but first let's watch this video about God.'” Murat (not his real name) and his friends distrust Gülen's glossy message of dialogue and tolerance, and are suspicious of his apparently sunny relations with the United States, where Gülen himself has lived in self-imposed exile since 1999. They subscribe to various conspiracy theories asserting that Gülen and his sympathizers are trying to infiltrate the government and transform Turkey into a theocracy. A new law that allows women to wear headscarves to state exams, they argue, proves Gülen's increasing social and political influence, and threatens Turkish secularism.
The news about women in Turkey is often grim. Although Turkish women won the right to vote in 1934, a decade earlier than women’s suffrage in Italy or France, their participation in politics remains comparatively low. The World Economic Forum’s recent Global Gender Gap report ranked Turkey as one of the 10 worst countries for women’s economic participation. Prime Minister Erdoğan encourages women to bear at least three children, and he discourages divorce. Violence against women is disturbingly high. In fact, the Justice Ministry recorded an increase in premeditated homicides against women from 66 in 2002 to 953 in 2009—a rise of more than 1,300 percent, although the figures could owe something to better reporting. Erdoğan’s government has introduced legal reforms to bring more perpetrators to justice, but according to Human Rights Watch, the laws tend to be poorly enforced by local authorities, who seem to value family preservation over women’s lives.
Women’s opportunities and public visibility vary greatly by region in Turkey, of course. But sharp cultural differences are apparent even from one Istanbul neighborhood to the next. When French fashion blogger Garance Doré visited the city, she was struck by “so many beautiful girls, sexy and free, smiling, relaxed, and who wouldn't bat an eye at any kind of passerby.” But outside the East-meets-West Village neighborhoods Doré described, I saw fewer young single women like myself traveling alone. Coming home in the evening to my apartment in the suburbs, 20 miles west of the city, I was sometimes the only woman on the bus with a hundred men.
Every day, during and after school, teachers at Fatih College are modeling – largely without question – a society where women's behavior is closely monitored, and where they have no voice in leadership. Many Turks were just as surprised as I was to find this happening in a middle-class, Istanbul suburb. When I described the school to a Turkish friend, an Istanbul University professor in his 40s, he told me, “This is not Islam. This is new. This is Cemaat.” If there's no place for women leaders at top-performing schools in Istanbul, where will they be squeezed out next? Do women have a place in Fethullah Gülen’s vision for a fast-changing Turkey?
The teachers I know at Istanbul University talk about how the city has changed in the past 10 years. Just look at how conservative women’s fashion has become, they say: they “can’t” wear certain skirts on the street anymore. They sense a growing religious presence on campus, too. More and more students are arriving from Gulen-inspired schools. The youngsters are well prepared academically, but they’re “not curious about the world.”
Although what women are wearing in Istanbul clearly doesn't tell the whole story, Garance Doré's take on street fashion does tell us something important -- especially in light of a the government’s new wave of Internet censorship. The government has banned has 138 keywords words from use on the Internet. As a result, the insouciant Istanbulites whom she described as “beautiful girls, sexy and free” might not be able to read what she wrote about them. Among the offending words in that quote? “Girls” and “free.”
Gulen Schools Worldwide, Power struggle emerging in Turkey Erdogan vs. Gulen
March 2012
After its election victory in 2002 the Islamist Justice- and Development Party (AKP) of PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan entered a symbiotic relationship with the U.S. based religious leader Fethullah Gülen. This alliance confronted the secular Kemalist establishment, which had been the leading power within the Turkish state for many decades and was enforced as such by the armed forces. Over the last few years this power struggle has reached its conclusion, with the power of the Kemalists greatly diminished, the AKP government mainly in charge of the military, and followers of Fethullah Gülen in control of the police, judiciary and other crucial segments of the state. This situation opened the way for a new power struggle in Turkey, putting the once solid alliance of the AKP and the Gülen movement under major pressure.
In Turkey sensational scandals follow each other in a rapid succession. The main actor in the latest one is the national intelligence service MIT. On the 7th of February it appeared that special prosecutor Sadrettin Sarikaya had ordered the detainment of MIT Undersecretary (the highest position) Hakan Fidan, his predecessor Emre Taner and two other (former) associates of MIT. This development followed from Sarikaya’s investigation into the KCK, the alleged urban branch of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). During this probe information came forward about secret contacts between MIT and the PKK, which were assumed to be unlawful (1). Although Sarikaya claimed strong evidence, the detainment of the MIT Undersecretary was highly controversial, not in the last place because it suggested political motives.
In itself it is not a bad idea for the Turkish government to accept the PKK as a conversation partner, for it could be an important step towards a solution of the conflict between Turkey and the Kurdish people, as well as an end to the violence in this respect. The fact that not everyone agrees on that became evident when Sarikaya summoned Fidan and the others to learn about what had taken place between MIT and the PKK. When they did not appear, he had them detained, a development that hit Ankara like a bomb. The AKP took Sarikaya’s maneuver as a direct assault on PM Erdogan, since it follows from his position that he carries knowledge about the ins and outs of MIT operations. This was especially so in this particular case, since Hakan Fidan is known to be a close confidant of Erdogan. To put it shortly, the AKP surmised that Sarikaya was on a collision course with Erdogan. Therefore, something had to be done to stop the threat.
Within days the AKP launched a new law, making it impossible for the Justice Department to prosecute employees of MIT without the consent of the PM (2). In response, the opposition was incensed, since Erdogan obtained a powerful weapon this way, which did not make Turkey more democratic in their opinion. Moreover, with the new law the government appears to follow double standards. For while the government has maintained that there should be an independent justice department in other cases, this principle was abandoned as soon as Erdogan became the direct object of an investigation himself.
Last year an audio recording of the secret meeting of MIT with the PKK in Oslo appeared on the Internet. Many wondered who caused the leak. It was more or less predictable that the Gülen movement eventually had to be mentioned in this respect. This was not only because of the many indications pointing to a triangle between the police, Justice Department and judges under the supervision of the Gülen movement, but also since media reports suggested a growing conflict between Gülen and the AKP. A few years ago this would have been hardly imaginable, but with the power of the Kemalists in retreat much has changed in Turkey.
Fethullah Gülen says he does not want to be involved in politics, but contradicted himself when he spoke out in favor of the AKP. This alliance didn’t come unexpectedly, since Gülen and the AKP have shared goals, such as greater religious influence on society and the end of the Kemalist hegemony. Moreover, both the AKP and Gülen stand for the expansion of Turkish influence abroad, a policy often summarized under the term Neo-Ottomanism.
The Gülen movement had much to offer to the AKP, not only an intellectual cadre and a social base within Turkish society, but also the support of the media belonging to the Gülen movement. In return the AKP became the political tool of the Gülen movement and a way towards domination of the state. Still, the AKP and the Gülen movement are not identical. A number of AKP MP’s may be followers of Gülen, but Erdogan is not. On certain essential points he even disagrees with this imam, who has resided on a farm in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania since 1998. For instance, Erdogan has been campaigning against the state of Israel over the last few years, while Gülen is on good terms with representatives of this country. This explains why Gülen criticized the Turkish activists who wanted in 2010 to bring humanitarian aid to the Gaza strip, beleaguered by Israel (3). Erdogan, who praised the activists generously, was hit by Gülen simultaneously this way. It was not going to be the last collision, for annoyances accumulated, such as the phenomenon that the loyalty of Gülen’s followers is shifting towards Erdogan as soon they are in his environment. MIT Undersecretary Hakan Fidan is a good example in this respect. Initially he belonged to the Gülen movement, but later he became closer to Erdogan. This is a major nuisance for Gülen.
The next stage in the growing power struggle between Gülen and Erdogan turned out to be the match-fixing scandal in football matches last year. The Gülen movement had no objections to a life sentence for Aziz Yildirim, the president of the Fehnerbahce sport club. This followed from considerations that went beyond football. For Yildirim is also an important contractor who does major construction projects, such as for NATO. With him in prison such lucrative jobs could go to Gülen’s number one entrepreneur Ahmet Calik. But the importance of football cannot be underestimated in Turkey, making the AKP hesitant to go along with Gülen’s scheme. The AKP feared a massive loss of votes if immensely popular football players were to end up in prison for many years. This is why Erdogan’s party proposed to limit the maximum penalty. Subsequently this proposal was torpedoed by the veto of President Abdullah Gül, with whom the Gülen movement has better relations than with Erdogan. After Gül had send the proposed law back to parliament, it was accepted there once again. So, Erdogan’s faction in the AKP got what it wanted, but as a consequence the crack in its understanding with Gülen became more visible than ever before. The strong critique directed towards the AKP supporters of the proposed law by columnists in Gülen’s daily Todays Zaman left no doubt about that (4).
The next discord appeared after the arrest of former Commander-in-Chief Ilker Basbug, on the suspicion of involvement with Ergenekon, the alleged ultra-secular conspiracy against the AKP and the Gülen movement which has kept Turkish newspaper readers occupied over the last few years. As far as Erdogan was concerned, Başbuğ could have been released pending trial, but Gülen’s followers in the Justice Department wanted to see the general behind bars immediately (5). At the time Erdogan saw no reason to interfere, but after the detainment of Hakan Fidan in early February he put on the emergency brake. This is entirely logical, because Erdogan understands very well that MIT is one of the state institutions that is not under full control of the Gülen movement. The Kurdish politician Zübeynir Aydar, a member of the PKK-team that negotiated with MIT, understood what happened very well. According to Aydar the government attempted to purge the police from Gülen’s influence. Subsequently the Gülen followers in the police hit back by leaking MIT documents to the Justice Department (6). Sarikaya’s probe was the result. The fact that shortly after the detainment of Hakan Fidan two police chiefs who investigated the contacts between MIT and PKK were removed from duty illustrates Aydars statement (7).
It was no coincidence that the contacts between MIT and PKK caused all of this. For while Erdogan came to see negotiations as a way to end violence, Gülen preferred mass arrests of Kurdish politicians and activists who allegedly had contacts with the PKK. Gülen is very much willing to give the Kurds certain privileges, such as their own schools and the use of their own language. But with those who continue to resist Turkish domination he shows no mercy. He made that quite clear during a speech which appeared on his website herkul.org in which he even called for the murder of 50,000 Kurds to silence their resistance!
On the outside nothing seems wrong between Erdogan and Gülen. This is explained by the fact that neither of them has anything to gain from a power struggle occurring in the arena of the media. While the Gülen movement keeps silent, the AKP government adopts a denial strategy. For example, Erdogan himself said: “The institutions of this country have been fulfilling their duties in a state of unprecedented harmony and motivation. There is no animosity, either among state institutions or between sons of this country.” (8) As if the AKP didn’t recently launch a law which radiates, above all else, mistrust towards the Gülen-dominated police and the judiciary …
According to AKP member of parliament (and former Erdogan advisor) Yalcin Akdogan the impression of a conflict with the Gülen movement has been intentionally created by opponents: “Those who sow the seeds of evil do not only want to drag the AK Party and the movement into a lose-lose downward spiral, they also want to separate Turkey from its current goal of democratization.” (9) Akdogan may partially have a point, in that opponents of both Erdogan and Gülen will surely appreciate discord between the two of them. However, this does not prove that any of these opponents arranged the situation. It also remains vague who “those who sow the seeds of evil” are. It cannot be the secular nationalists, for their power over the state belongs to the past by now. Moreover, in those circumstances prosecutor Sarikaya would probably be standing in the Ergenekon corner by now. Instead his name hardly came forward recently. This may seem strange, but it is not unexplainable. For if further investigation had uncovered his ties with the Gülen movement, no one would have doubted the reality of the conflict any longer.
As long as some doubts remained, the state of Israel could also be mentioned as a possible perpetrator. This is not so implausible, since the Jewish state was far from pleased when Hakan Fidan became appointed as MIT-chief. But if Israel wants to do him harm, it would seem easier to point at his good relationship with Iran. Besides, a role of Israel in the MIT scandal would lead towards contradictory (but nevertheless interesting) aspects, such as the indications of a cooperation between the Jewish state and the PKK over the last few years, and of course on the other side, the good relations between Israel and the PKK-hating Gülen movement.
Did the government realize that its arguments were not particularly strong? Maybe that is why Yalcin Akdogan added the statement that Gülen sent a get-well-soon message to Erdogan, after the PM underwent surgery on his troubled intestines for the second time early February. Very kind of course, but what does it say about the quality of the relationship? For opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who often responds furiously about Erdogan’s tricks, sends such messages to Erdogan as well. That is why it is more interesting to speculate why Gülen did not send a get-well-soon message to Erdogan in November, after Erdogan received his first surgery.
Apart from all the denials stands the fact that both the AKP and the Gülen movement are hungry for power and influence in Turkey. The AKP through the government, the Gülen movement through the state, which seems to make conflicts inevitable. Few observers still have doubts that there is a power struggle. Not only does a secular columnist such as Rusen Cakir take it as a fact (10), but so does the conservative Ali Bayramoğlu in the religious and pro-government daily Yeni Safak (11). That the conflict has been slumbering so long is caused by the fact that the AKP and the Gülen movement were on the same side in the confrontation with the Kemalist establishment. However, after the ideological opponents had disappeared in prison, or were kept silent out of fear for arrest, the common-enemy element diminished, opening the way to an entirely new power struggle in Turkey. The recent controversy over MIT is not its first manifestation, but has lead to the most implications so far. Columnist Rusen Cakir foresees what may happen next: “At this point, I think there is a higher probability that the Gülen movement will take a step back. However, it is also not realistic to expect them to abandon the positions they have achieved after years of hard labor without gaining anything.”
1.http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ankara-in-shock-over-probe-on-intel-chiefs.aspx?pageID=238&nID=13359&NewsCatID=338
2.http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/government-shields-intel-by-changing-law.aspx?pageID=238&nID=13439&NewsCatID=341
3.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575284721280274694.html
4. http://www.todayszaman.com/columnist-265380-from-ak-party-to-akp.html
5.http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/basbug-arrest-reveals-crack-in-ruling-party.aspx?pageID=238&nid=11370
6.http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/deputy-prosecutor-says--evidence-was-obtained.aspx?pageID=238&nID=13695&NewsCatID=338
7.http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/two-key-police-chiefs-removed-from-duty.aspx?pageID=238&nID=13362&NewsCatID=338
8.http://www.todayszaman.com/news-271885-erdogan-defends-the-elected-in-mit-controversy-rejects-infighting.html
9. http://www.todayszaman.com/news-271543-.html
10.http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/third-parties-need-not-worry-two-sides-will-tackle-the-crisis-.aspx?pageID=238&nID=14224&NewsCatID=39
11. http://www.ulusalkanal.com.tr/gundem/iktidar-kavgasinin-sifreleri-erdogan-gulen-kavgasi-surecek-h1289.html
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Gulen Turkish School in Ethiopia- Nejashi Ethio Turkish School
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| Ethiopian chilren at Nejashi Etho-Turkish school meet with Turkey's State Minister |
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| With the President of Ethiopia reading an F. Gulen Pamphlet (how obvious can you get) |
Ethio - Turkish Harmony of Cultures Day is Celebrated
Our schools organized the 2nd of an admired annual event, Ethio-Turkish Harmony of Cultures Day, on Sunday, March 11, 2012 at Sheraton Addis Ababa Hotel with the participation of bureaucrats from Federal Ministry of Education and Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, lecturers and students from Addis Ababa University, businessmen from Turkey, parents of our students, administrators, teachers and students of Nejashi Ethio-Turkish International Schools.
The show started with the national anthems of Ethiopia and Turkey. In this event, guests had a chance to see some examples of Ethiopian and Turkish folk dances. Besides, there were four competitions of poem recitations in Amharic and Turkish, and singing songs in Amharic and Turkish as well. The winners of poem recitation and singing a song in Turkish were chosen as the representatives of Ethiopia for the 10th International Turkish Olympiads in June in Turkey.
For the eliminations, a jury of 8 members was formed by some important guests from Ministry of Education, music industry and media in Ethiopia, businessmen and elites from Turkish society living in Addis Ababa. The winners in the competitions of Amharic song and poem were Lidya Abiy and Neval Muhammed relatively. Students who got the first position and had a chance to represent Ethiopia in International Turkish Olympiads in singing a Turkish song and reading a poem were Sifen Mulu and Ahmed Awad.
The day ended with the speeches of distinguished guests such as H.E. Dr. Mulatu Teshome, Ethiopian Ambassador to Turkey, H.E. Dr. Ergüder Can, the deputy governor of Izmir, H.E. Ambassador Mahdi Ahmed from the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, H.E. Mr. Ahmet Küçükbay, the Honorary Counselor of Ethiopia to Izmir and representatives of Turkish businessmen who were in Ethiopia for Ethiopia-Turkey Trade and Investment Committee Meeting. Degree holders in the competitions and presenters of the program from the students were given different gifts by the speakers and jury members.
To help the establishment of inter-cultural dialog, love and tolerance is among the most important goals of our schools and we believe that such events help all different cultures on Earth to be hand in hand.
Monday, March 19, 2012
Gulen and their worldwide secret agenda explored on Wikileaks
Stratfor a think tank based out of Austin, TX has released a series of e mails and investigations about the Gulen Movement.
Review additional pages by clicking on a date to the left
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Turkish Olympiad-A Gulen "show": Gulen's Turkish Olympiad - Worldwide finals to be ...
Turkish Olympiad-A Gulen "show": Gulen's Turkish Olympiad - Worldwide finals to be ...: mentioned on Gulen's mouthpiece propaganda rag "Today's Zaman" hate to break these kid's hearts that attend the charter schools managed by ...
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Gulen Schools in Australia controversial and growing
Despite its name, Resha College, Turkish for raindrops, would cater for up to 150 students in a non-denominational environment.
Councillor Angela Owen-Taylor (Parkinson) said although the college was still seeking Brisbane City Council planning approval, several residents had raised concerns.
“It is disappointing that some people are choosing to make racially based inferences about this school,” she said.
“It is an independent school and will not preclude any student from any background from attending.”
One Algester resident said Turkish families should send their children to existing local schools or go back to Turkey.
Ngaire Lanyon said it was time people stood up to the development of Muslim-based schools which she believed did not promote integration.
“They come to this country, why can’t they go to our local schools?
“How many German schools or New Zealand schools do you see around?”
Mrs Lanyon said building schools like Resha College was setting a “shocking precedent”.
“We’re losing our own values,” she said. “When other people come here they have to adopt the Australian way of life.
“If our schools aren’t good enough for their kids they should go back to Turkey.”
Queensland Education and Cultural Foundation’s Murat Coskun said the boutique private school would cater for a maximum of 150 students and would welcome children of all faiths and ethnic backgrounds.
Federal Member for Moreton Graham Perrett said he would establish a multicultural forum following discussions at the Southside Summit on the weekend.
Mr Perrett said multiculturalism was an issue residents felt needed regular discussion.
“It will be useful to educate, inform and pass on community concerns,” he said.
Mr Perrett said people had also raised migrant housing as an issue.
Email editorial@southern-star.com.au with your view.
THE GULEN MOVEMENT IS PARTICULARLY STRONG IN AUSTRALIA AND HAS PURCHASED A CHAIR AT THE ACU (Australian Catholic University)
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