No mention is made here of the huge network of Gulenist schools in this country. They use the charter school mechanism to siphon millions of dollars from idiots in US school districts who allow these fake schools to run. They use work visas like h-1B and L-1 to bring in Turkish teachers, although there are many unemployed US teachers. The H-1bs are required to kick back up to 40% of their salaries to Gulen to fund his lavish lifestyle, built essentially on a serf or indentured servant model.
This guy should be extradicted immediately, and his network of schools closed. We don’t need schools which use work visas to bring in Turkish teachers of English to the US.
People are idiots, really. This Gulenist Harmony school scam has been going on for 20 years - US taxpayers financing this corrupt evil guy, and financing a political movement in Turkey.
Democrats are up in arms about a few ads on facebook but are totally unaware of our own complicity in this Gulen thing. Democrats are profoundly stupid in many areas.
It seems to me that both Erdogan and Gulen were modernist and moderate during the period when they were allied – a period when Turkish membership in the European was a perhaps distant but certainly real possibility.
Erdogan’s drift – from Toyota dealer civic religion toward, though not as far as, Talibanist obsessive fake-fundamentalist stuff – dates from the jelling, nay the ossification, of French and German opposition to Turkey’s integration.
It’s a damn shame. The failure is lies in the banlieux of Paris, not in Washington or Istanbul.
Erdogan has since shown that Turkey was indeed unfit to join. To give a corrupt jack- booted Fascist the veto power that goes to a nation which is a member of the Europeam Union would have been an idiotic move.
