Center shows threat posed by Islamist Gülen movement charter schools– in Loudon County and elsewhere

WASHINGTON, D.C.: Last night, the Center for Security Policy sponsored a briefing to inform, most immediately, members of the Loudoun County School Board who are actively considering whether to provide taxpayer funding to a new charter school linked to Turkish Islamist Fethullah Gulen. A version of the explosive power point briefing presented by Center President Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. and a former public school teacher, Rachel Sargent, at the Loudoun County School System Administration Building in Ashburn, Virginia is available at https://youtu.be/v6wqna7AhYg.

The briefing illuminates the pattern employed by Gulen and his cult-like Turkish supremacist Movement to induce school boards to charter and pay his followers to establish vehicles for indoctrinating impressionable American students, usually under the guise of enriched science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. At its core, this pattern involves deception with respect to the true character of the proposed school, its association with the Gulenists, and the myriad problems such Gulen academic institutions have presented to school system administrators and taxpayers from Texas to Maryland.

In the case of the so-called Loudoun Math and Information Technology Academy (LMITA), the briefing established that denials on the part of LMITA’s applicants of any relationship with Fethullah Gulen and its followers obscure the truth. On the basis of a link analysis performed by Kent Clizbe, a retired career CIA intelligence officer who has specialized in ferreting out and countering terrorist networks, at least two of the LMITA applicants have extensive ties to Gulen educational operations elsewhere across the country.

The briefing also presented the attached letter to the Loudoun School Board by Mary Addi, a former teacher in a Gulen school in Cleveland, Ohio. It draws on her own experience and that of Ms. Addi’s husband, an expatriate from Turkey who was also a teacher at that school, to make clear the Islamist character and mission of the Gulen Movement and its pedagogy.

Mr. Gaffney, whose column published in the Washington Times on December 11, 2012 addresses the danger posed by Gulenists to the students and taxpayers of Loudoun County and those of the nation as a whole, said:

The Loudoun County School Board is not the first to be subjected to the Gulen bait-and-switch. The lack of transparency fits a pattern in such applications of concealing connections to an organization promoting Turkish and Islamist agendas deeply hostile to the United States. Gulen schools prove deeply problematic to their school systems and exceedingly difficult to disestablish Armed with the knowledge that this application is, in fact, for a Gulen Movement institution, the Board has a responsibility to deny it taxpayer funding. In so doing, it can set a model for the rest of the country.