Tag: Gulen

CRAZED FROM THE CRADLE: The Weird Roots of American Imperialism (by Cem Ryan)

"Declaration of Independence" John Trumbull, 1817

CRAZED FROM THE CRADLE

The Weird Roots of American Imperialism

By James (Cem) Ryan

How beautifully written the American Declaration of Independence. How stirring the claims pronounced by the Founding Fathers, “self evident” truths about equality and the endowment of rights by the deity, all dogmatically unassailable. Add to this heady nectar the assertion that “Laws of nature and of Nature’s God” sanction, and indeed entitle, the new country to rebel from tyrannous England and establish a new government. The rights of the people, indeed people everywhere, were dictated, not by government decree or any man, but by God. And America became one nation under God to whom schoolchildren in America daily pledge. Can there be any higher entitling authority?

With the righteousness of their actions derived from and affixed by the deity, America’s Founding Fathers double-stitched their assertion of independence from below, that is, from the people themselves. While governments are created and organized by men, the powers inherent in government are derived “from the consent of the governed.” And governments destructive to the natural and divine rights of man can be altered or even abolished by the people under its rule. In other words, the right of revolution is implicit in the right and responsibility of government. The reason by which the implication of liberty was enlarged to sanction the self-determination of a group appears in the Declaration of Independence. It proclaimed that men, free and equal, instituted government and consented to its powers in order to protect the inalienable natural rights with which their Creator had bestowed them.

Nature’s God had a clear purpose intuited the founding fathers. America was the fortunate child of a beneficent, protective deity, which shed grace and moral justification on the new land and on its governed, the second generation of God’s chosen people, the first being the Biblical Israelites. The late Professor Albert Weinberg of Johns Hopkins University, author of that magisterial work on American expansionism, Manifest Destiny, adds that “the first doctrine which reflected the nationalistic theology […] was that of God’s decree of independence.” [1] The Declaration of Independence also reflected the first governmental demonization of the American Indians. The freedoms given by God to the freshly minted Americans in their Declaration of Independence did not apply to “the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” [2] Thus the Indians were damned by God’s mouth, the same mouth that inspired the framers of the above cited document of freedom, primarily from the pen of Thomas Jefferson. In for a penny, in for a pound! Thus on July 4, 1776, the birth of the nation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the first war against terror was officially declared by the Continental Congress on behalf of themselves, the invading and occupying power, America, against the aboriginal inhabitants and primordial owners of the land of that appropriating new nation. And the “Indian Savages” remain condemned to this moment in the catalyzing document that launched the American republic. Frozen in time as “merciless” terrorists, Native Americans are marked by the original sin of the white man’s appropriation. The irony lies too deep for tears.

Baby Steps, Giant Swallows

The destruction from within of their much vaunted and hotly contested liberty was of grave concern to America’s Founding Fathers. Tere was much worry about the control of possible violence and probable factionalism—the new Constitution was still controversial. James Madison first advocated in the Federalıst Papers growth beyond the original thirteen colonies in 1788. For Madison, safety resided in numbers and dispersion. “Extend the sphere,” he said writing as Publius in Federalist #10. [3] This would soon mean products as well as land and would provide the economic impetus for what would become the self-assigned destiny of America. The quip about “extending the sphere” would be slightly restated fifty years later by Andrew Jackson, the George W. Bush of his day, as“extending the area of freedom.” “Extend” would become a codeword for dispossessing, cheating, and disposing of southern American Indians along with forcibly annexing Texas from Mexico. [4]

Expansion for expansion’s sake was not some abstract ideal. Many thought—and not just abolitionists—that the insatiable demand for cotton by England, and the arable land for the southern slavers to grow it, were the true fuels for expansion. Historian William Appleman Williams describes this condition as “the American farm businessmen who were in a quasi-colonial position inside their own national economy” while operating as“economic imperialists” abroad.[5]

By expanding the territory the potential for passionate insurrection, while not eliminated, would at least be controlled by the wider representation in government and the resulting variety and multiplicity of issues. These “issues” had already coalesced into the agrarian versus the cosmopolitan argument, that is, agricultural interests posed against the monetary banking power of the cities. Let those passions be nurtured to the broader common good, Madison said, and over a wider range, both intellectually and geographically. And of course, this would be all in the best interests of the electorate.

As Madison wrote: Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. [6]

Thus the risk of violent factionalism would be avoided. Let the passions prevail, allow the people a voice, although a marginal one. Control was the key. Divide and diffuse. By extending the sphere of political representation, the heat of disagreement is dissipated and factionalized, like coalition governments in parliamentary democracies.

Ever analytical in justifying its actions, ever striving to be unique among any and all nations, John Jay similarly extolled some differences between the young America and its former parent, England. That Jay considered post-colonial America to be the nucleus for a much wider domain is obvious. He wrote:

It has often given me pleasure to observe, that independent America was not composed of detached and distant territories, but that one connected, fertile, wide spreading country was the portion of our western sons of liberty. Providence has in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions, and watered it with innumerable streams, for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants. A succession of navigable waters forms a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind it together; while the most noble rivers in the world, running at convenient distances, present them with highways for the easy communication of friendly aids, and the mutual transportation and exchange of their various commodities. [7]

Jay was border-conscious and, like Jefferson, suspicious of Spain and France. These fears would later be heightened by Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The concerns then shifted from commercial navigation of the Mississippi to protecting its mouth at New Orleans. And this focused American eyes on Cuba. The American fixation on Cuba began even earlier. In 1761, Benjamin Franklin spoke about Cuba and Mexico as being next on the list of acquisitions. But it was Jefferson who was fixated on the Black Pearl of the Antilles. He viewed the island as a mere appendage of Florida and a natural way to expand the new republic. In addition to its geopolitical strategic importance, Cuba was the center of the slave trade; this was of great interest to the slave-holding southern states as a way to expand economic and political power. Cuba entering the union as Texas had would prove a boon for the slave states. Thus began the long-standing national fixation on Cuba spanning almost three centuries as a natural protector of the southern border of the United States and now for decades a threat. Sounding like Bush and Cheney, John Jay made the claim that America’s security concerns alone justified expansion. [8] Jefferson wrote:

Spain thinks it convenient to shut the Mississippi against us on the one side, and Britain excludes us from the St. Lawrence on the other; nor will either of them permit the other waters, which are between them and us, to become the means of mutual intercourse and traffic. From these and such like considerations, which might if consistent with prudence, be more amplified and detailed, it is easy to see that jealousies and uneasiness may gradually slide into the minds and cabinets of other nations; and that we are not to expect they should regard our advancement in union, in power and consequence by land and by sea, with an eye of indifference and composure. [9]

Jefferson was also uneasy about fledgling America falling prey to the talons of foreign powers. In an April 27, 1809 letter to James Madison, then President of the United States, Jefferson expressed his deep concern about the ambitions of Napoleon Bonaparte toward the Spanish colonies, particularly Mexico and Cuba. Not only was Jefferson anticipating the imperialistic Spanish-American war almost a century later, he poked his finger into the open wound that describes relations between the United States and Cuba to this day. As he noted below:

He [Napoleon] ought the more to conciliate our good will, as we can be such an obstacle to the new career opening on him in the Spanish colonies. That he would give us the Floridas to withhold intercourse with the residue of those colonies, cannot be doubted. But that is no price; because they are ours in the first moment of the first war; and until a war they are of no particular necessity to us. But, although with difficulty, he will consent to our receiving Cuba into our Union, to prevent our aid to Mexico and the other provinces. That would be a price, and I would immediately erect a column on the southernmost limit of Cuba, and inscribe on it a ne plus ultra as to us in that direction. We should then have only to include the north in our Confederacy, which would be of course in the first war, and we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation; and I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government.[10]

For Jefferson the primary author of the Constitution, it was quite natural that he was pleased with his efforts. Unfortunately, his“empire for liberty” was a highly selective one, excluding any and all who stood in its relentless path.

Natural God-Given Borders

The notion of a natural right to liberty soon metastasized into other rights that became self-serving vehicles to promote the national interest at the expense of other nations and other peoples. Not surprisingly there was an inherent expansionist impulse in protecting the natural and self-proclaimed God-given right of liberty. By logical extension, claims of a natural right to security, led forthwith to claims for more land, which evolved into something referred to as the Great Law of Preservation, actually an offshoot of the Hobbesian concept of self-preservation. Hobbes claimed that self-preservation, being a natural instinct, should be the root of any political philosophy or system.[11] Samuel Adams and Benjamin Franklin earlier broached this idea in 1772 in a town meeting in Boston. “The first fundamental, positive law of all common wealths or states,” said Franklin, “is establishing the legislative power. As the first fundamental natural law, also, which is to govern even the legislative power itself, is the preservation of the society.” [12]

The evolved law of self-preservation was evoked by the perceived threat posed by peaceful Canada as a possible staging area and invasion route for the British. The Continental Congress, headed by John Jay, sent a letter to the “oppressed inhabitants of Canada” defending American use of armed ships on Lake Erie and the seizure of forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point in the war of independence from Great Britain. The letter addressed the notion of self-preservation, and soon developed into the “great law of self-preservation.” Jay went on to say “we, for our parts, are determined to live free, or not at all; and are resolved, that posterity shall never reproach us with having brought slaves into the world.” [13] Ever self-referential, apparently the notion that Jay and his forbearers, at the behest of Great Britain, had already brought hundreds of thousands of slaves into the world soon-to-be-called the United States of America did not pose the slightest disturbance.

The best defense? Expansion. For the fledgling coastline nation, with enormous Canada to its north and the Spanish to the south, had little recourse but to seek territorial buffers for its security. But what are the conditions of security? When does a nation’s right to securely exist translate into the right to seize or attack a neighbor? These post-revolutionary issues remain relevant in today’s America as well, particularly the determinants of what constitutes a security threat.

Tensions had been heightened by the presence of the Spanish in Florida and the resulting restriction of navigation rights on the Mississippi River. America claimed the right of free navigation under a Jeffersonian-espoused extension of natural law. As Weinberg notes, “the idea of natural right is apparently like a pebble which, however diminutive, on being cast into the water sets up ripples in remarkably increasing scope” [14] At that time, these “ripples” would lead to tidal waves of hallucinatory logic that eventually floated the nation’s natural right of ‘extension’ to include the full sweep of the Gulf Stream. And related ideas of ‘propinquity’ and‘contiguity’ made the Philippines contiguous to Hawaii and China both. When challenged, US Senator Albert Beveridge, the neo-con of his day, huffed, “Our navy will make them contiguous.” [15]

But Jefferson’s attention centered on the Mississippi River, particularly its mouth. As mentioned earlier, annexation of Cuba became a strategic interest to use as a bulwark for the entrance of this vital commercial artery. Jefferson led the acquisition campaign. In a letter to James Monroe, October 24, 1823 he avowed his desire for Cuba as a strategic interest of the United States, an obsession that persists to this day.

I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States. The control which, with Florida, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries and isthmus bordering on it, as well as all those whose waters flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political well-being. [16]

When Spain ceded Louisiana to Napoleonic France tensions in America heightened further. But one morning thereafter Napoleon announced from his bath that he would sell the Louisiana Territory to America. In one sense this solved the security problem of New Orleans. But another was created, and it set a dangerous precedent, later visited tragically on the American Indians. It seems that the residents of New Orleans, preferring the more casual Spanish rule, did not like the quick flip sale by France to America. Ever concerned about internal rebellion, America acted reflexively. Thus on the day of possession President Jefferson sent in the troops. One may note that thus began the long and continuing use of America’s military to solve political problems, usually in the name of protecting its God-given democracy.

Thus Jefferson, that champion of democracy, suspended the natural, democratic right of the people of New Orleans—and greater Louisiana—to have political freedom. More specifically, he nullified their natural right to have government, in Jefferson’s language, “at the consent of the governed.”Offered neither statehood nor territorial government, they had no representation, the crucial flashpoint of the American war of revolution thirty years earlier. That these people—Indian and non-Indian both— had no natural rights whatsoever little affected Jefferson. According to Weinberg,

It is the doctrine that by the destiny manifest in geography America’s natural right to territory essential to its security must override the right of self-determination claimed by its inhabitants. Here for the first time the idea that “our rights” must not be destroyed leads to the destruction of that cornerstone of the nationalist’s natural right philosophy, the universal right to political liberty. [17]

Thinking indeed relevant today.

American imperialism of that time was focused on its own concerns about security, regardless of concerns for people like the non-citizens of Louisiana. Thus grew the flawed and heavily biased ideology that America’s—and Americans—rights always trump others. The champions of human rights became the chumps of heavy-handed enforcement. Had America revealed itself as naive? Or at best hypocritical? Or at its worst, an aggressive, dangerous imperialist power? Where in the spectrum would it reside?

Learning from its success, America convinced itself of the purity and clarity of its destiny. Experts like Weinberg speak of the pride inherent in the American achievement in democracy, with certain notable exceptions covered over by the enthusiasm of the endeavor. The deity was invoked in whose name geography and civilizations were overrun and destroyed. Shifting and ever escalating principles were developed to justify aggressive and morally questionable land grabs and the related mistreatment of aboriginal inhabitants. As for the newly obtained population of New Orleans, no consent was obtained from the governed, no offer of representation or citizenship was extended. The endeavor to expand was all, a mission designed to light the way for democracy, liberty, security, and equality not only for America, but for the world. Weinberg comments:

The logical composition of ideas may contain elements which, as the ideas enter into chemical reaction with more emotional factors, cause them to undergo precisely the transformations which their original propounders would most abhor. [18]

Retrospectively over the long sweep of history what would these original “propounders” now say? What would such a backward glimpse reveal about the America that was their dream, the endeavor to which they pledged their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor? Would they smile beneficently? Or would their words be the dying words of the despairing Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guiness) in the film, The Bridge On the River Kwai, “What have I done?”

The Divinity of Nature

The doubling in size of America from the Louisiana Purchase did not satiate the need for more land. More land only meant more border problems. So concern continued to grow about protecting the mouth of the Mississippi River, that is, New Orleans and the delta plain. And now the strategic focus shifted to the Spanish colony, Florida. What to do? The assertion of a natural“righteousness” seemed outdated given that Florida was a dangling remnant of the original Spanish holding of what eventually became the Louisiana Purchase. Setting aside the natural right principle, nature itself was selected as the rational for extension. “Instead of reading the law of nature primarily from the heart of man,” noted Weinberg, “expansionists took to reading it from the configuration of the earth.” [19] After all, since nature had ordered all things including natural boundaries for nations, so certainly had the deity done likewise for the United States. And why not? Hadn’t God himself chosen this nation, above all others, for greatness? Ironically, given its relatively small size, the notion of natural boundaries was used in Europe as a check against expansion. Not so for bountiful America with unimaginably vast territory, recently doubled in size by Jefferson’s acquisition. America was young and fast-moving, unique among countries. What had served for parent Europe no longer served for the child. With the acquisition of the western territory, the previous notion of the Mississippi River as a quasi boundary was shattered forever. The expression “beyond the Mississippi” would later appear as a kind of Biblical “far country”—the “Great American Desert”—to which the southern Indian tribes, primarily forest people, would be banished.[20] And the original idea that the eastern slope of the Appalachian Mountains served as a border was now an historical figment of no consequence. Besides, a river can be crossed, and mountains, while arduous to scale, would never pose a barrier to the plucky, emboldened Americans. But there were big problems down south.

A look at a map reveals the concern raised by Spanish possessions, specifically Florida and Cuba. Annexing these two would impose a strategic natural barrier between the open ocean and the Gulf of Mexico thus securing the commercial and strategic significance of the Mississippi River and New Orleans. To solve the Florida problem explosive suggestions were made. America’s natural boundaries were really the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Mississippi river. In other words, all water boundaries east, south, and west. Also advanced was something called the “appendage theory.”This held that Florida had been affixed to the American mainland by the hand of God. The idea of God as master landscape-designer would evolve to be known as the principle of “territorial propinquity.” It held that two adjacent territories connected by a common geographical feature are considered as one combined landmass, as ligaments and muscles connect the foot to the leg to form the completed member. Geography determined everything. Only appropriate ownership was lacking. But the deity of geographical predestination would do the rest. “Unity was posited on the grounds of propinquity, enclosure by the same natural barrier, or a common territorial feature such as a river,”observed Weinberg. [21] With unchecked illogic, these principles would soon evolve into a fantasy of geographical and nautical rationalizing that would take care of Cuba and, by possibly combining sunsets and oceanic currents that burnish and bathe America, the rest of the world. God, at least the American variety, was indeed good and generous.

Expansionist Metaphysics

The babbling was epic. Everything was up for America’s taking according to the expansionists of the early 19th century. Natural boundaries are those that create economic self-sufficiency. Thus, the grain-growing upper Mississippi region is a natural partner with the land around the lower Gulf, that is, Texas. Why? Because one can’t readily transport the grain without using the river system and much of it flows through or abuts Texas. Simple enough. Thus, Texas should be considered part of the Louisiana Purchase. After all, the French discovered the Mississippi River and cruised the Texas coastline as well. Discovery and possession of the coastline presumes that such occupation includes the interior country for it is natural that one has to move inland beyond the beachhead. This is similar to the same earlier fantastic thinking inherent in the Doctrine of Discovery. This established England’s—and later America’s—claim of the northeastern coast of America because John Cabot observed the land from offshore with a deep, penetrating gaze as might some colonial Superman. In fact, this very thing, a sort of ‘gaze doctrine’ is at the heart of the logic of the Doctrine of Discovery. Incredibly, this doctrine has been codified into law via US Supreme Court decisions regarding claims of American Indians. The result? The American Indians have remained in a parent-to-child protective relationship, with the court as guardian of their rights. Poor law. Poorer Indians.

The natural boundary theory maintained that the nation holding the greatest part of a river has the right to hold the coastline at its mouth. This applied particularly to the dispute over the right to claim Florida. However, if one was arguing the case for Texas, a neat switch was in order. Here, the nation that holds the seacoast has the right to the inland area that borders the river. In other words, depending upon the natural boundary needs of America, either the vice or the versa can be applied pari passu, that is, equally.

Another watery theory dealt with the northern border and the Mississippi and St. Lawrence rivers. Since the waters merge and mingle at some points, such blending was deemed to constitute a “territorial nexus.” Thus the waterways should belong to the same country, in this case, America. But surprise, surprise! Someone suggested that in upholding that theory, the United States could just as logically belong to Canada. The mingling-of-waters theory was thereafter sent out to sea.

None of the contradictory, self-serving theorizing affected Representative John A. Harper one bit. He had a clear view of the American future. Addressing Congress in 1812, invoking God as the usual trump card, he extolled:

To me, sir, it appears that the Author of Nature has marked our limits in the south, by the Gulf of Mexico; and on the north, by the regions of eternal frost. [22]

These regions of eternal frost are now, nearly two hundred years later, considerably less frosty due to global warming. Yet they remain disputatious. On August 2, 2007, two Russian submersible vessels embedded a Russian flag two miles beneath the polar ice cap at the North Pole. The titanium flag was planted on the Lomonosov Ridge which is an extension of Russia’s continental shelf. The New York Times reported:

At least one country with a stake in the issue registered its immediate disapproval of the expedition. “This isn’t the 15th century,” Peter MacKay, Canada’s foreign minister, said on CTV television. “You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say, ‘We’re claiming this territory’.” [23]

Well who, aside from Mr. MacKay, says so? Apparently one can, and already has, and no doubt will continue to do so, particularly when oil and gas reserves portend below, particularly in this age of post-flag colonialism. Now countries just send in their companies, or in the case of America, its bombs and its mercenaries or its puppet-nation’s resources and military assets. The current use of NATO, particularly Turkey, in North Africa and the Middle East is a prime example.

One of the strangest applications allowed that the Gulf Stream should be considered an extension of the Mississippi River, thus carrying expansionists (and their arguments) well out to sea. None other than Thomas Jefferson found the notion plausible. He wrote to James Monroe in 1806:

We begin to broach the idea that we consider the whole Gulph Stream as of our waters, in which hostilities and cruising are to be frowned on for the present, and prohibited so soon as either consent or force will permit us. [24]

What? Thus Ireland, washed by the Gulf Stream, could be considered part of America.

In 1804, another expansionist, William Chandler, celebrated the Fourth of July with the bombastic warning that the Louisiana Purchase was only the beginning.“Our boundaries shall be those which Nature has formed for a great, powerful, and free State.” [25] Chandler went on to assert that the natural southern expanse for the United States was the Isthmus of Panama, perhaps on the withering principle of the withering waistline between two oceans. But dig a canal, mingle the waters, and the world could become one big Yankee doodle toy.

James (Cem) Ryan, Ph.D.
14 July 2012

National Atlas of the United States, U.S. Government, 2006 PUBLIC DOMAIN

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ENDNOTES

[1] Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History, p. 17.

[2] Declaration of Independence, “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” [3] Federalist Papers, p. 78

[4] Today similar Orwellian words can be heard dropping daily from the lips of the American politicians as they bring democracy, peace, and freedom to the Iraqi people, and indeed all over the Middle East. Let’s brush up our Shakespeare and remember what he said: “And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood/Up to the elbows, and besmear our swords;/Then walk forth, even to the market-place,/And waving our red weapons o’er our heads,/Let’s all cry, “Peace, Freedom, and Liberty!”
(Julius Caesar, III, I, 106-110).

[5] William A. Williams, The Roots of Modern American Empire, p. 22.

[6] Federalist Papers, p. 78.

[7] Ibid., p.32. [8] Richard W. Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire, pp. 88,89,148-151.

[9] Federalist Papers., p. 41.

[10] Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 12, p. 277.

[11] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter XIV, 1. “THE RIGHT of Nature, which writers commonly call jus naturale, is the liberty each man hath to use his own power as he will himself for the preservation of his own nature, that is to say, of his own life; and consequently of doing anything which in his own judgment and reason he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.”

[12] Samuel Adams. Benjamin Franklin. The Report of the Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Town Meeting, Nov. 20, 1772,

[13] John Jay, Journals of the Continental Congress, “Letter to the Inhabitants of Canada,” May 29, 1775, Avalon Project, Yale University.

[14] Weinberg, op. cit., p. 27.

[15] Ibid., p. 68.

[16] Thomas Jefferson, Letter to President of the United States, James Monroe, October 24, 1823,

[17] Weinberg, op. cit, p. 34.

[18] Ibid., p. 39.

[19] Ibid., p. 43. [

20] Richard Van Alstyne, op. cit., p. 94. Van Alstyne writes about the terra incognita in the American west: “Expeditions which ventured, during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, across the treeless plains to the Rockies and beyond into the alkali basin of the Great salt Lake reported on these barriers; and until the mid-century the maps of the United States labeled the region as ‘the Great American Desert’.”

[21]Weinberg, op. cit., p. 50.

[22] Ibid., p. 53.

[23] C.J. Chivers, “Russians Plant Flag on the Arctic Seabed.” The New York Times. August 3, 2007.

[24] Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 11, p. 111.

[25] Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in America, p. 13. ____________________________________________________________

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Samuel. Franklin, Benjamin. The Report of the Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Town Meeting. Nov. 20, 1772,

Chivers, C.J. “Russians Plant Flag on the Arctic Seabed.” The New York Times. August 3, 2007.

Declaration of Independence, United States.

Federalist Papers, The. Signet Classics, New York, 2003. Hobbs, Thomas. Leviathan. Oxford University Press, New York, 2008.

Jay, John. Journals of the Continental Congress, Letter to the Inhabitants of Canada; May 29, 1775. The Avalon Project, Yale University.

Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to President of the United States, James Monroe, October 24, 1823.

Jefferson, Thomas. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. 20 volumes, Lipscomb, Andrew A. Albert Ellery Bergh, and Richard Holland Johnson, eds. Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, Washington, DC, 1903.

Merk, Frederick. Manifest Destiny and Mission in America. Alfred Knopf, New York, 1963.

Van Alstyne, Richard W. The Rising American Empire. W.W. Norton, New York, 1975.

Weinberg, Albert K. Manifest Destiny. The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1935.

Williams, William Appleman. The Roots of Modern American Empire. Vintage Books, New York, 1970. ______________________________________________________________________________________

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE REAL HISTORY OF AMERICA, CLICK ON AND READ SHOUTS

July 15, 2012
World’s most powerful imam to rise?

Middle East invites Islamist billionaire to return from exile

In a stunning move, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has called for Fethullah Gülen, the reclusive imam of arguably the most powerful Islamist movement in the world, to return home to Turkey from his self-imposed exile in rural Pennsylvania.

Erdoğan’s appeal to Gülen came after he received an award during the closing ceremony of the Turkish Olympics.

“We want this yearning to come to an end,” the prime minister said. “We want to see those who are abroad and longing for the homeland to be among us. … Absence from home is loneliness. We have no tolerance for loneliness. We are saying that this absence from home [of Gülen] should end. To be honest, I understand that this is also what you all expect. So, let’s say the absence should be ended. As the child of an ancient civilization, I am extending my thanks to the ones who call on us and the entire world tonight in Turkish, the language of a rich culture. This is what I am saying, let’s put absence from home and longing for the homeland to one side.”

Although Erdoğan did not use Gülen’s name, his comments were widely understood by the Turkish audience and media to refer to Fethullah Gülen. This invitation represents the first time that Erdoğan has ever publicly reached out to the man that many consider to be Erdoğan’s spiritual mentor and the most dangerous Islamist in the world.

But according to the Turkish media, Erdoğan’s comments “received a lengthy standing ovation from the huge crowd that had jam-packed the over 50,000-seat Türk Telekom Arena.”

Others prominent Turkish leader’s joined in Erdoğan’s calls.

Bülent Arınç, a deputy prime minister, said, “I am one of the many people in Turkey who know that Gülen misses his country. I hope it is finally time for him to return. … At least Gülen may visit Turkey from some time to time. We want him to return to his country after over 10 years and reunite with people who love him. I hope our prime minister’s wish [for Gülen to return to Turkey] will come true soon. We will be happy to see Gülen in Turkey.”

Gülen’s response was almost immediate. With tear-filled eyes, Gülen praised both the rise of Islamism and the vibrant economy of Turkey, while indicating that for now, he may prefer to stay in the U.S.

“If [my return] halts positive developments in Turkey, [I prefer] staying here, if my lifespan allows, and I will not return not to damage my country, my nation and those [positive] things in my country,” Gülen said.

Gülen also added that he wishes to be buried in Turkey near his mother, a sign that he may not plan on staying in the U.S. indefinitely.

Fethullah Gülen is the highly controversial leader of a global Islamist movement, which oversees a vast network of over 1,000 schools in over 140 countries, with nearly 150 in the United States alone. While the schools’ official claims are that their goals are to merely help youth in poorer countries, a mountain of evidence has accrued over the years suggesting that their underlying secret agenda is the spread of Gülen’s unique brand of Turkish Islamism.

Read Joel Richardson’s “Mideast Beast: The Scriptural Case for an Islamic Antichrist,” from WND Books!

According to analysts, unlike the Islamism of al-Qaeda, the Turkish Islamism of Gülen, as well as his Islamist predecessor, Said Al-Nursi, uses a veneer of moderation along with the Western concepts of democracy, interfaith dialogue and tolerance as a cover while it works to achieve its goals of Turkish Islamic dominance and a return to the glories of the Ottoman Empire.

After fleeing to the United States in March of 1999, Gülen was put on trial and prosecuted in absentia for attempting to overthrow the Turkish government and Constitution. Turkish television broadcast footage of Gülen telling his followers to spread his Islamist ideas secretly in order to conquer the Turkish secular state from within. The footage was eminently damning.

Yet in 2008, after receiving 29 letters of support from prominent American political and educational figures, including Graham E. Fuller, the former Station Chief for the CIA in Afghanistan, former Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman and former Ambassador to Turkey Morton Abramowitz, Gülen won on appeal and was acquitted of all charges by the ruling Islamist AK party of Prime Minister Erdoğan.

Since that time, Gülen has remained in Pennsylvania, accruing numerous awards and endless accolades from American and other Western educational and religious entities.

Imam Gülen and his movement are also reported to be wildly wealthy. According to the testimony of Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator, the Gülen movement receives much of its funding directly from the CIA. According to Edmonds, for years, the U.S. has allowed the free-flow of money from the Afghanistan opium and heroin trade to reach the Gülenists. According to some accounts, Gülen is worth more than $25 billion.

According to investigative journalist Paul Williams, “This scenario serves to explain why U.S.-led coalition troops in Afghanistan are forbidden to firebomb the fields or fumigate the poppies with a chemical herbicide, such as glyphosate.”

Gülen and his movement also own the Today’s Zaman, one of Turkey’s largest newspapers, as well as numerous television networks, banks, universities, construction and manufacturing companies throughout the country.

The Gülen movement has allegedly even used its vast fortunes and influence to virtually create the ruling Islamist AK Party and protect its continued successes in Turkey.

But despite the fact that Gülen has been filmed encouraging the spread of Islamism through deception, numerous American politicians, educators and universities vehemently defend him as a paragon of virtue, a modernist scholar dedicated only to peace, charity and tolerance.

According to Mustafa Yesil, a leading figure within the Gulen movement and chairman of the Journalists and Writers Foundation in Istanbul, the movement is “faith-based, pacifist, pluralist, colorful and pro-democratic.”

Gülen was most recently honored with the EastWest Institute’s 2011 EWI Peace Building Award for his contribution to world peace. Such superlative awards and accolades are not uncommon for Gülen.

Critics of Gülen and his movement however, including Ahmet Sik, the Turkish author of the book “The Imam’s Army” (“Imamin Ordusu”), claim that the group has thoroughly infiltrated every arena of Turkish government, including the police force. Sik’s book was banned by Turkish prosecutors, and Sik was arrested and charged with involvement in a secret coup plot. After 13 months in jail, Sik was only recently released, with a trial still pending.

Sik’s case is far from unique. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York, despite its claims to represent an open, free and democratic nation, Turkey now leads the world in the number of journalists in prison. While China has 27 journalists in prison, Iran has 42 and Turkey presently has 94.

For years, many secular Turks have claimed the Gülen movement has so infiltrated Turkish government that it effectively now represents a type of Islamist shadow government, whose spidery fingers reach into every arena of Turkish government. The present imprisonment of so many journalists opposed to the Gülen movement is but one example of the movement’s power.

There is also a mountain of evidence that the ruling Turkish government shares the Turkish nationalism and expansionist goals of Imam Gülen. Only a few weeks ago, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu made the following grandiose statement:

We will manage the wave of change in the Middle East. Just as the ideal we have in our minds about Turkey, we have an ideal of a new Middle East. We will be the leader and the spokesperson of a new peaceful order, no matter what they say.

But despite the clear and present danger represented by Turkey’s ruling Islamist party, the Obama administration has openly pursued a partnership with Prime Minister Erdoğan.

At a fund raising event for the Obama reelection campaign, Vice President Joe Biden recently addressed a group of roughly 200 influential members of the Turkish-American community.

In speaking of the Obama administration’s view of Turkey’s reassertion of power in the region, Biden said, “We’re looking for Turkish leadership in the rest of that entire region.”

Biden continued to speak of what a wonderful “model” Turkey is for other Islamic nations: “It’s a model as to how you can have an Islamic population, an Islamic state and a democracy, something the rest of the region is groping to figure out how to do.”

And speaking of American cooperation with Turkey in the region, Biden said, “There’s nothing we do that we don’t coordinate.”

June 18, 2012
A Visit with Turkey’s Controversial Religious Movement

By Piotr Zalewski / Diyarbakir

Children attend a class at Fatih College in Istanbul April 16, 2008. The 640-pupil school is run by followers of Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish Muslim preacher who advocates moderate Islam rooted in modern life. Osman Orsal / Reuters

It is Monday evening in Diyarbakir, a city in Turkey’s southeast, and a weekly meeting of several local members of the so-called Gulen movement has begun with a book reading. One of the eight men present — this is an all-boys affair — picks up a paperback by Fethullah Gulen, the charismatic Islamic preacher after whom the movement is named, and reads out a few paragraphs. The subject is one of the central tenets of Gulen’s philosophy: hizmet, service to others. Once the reading ends, a few of the other members — smiling beneath cropped mustaches — begin to extemporize on the difficulties and rewards of teaching and the challenges of shaping young minds.

Many Turks view the Gulen Movement with suspicion. The group has drawn comparisons among the conspiracy-minded to the freemasons; it has been accused of being a shadow government and more than once of trying to engineer an Islamist takeover of Turkey; and in recent years, some of its opponents have found themselves snared in legal proceedings. There’s little reason to expect such issues to come up during an informal gathering of local Gulenists in a place like Diyarbakir. The movement not only forswears any role in politics, but is also said to discourage discussion of political issues among its followers. (A student who stayed at one of the movement’s dormitories in Istanbul told me that he, an international relations major, was asked not to read or discuss books on politics in his room.) Still, the next item on the Diyarbakir meeting’s agenda comes as something of a surprise.

It involves the day before, Sunday May 13: “What did you do for Mother’s Day?”

The question comes from Bilgi Ozdemir, a public school teacher who is presiding over the gathering. A tour de table follows. One of the men reports that he and a group of friends cooked dinner for a group of women. All the time they are the ones cooking, he says, but on Mother’s Day “we told them to sit still and let us prepare the food.” Another man took a group of moms to a picnic outside Diyarbakir. Yet another organized a sightseeing tour of the city, including visits to a mosque and a reading hall — the local equivalent of a Boys and Girls Club — run by fellow Gulen supporters.

As the meeting progresses, it’s hard to avoid the impression that the men, all of whom have regular jobs, have much time for anything other than hizmet. For the months of May and June alone, Ozdemir’s circle, one of many similar Gulen groups in Diyarbakir, has scheduled at least a dozen events. Fundraisers, trips, charity functions: one for Nurses Day; another for Disability Week; and still more for the International Day against Drug Abuse. They might as well belong to the Rotary Club. Except that hizmet can be a little all-enveloping.

Nearly half a century after Fethullah Gulen began delivering impassioned sermons in Izmir, a city on Turkey’s Aegean coast, the religious movement he helped inspire counts as many as six million followers. (There is no formal membership structure, Gulenists say, making exact numbers impossible to compute.) The largest religious movement in Turkey, Gulen sympathizers are known to run hundreds of schools, several media outlets, including Zaman, the paper with the highest circulation in Turkey, as well as a bank, a number of foundations, and a major charity.

If anything, the tiny, informal gathering in Diyarbakir reveals a side of the Gulen movement that is key to its power — its management at the grass-roots level. Opening an Excel file on his laptop, Ozdemir the teacher asks each of the eight men present to report how much money they have raised for the construction of four new reading halls in the city. Each of the members, Ozdemir tells me, represents a group of lower-level followers who have been asked to pitch in, along with friends, neighbors and family. Celal, a physiotherapist seated to my left, has managed to raise 4,000 lira, or about $2,200. Others report having raised 1,400, 1,500 or 250 lira. Ozdemir carefully records all the sums. For transparency’s sake, he tells me, we prefer bank transfers. “If donations are made in cash, we will provide receipts.”

Apart from nominal contributions for special projects, it is local businessmen sympathetic to the movement’s cause who often foot the Gulenists’ bills. “When I was in high school, some people inspired by hizmet helped me financially,” says Aladdin Korkutata, who heads DIGIAD, a local business association. “Now that I’ve reached my target I am happy to help others.”

Leading lights within the movement usually insist that that Gulen-affiliated institutions are administered autonomously, with little supervision from above. Meetings in Diyarbakir, however, show that at least here, at the local level, the movement runs a very tight ship. Most local Gulenists have no difficulty producing data about the movement’s educational activities. In the southeast as a whole, Gulen followers run 57 elementary schools, Ali Pehlivan, a principal at one of the schools, tells me. In Diyarbakir province alone, another Gulenist says, the movement’s 27 reading halls cater to roughly 4,500 children. FEM, a network of Gulen dershanes, or cramming schools, operates 14 local branches, attracting about 11,000 students per year. The total number of FEM branches in Turkey is “roughly” 615.

At one of dershanes, Bulent Ince, the headmaster, explains that 2,000 lira, the price of tuition, buys local high schoolers much more than a 10-month prep course for Turkey’s feared university entrance exam. Students, he says, are also assigned so-called teacher-guides, who look after them in and outside of class, and even after they enter college.

The teacher-guides, says Ince, serve as role models. “None of them smoke or drink,” he says. Many become the teens’ confidants, calling on them regularly, offering advice, teaching them “love for their parents, love for their country, love for others,” and “Islamic values.” “Sometimes, our kids will share things with their teacher-guides that they will not share with their parents,” says Ince. Students can phone their guides late at night to talk about their problems. “It’s 24 hour hizmet.”

When students enter college — FEM students score better on the entrance exams than most others — they remain under the watchful eye of Gulen followers. If a student goes off to study in another city, says Ince, a teacher will accompany him there and try to place him in a dorm or a house where “people don’t smoke and drink, and where they pray.” Otherwise, he says, “we will introduce him to our friends, who will keep in touch with him.” After graduation, he explains, “we will help him find job, or make him a teacher and send him abroad.” As he puts it, “If you’re in hizmet, you’re never alone.”

Read more:

May 23, 2012
Turkey Feels Sway of Reclusive Cleric in the U.S.

By DAN BILEFSKY and SEBNEM ARSU / The New York Times

ISTANBUL — When Ahmet Sik was jailed last year on charges of plotting to overthrow the government, he had little doubt that a secretive movement linked to a reclusive imam living in the United States was behind his arrest.

Pupils at a school in Istanbul run by the Gulen movement sang Turkey’s national anthem recently. The movement has millions of followers and schools in 140 countries.

“If you touch them you get burned,” a gaunt and defiant Mr. Sik said in an interview in March at his apartment here, just days after being released from more than a year in jail. “Whether you are a journalist, an intellectual or a human rights activist, if you dare to criticize them you are accused of being a drug dealer or a terrorist.”

Mr. Sik’s transgression, he said, was to write a book, “The Army of the Imam.” It chronicles how the followers of the imam, Fethullah Gulen, have proliferated within the police and the judiciary, working behind the scenes to become one of Turkey’s most powerful political forces — and, he contends, one of its most ruthless, smearing opponents and silencing dissenters.

The case quickly became among the most prominent of dozens of prosecutions that critics say are being driven by the followers of Mr. Gulen, 70, a charismatic preacher who leads one of the most influential Islamic movements in the world, with millions of followers and schools in 140 countries. He has long advocated tolerance, peace and interfaith dialogue, drawing on the traditions of Sufism, a mystical strain of Islam generally viewed as being moderate.

But the movement’s stealthy expansion of power — as well as its tactics and lack of transparency — is now drawing accusations that Mr. Gulen’s supporters are using their influence in Turkey’s courts and police and intelligence services to engage in witch hunts against opponents with the aim of creating a more conservative Islamic Turkey. Critics say the agenda is threatening the government’s democratic credentials just as Turkey steps forward as a regional power.

“We are troubled by the secretive nature of the Gulen movement, all the smoke and mirrors,” said a senior American official, who requested anonymity to avoid breaching diplomatic protocol. “It is clear they want influence and power. We are concerned there is a hidden agenda to challenge secular Turkey and guide the country in a more Islamic direction.”

The movement has strong affiliations or sympathy in powerful parts of Turkey’s news media, including the country’s largest daily newspaper, Zaman, and, Turkish analysts say, among at least several dozen members of its 550-seat Parliament, with support extending to the highest levels of government.

With its extensive influence in the media and a small army of grass-roots supporters, the Gulen movement has provided indispensable support to the conservative, Islam-inspired government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Some officials and analysts suspect that some elements within the Gulen movement have served as a stalking-horse for the government, which has benefited, too, as the Gulen-affiliated media have attacked common opponents and backed trials that Mr. Erdogan has publicly supported.

But the relationship between Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Gulen has sometimes been tense, with the prime minster, a mercurial and populist leader, sensitive to any challenges to his authority. Analysts say that in recent months Mr. Erdogan and other members of his Justice and Development Party have grown increasingly wary, as high-profile arrests of critics of the Gulen movement have embarrassed the government. There is growing talk of a power struggle.

A culture of fear surrounding the so-called Gulenists, however exaggerated, is so endemic that few here will talk openly about them on the telephone, fearing that their conversations are being recorded and that there will be reprisals.

Ayse Bohurler, a founding member of the Justice and Development Party, said that the lack of transparency and clear organizational structure made it impossible to hold the group accountable. “There is no reference point; they are kicking in the shadows,” Ms. Bohurler said. “They are everywhere and nowhere.”

Mr. Gulen rarely gives interviews, and he declined a request for this article. But Mustafa Yesil, president of the Journalists and Writers Foundation, a group based in Istanbul that is affiliated with the movement, described the Gulenists as a “civic movement” with no political aspirations. If sympathizers of the movement are well represented in Turkey’s state bureaucracy and the police, Mr. Yesil said, their presence is based on merit.

“The old guard feel squeezed because their space is getting smaller, and they are sending the bill to the movement,” Mr. Yesil said.

His words were reinforced by a rare public statement posted on a leading Gulen community Web site this month. The statement said it was a “violation of human rights” to accuse Gulenists in the state bureaucracy of “infiltration” when they were actually upholding the rule of law and serving their country.

The movement is well known for running a network of schools lauded for their academic rigor and commitment to spreading Turkish language and culture. Gulen followers have been involved in starting one of the largest collections of charter schools in the United States. With their neatly trimmed mustaches, suits and ties, and their missionary zeal, supporters here convey the earnestness of Mormon missionaries or Muslim Peace Corps volunteers. Their eyes moisten at the mention of Mr. Gulen’s name, which is invoked with utmost reverence.

Sympathizers say the notion of Mr. Gulen as a cultish puppet master is a malicious caricature. The group consists of an informal network of followers and has no formal organization or official membership, they say. Mr. Gulen communicates in essays and videotaped sermons, which are posted on the Internet and appear in other Gulen-related media outlets.

His sympathizers say his goal is the creation of a “golden generation” that would embrace humanism, science and Islam and serve the Turkish state. He has publicly affirmed the importance of complying with Turkey’s secular laws, and mathematics and science competitions at Gulen schools overshadow religious expression, which takes place quietly in “relaxation rooms” that double as prayer spaces.

But some critics say that outward appearances belie the true agenda of a movement working behind the scenes to expand the role of Islam in Turkey. They say that, ultimately, the community aims to bring Mr. Gulen, who is ailing, back to Turkey. Supporters say Mr. Gulen has resisted returning home, mindful that he could polarize the country.

Mr. Sik, the author, accused Mr. Gulen’s followers of misusing their positions of power. Once arrested, he was accused of links to a shadowy network called Ergenekon, which prosecutors contend planned to engage in civil unrest, assassinations and terrorism to create chaos for Mr. Erdogan’s Muslim-inspired government as a prelude for a coup by the military, which has long regarded itself as the guardian of the secular state.

Even some of Mr. Sik’s staunchest critics say the charges against him appeared ludicrous. A longtime critic of the military, he had written a book on the Ergenekon case arguing about ways prosecutors could better investigate the coup plot he is now accused of abetting.

The Ergenekon trials have been a watershed for Turkey, as prosecution of the matter has swept up dozens of journalists, intellectuals and current and former military service members.

The ascent of Mr. Erdogan’s government since 2002 has radically shifted the balance of power, and analysts say the Gulenists have seized the opportunity to settle old scores and tame their former rivals, including the military.

“Hard-core activists within the Gulen movement are driving the arrests,” said Gareth Jenkins, an expert on Turkey at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, affiliated with Johns Hopkins University. “It is revenge for the 1990s, when the military oppressed Muslim conservatives.”

Gulen supporters argue that the Ergenekon trials are a long-overdue historical reckoning aimed at bringing to account a murky group of ultranationalist operatives, linked to the military, that has fought against perceived enemies of the state, including pro-Islamists.

Few here doubt that there is some truth to the conspiracy: the police say they have uncovered stashes of weapons linked to retired officers, and the military has intervened four times to overthrow democratically elected governments.

Mr. Gulen lives in self-imposed exile on a 25-acre haven in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania. In 1999, he fled Turkey amid accusations of plotting to overthrow the secular government. Around that time, a taped sermon emerged in the media in which Mr. Gulen was heard advising his followers to “move within the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centers.”

He has said his words were manipulated, and he was acquitted of all charges in 2008.

Mr. Gulen, who has preached openly against fundamentalism and terrorism, was embraced in Washington after Sept. 11, 2001, as a welcome face of moderate Islam, analysts say. His green card application shows that his request to remain in the United States was endorsed by a former official of the Central Intelligence Agency. His movement’s events have been attended by luminaries like former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general.

A 2009 cable by the United States ambassador to Turkey at the time, James F. Jeffrey, made public by WikiLeaks, noted that the Gulen movement was strong within the police force and in conflict with the military. It said that the assertion that the Turkish national police is controlled by Gulenists “is impossible to confirm, but we have found no one who disputes it.”

The cable goes on to say that the Gulen-controlled media are supporting the investigation into Ergenekon and have helped put many opponents of the governing Justice and Development Party behind bars.

But the interests of the movement and the government appear increasingly to be diverging, as prosecutions of opponents widen.

In February a prosecutor asked the leader of the National Intelligence Agency, Hakan Fidan, a close ally of Mr. Erdogan, to testify in a court case widely backed by Gulen supporters over secret links between the agency and the P.K.K., a Kurdish group that Turkey, the United States and the European Union classify as a terrorist organization. The government moved swiftly to block the questioning, and the prosecutor was removed from the case.

It was not the first case in which tensions with the government have surfaced, or the first case of allegations with murky origins.

In September 2010, Hanefi Avci, a former police chief and Gulen sympathizer, was arrested and accused of being part of the Ergenekon plot after publishing a book alleging that a network of Gulenists in the police was manipulating judicial processes.

In another case, in 2009, three noncommissioned officers confessed to planting forged documents implicating the commander of their air force base in the central city of Kayseri, according to Serkan Gunel, a lawyer familiar with the case. One of the documents asked army personnel to assist an officer jailed on charges of plotting to overthrow the government.

The officers told investigators they had planted the forged documents at the request of their Gulenist mentor. Soon afterward, articles appeared in the Gulen-affiliated media saying that their confessions had been extracted with the use of hypnosis. The military prosecutor who carried out the investigation, Col. Ahmet Zeki Ucok, was accused of cavorting with Russian prostitutes as part of a smear campaign, the lawyer said.

The officers recanted their confessions and were restored to their posts. A forensic medical report, obtained 18 months after the officers were interviewed, said they could have been hypnotized. Colonel Ucok was convicted April 17 on charges of torture related to his questioning of the officers and sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.

Mr. Sik, who remains out of prison, pending trial, has not been silenced. The police seized the manuscript to his book, but it was nevertheless published by a group of supporters on the Internet. Mr. Sik says he hopes to return to writing books, assuming he is not put back in jail.

“My only wish is for my children to read about these events as dirt from the past,” he said. “I want it to be buried.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
First Published April 25, 2012 1:01 pm

May 17, 2012
“Sixty Minutes” to Air Report on Turkish Charter School Cleric (FETULLAH GULEN)Tied to Bob Filner

Matt Potter, May 11, 2012

Just in time for the final stretch of San Diego’s race for mayor, the CBS news magazine Sixty Minutes is airing a report this coming Sunday about a controversial Turkish spiritual leader, followers of whom, records show, have contributed money to the mayoral campaign of Democratic congressman Bob Filner.

The Muslim scholar, Fethullah Gulen, leads a worldwide movement that has been heavily involved in creating high-tech charter schools around the world and has both backers and detractors.

As we reported in March of last year, Filner visited Turkey in late December 2010, courtesy of a non-profit corporation called the Pacifica Institute:

“Highlights, according to the itinerary, included a stop at Topkapi Palace, lunch at Sultan Ahmet Square, a visit to the Karakoy Jewish Foundation Museum, capturing ‘700 years of amiable relations between Jews and Turks,’ and a December 25 shopping tour of the Grand Bazaar, ‘one of the largest and oldest covered markets in the world, with more than 58 covered streets and over 1200 shops.… Many of the stalls in the bazaar are grouped by type of goods, with special areas for leather coats, gold jewelry and the like.’”

Filner took another tour paid for by Pacifica, this one with stops in Istanbul and northern Iraq, in April 2011, according to a travel disclosure he filed with the House a year ago this month.

That trip was said to be worth a total of $3,700, the filing said.

The congressman subsequently wielded a pair of scissors at the 2011 ribbon-cutting for the new Washington headquarters of the Turkic American Alliance, an event videoed and posted on the group’s YouTube page.

Turkic American Alliance opens new headquarters in Washington D.C.

“California Congressman Bob Filner, who had just returned to the US after a TAA-sponsored trip to Turkey, indicated that the nature of the relationship between Turkey and the US has changed as it was a more military-based tie before,” according to a description of the event on YouTube.

“‘Now we have to have a people-to-people relationship,’ Filner said, adding, ‘What you [the TAA] are doing is extremely important, and that is establishing real people-to-people talk.’”

Also in 2011, Filner was featured at a Gulen Institute-sponsored essay awards ceremony for college students, according to the movement’s website.

Mayoral campaign finance disclosure data posted online by the San Diego city clerk show that on February 21 of this year Ilker Yildiz of Irvine, listed as “outreach coordinator” for Pacifica, gave Filner’s campaign $200; Ferdi M. Ates of Tarzana, California, Pacifica’s chief financial officer, gave the Filner bid a total of $400 last June.

(Pacifica’s role in Gulen’s outreach is chronicled by UC Santa Barbara history professor Nancy Gallagher in her January 2012 book, “The Gulen Hizmet Movement and Its Transnational Activities: Case Studies of Altruistic Activism in Contemporary Islam”)

On February 29, Mesut Inci, branch director of Pacifica’s Mira Mesa offices in San Diego, contributed $100 to the Filner cause.

In a video posted last year on the People’s Post website, Inci talks about his life’s work and inspiration, and Gulen’s role in the Pacifica Institute.

“There was a man who inspired me…His name is Fethullah Gulen,” Inci says in the video.

Reached at Pacifica’s offices today, Inci confirmed he had made the campaign contribution reported by Filner, then said he was too busy to discuss the matter further.

Inci said he would call back within an hour, but did not. We’ll update here when he does.

(UPDATE: Inci has called back to say that though he was aware of Filner’s Pacifica-sponsored tours of Turkey and Iraq, nobody with the institute had asked him to make a contribution to the congressman’s mayoral campaign. The Pacifica branch director says he was motivated to contribute because he liked Filner’s position on various local issues.)

In an online preview of Sunday’s 60 Minutes story, correspondent Lesley Stahl goes in search of Fethullah Gulen himself, currently an exile living in seclusion on an estate in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania, in an attempt to interview him.

“Will he come out? Will we get to see him?” Stahl asks a Gulen aide.

Viewers will have to tune in Sunday for the answer.

Fethullah Gulen Charter Schools Preview CBS NEWS Lesly Stahl Sunday, May 13 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

We left messages with Filner’s campaign and congressional offices this morning and will update when he gets back to us.

May 12, 2012
A Peek Inside a Gulen School
Justin Vela
- Turkey
- EurasiaNet’s Weekly Digest
- Gulen Movement
A teacher watches students playing chess at the Gulen Movement-affiliated Fatih Koleji school in Istanbul. The movement, which maintains schools throughout the world, is out to establish a “golden generation” of educated Muslims, but some, especially in Central Asia, wonder if it has a hidden agenda. (Photo: Justin Vela)

With conservative Muslim believers becoming more visible in Turkey these days, a movement founded by a charismatic Islamic theologian, Fetullah Gülen, is attracting increasing outside interest. The Gülen movement’s public profile is defined mainly by a worldwide network of schools that it operates, yet little is known about the inner workings of the organization’s educational component.

EurasiaNet.org was recently invited to visit one of the movement’s showcase, high-achieving schools, Fatih Koleji, located on the European side of Istanbul. The visit provided greater clarity on a particularly controversial aspect of the schools’ operations – religious instruction.

The Gülen movement’s stated aim is to create a “golden generation” of educated Muslims, an aim shared by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. At the Fatih Koleji school, statues in Ottoman-era garb and children’s artwork sparsely decorate the interior of the sleek, multi-storey school building. Male teachers wear suits, while nearly all the female instructors wear long, white jackets. The obligatory image of the Republic of Turkey’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, hangs in nearly every room.

However, portraits of Gülen, who currently lives in the United States, are not to be seen. Students interviewed by EurasiaNet.org claimed that they only know about the cleric from reading newspapers stories and books; Fatih Koleji, which has students ranging in age from four to 18, does not offer specific instruction about the movement’s founder, they said.

The methods and approach of Gülen schools toward religious instruction has fueled lots of speculation about the movement’s intentions. Governments in Central Asia in particular are suspicious that the Islamic values espoused by the Gulen movement could potentially pose a challenge to the political status quo in the region.

Hoping to dispel misconceptions, the 37-year-old vice-principal of Fatih Koleji, Metin Demirci, who taught for five years in the movement’s schools in Kazakhstan, stressed that all the schools closely follow the curriculum of the public schools in whichever country they are operating.

In Turkey, he said the basic tenets of Islam are taught in a weekly class lasting 80 minutes that also offers instruction on other world religions. “Students learn our religious principles and other religious principles,” Demirci said. Faculty members, he claimed, try to serve as role models of Islamic piety, leading by example.

While Fatih Koleji has a prayer room, no student is forced to pray, Demirci continued. Out of 200 students at the school, only about 10 percent of the children follow the Muslim practice of prayer five times a day, he estimated. “They must want it.”

One foreign teacher at another of the movement’s estimated 30 schools in the Istanbul metropolitan area commented that most students are drawn from religious families, but their faith does not appear to “rub off” on more secular classmates.

One ritual from Turkey’s ardently secular public schools, though, appears less prominent at Fatih Koleji. Demirci played down the importance of “Our Oath,” a nationalist pledge that students usually recite daily. “It is related to democracy and improving democracy,” he said. “I believe in the next two years, we will stop saying this because we don’t need it. With democracy, every small child has the right to say anything they choose.”

Whether secular or religious, Fatih Koleji’s students appear to hail from wealthier families. Tuition stands at 20,000 Turkish lira per year, or about $11,325, nearly the equivalent of Turkey’s average per capita income of $14,600. The fee does not include books or transportation to school. Financial assistance is available to qualifying students.

Eager for their children to gain an educational edge amid an overcrowded and underfunded public-school system, many Turkish parents willingly swallow the relatively high cost. “In Turkey . . . the private schools of Gülen are incomparably more successful than the public schools,” emailed Bayram Balci, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC, who has tracked the movement for several years.

“The high quality of the education in these schools is stressed by everybody, even by those who don’t like the conservatism of this movement,” Balci added.

One 14-year-old boy, playing chess with a girl about his age, said his parents had transferred him to Fatih Koleji from another private school for its higher quality of education and smaller class sizes.

All boys in the school wear blue shirts, girls wear yellow. Class size averages about 20 students, roughly half the size in most Turkish public schools, according to Demirci. Many of the school’s classrooms feature digital blackboards controlled from the teacher’s laptop that are used for interactive forms of instruction.

Gülen school students begin to learn English in kindergarten, as supposed to 4th grade in Turkish public schools. From the 6th grade, students have the option of learning Spanish or Russian. Special preparatory centers that ready Gülen school students for university entrance exams provide an additional advantage, Balci said.

How the schools are financed remains a murkier detail. Representatives of the movement claim there is no centralized bookkeeping system. Nor even a master roster of how many Gülen schools exist around the world. A senior Gülen movement member, who wished not to be named, told EurasiaNet.org that “[n]o accurate data is really possible on the number of schools since they are highly localized both economically and management-wise.”

Money for Gülen schools is first raised locally, through donations from private individuals and businesses that support the movement, he said. In Turkey, a “sister school” program with longer-established Gülen schools also is a source of funding.

When financial assistance is required outside of Turkey, schools simply bring that “need” to Turkey, the Gülen movement member said.

Some of those schools’ students may end up working for the Gülen movement after graduation. Demirci added that the opportunity to travel and to be part of a community attracts many alumni to the teaching profession. “There is an advantage in this,” Demirci said. “We have friends everywhere.”

Editor’s note:

Justin Vela is a freelance reporter based in Istanbul.
May 11, 2012