Sunday, March 06, 2011

Who is Fethullah Gulen?

Fethullah Gulen is a well-connected Turkish billionaire who fled to the US, and is believed to be serving a US agenda in Central Asia. It's not clear to me whether this particular agenda would be in India's interests. Anyhow, he seems to have ties to Turkey's newly re-vamped security establishment, following the purge of Ataturkists.

It seems to me that the more the CIA supports Islamism in Central Asia, the more difficult it will be for the US to defeat AlQaeda. I guess that Americans don't care that they are shooting themselves in the foot, but at least India needs to be wary of being shot through collateral damage.

Here is an excerpt from one of Gulen's sermons:
"You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers … until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria … like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it … You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey … Until that time, any step taken would be too early—like breaking an egg without waiting the full forty days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all—in confidence … trusting your loyalty and secrecy. I know that when you leave here—[just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here"

It seems Gulen prefers a "velvet revolution" approach over AlQaeda's directly confrontational jihad.

1 comment:

Pagan said...

OT: BJP to field Muslim candidates for Assam elections
"In the next list, several Muslim candidates will be given a chance. There is one Muslim for the Upper Assam seat in this list. There would be many more minority candidates in our next list, especially for the Lower Assam seats."