Russia: Moscow fears tide of Black Widows

WE CANNOT RULE THEM OUT HERE EITHER! Just CONNECT THREE DOTS:

1) Moscow has identified the group as numbering 21 and coming from TURKEY.

2) Turkey has moved away from the US totally and is pursuing a neo-Ottoman, fully Islamist anti-US, anti-Israel approach

3) Turkey funds over 30 US Islamist charter schools in the US that are carefully monitored? (doubt).

here are the three articles printed out:

March 29, 2010
Islamist Gülen Movement Runs U.S. Charter Schools
By Stephen Schwartz
A secretive foreign network of Islamic radicals now operates dozens of charter schools — which receive government money but are not required to adopt a state-approved curriculum — on U.S. soil. The inspirer of this conspiratorial effort is Fethullah Gülen, who directs a major Islamist movement in Turkey and the Turkish Diaspora but lives in the United States. He is number thirteen among the world’s “50 most influential Muslims,” according to one prominent listing.

Gülen has been criticized as the puppet master for the current Turkish government headed by the “soft Islamist” Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials as the AKP, in its slow-motion showdown with the secularist Turkish military. But Gülen is also known in Muslim countries for his network of 500-700 Islamic schools around the world, according to differing sources favorable to his movement. A more critical view of Gülen’s emphasis on education asserts that his international network of thousands of primary and secondary schools, universities, and student residences is a key element in solidifying an Islamist political agenda in Turkey.

But in startling news for Americans, the Gülen movement operates more than 85 primary and secondary schools on our soil. A roster of the Gülen schools and of the numerous foundations that support them has been released to the public by the patriotic group Act! for America. The Gülen schools are often designated as “science academies” and are concentrated in Texas, Ohio, and California — with others scattered across the rest of the country.

Two states that host Gülen charter schools are Arizona and Utah. In the former, the Daisy Education Corporation (the Gülen movement loves friendly-sounding institutional names) operates three schools in Tucson: one serving kindergarten through the eighth grade, another designated as an elementary school, and a middle-high school, all under the rubric of the Sonoran Science Academy. In Phoenix, it runs a satellite kindergarten-to-10th-grade campus with the same name.

The appearance of Gülen charter schools in Tucson has produced critical attention in local media. The Tucson Weekly published a report at the end of 2009 noting that the Sonoran Science Academy in the southern Arizona town had been named “charter school of the year” by the Arizona Charter School Association. But writer Tim Vanderpool reported that according to one dismayed parent, who declined identification while pointing out the Gülen movement’s history of intimidating critics, “the Sonoran Academy seems constantly to be bringing Turkish educators into the United States, and subjecting students to substitute teachers while the teachers await work visas.” Vanderpool submits that “several Sonoran Academy parents believe the school has a hidden agenda to promote Gülen’s brand of Turkish nationalism, advance sympathy for that country’s political goals such as winning acceptance into the European Union, and discourage official acknowledgment of Turkey’s genocide against the Armenians during World War I.” Such issues are exotic, to say the least, for Tucson parents.

Earlier in 2009, the Beehive Science and Technology Academy, a high school in Salt Lake City, came under similar critical scrutiny from the Salt Lake Tribune. That major daily’s writer, Kirsten Stewart, reported that the Utah State Charter Board had begun an investigation of the Beehive school following complaints from a former teacher and an alarmed parent. The complainants asserted that while “Beehive advertises itself as a public charter school offering college-bound seventh through 12th graders a foundation in math and science ... the school has another mission: to advance and promote certain Islamic beliefs. They point to questionable financial transactions and hiring practices as proof of the school’s covert ties to Turkish Muslim preacher Fethullah Gülen.”

But while Fatih Karatas, principal of the Sonoran Science Academy middle school in Tucson, flatly denied any connection with the Gülen movement, Beehive principal Muhammet “Frank” Erdogan in Salt Lake City admitted such links in the case of his school. The Salt Lake Tribune quoted his admission that along with him, “many of Beehive’s teachers and founders also support Gülen’s ideals.” The paper also described how “Adam Kuntz, a first-year history teacher at Beehive, was fired [in spring 2009], he alleges, for taking academic freedom concerns to the state board. Earlier in the school year, Kuntz had a run-in with Erdogan over a lesson plan on World War II and the Holocaust. Erdogan wanted Kuntz to revise the plan and during a tape-recorded meeting, questioned conventional accounts of the genocide.”

Kelly Wayment, a parent of three children in the school, was removed from his post on the Beehive administrative board after he e-mailed other parents about Gülen movement influence in the school. Wayment told the Salt Lake Tribune that as in the Tucson case, teachers “tend to be from Turkey and central Asian republics living here on work visas.”

Americans should ask both why and how the Islamist Gülen movement has managed to establish such a large presence for Turkish religious political indoctrination in publicly financed education — and should unite to oppose it.

Stephen Suleyman Schwartz is executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism in Washington, D.C. This article was sponsored by Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/03/islamist_guelen_movement_runs.html at March 29, 2010 - 12:54:02 AM CDT

Russia looking for 21 members of “black widow” jihadist cell trained in Turkey

According to this story, one of the bombers in yesterday’s attack in Moscow may also have been

mentally retarded. Such gallant mujahedin, pressing the most vulnerable members of society

into the business of mass murder. And it would not be the first time we have seen this tactic

employed. “Russia hunts 21-strong ‘Black Widow’ cell as first images of suicide bombers are

released,” by Will Stewart for the Daily Mail, March 30:

The first images of the ‘Black Widow’ suicide bombers were released today as Vladimir Putin

vowed to ‘scrape out the attackers from the bottom of the sewers’.

As Russia held a day of mourning for the 39 people killed in the underground terror attack,

the country’s prime minister vowed vengeance on those who had helped mount the attack.

The police and security services now believe there are in a desperate race against time to find

the gang with fears they could be plotting another outrage.

It was suggested today that some 21 more ‘widows’ are at large following reports that the

women were part of a 30-strong band of suicide bombers trained at a Muslim school in Turkey.

Nine have already perished in earlier attacks, Russian media said.

The dead women in Monday’s attack are both believed to be aged between 18 and 25 and to

have carried the explosives - packed with nails and metal fragments to maximise death and

destruction - in shahid belts or handbags.

According to police who have viewed CCTV which has not yet been released, one was said to

be mentally retarded.

A source close to the investigators said that the women suicide bombers travelled to Moscow

early on Monday by coach from a unnamed Caucasus town, prompting the belief that the attack

was by militants from volatile Chechnya.

The women were accompanied by a tall man with Caucasus appearance, dressed in dark blue

coat with white marks. He had five days growth of beard. Both women were identified by the

driver of the coach.

‘One was dressed in black trousers, another in black skirt, black tights and spangled black

shoes,’ said the Kommersant newspaper. Their appearance indicated they were from the

Caucasus region.

The newspaper said the women had been taught by an Islamic militant who had himself being

killed last month in an operation by the FSB, which replaced the KGB. ‘Around 30 of them were

taught in Madrasah (Muslim school) in Turkey and then came back to perform their tasks,’ said

Kommersant.

‘Nine of them have already blown themselves up, the others are being checked now.’...

million people of Turkey, we have a historic debt to those lands where there

are Turks or which was related to our land in the past. We have to repay this debt in the best

way.”

This strategy is based on the assumption that growing Turkish clout in the old Ottoman lands —

a region in which the EU has vital energy and political interests — may prompt President Sarkozy

and Chancellor Merkel to drop their objections to Turkey’s EU membership. If on the other hand

the EU insists on Turkey’s fulfillment of all 35 chapters of the acquis communautaire — which

Turkey cannot and does not want to complete — then its huge autonomous sphere of influence

in the old Ottoman domain can be developed into a major and potentially hostile counter-bloc to

Brussels. Obama approved this strategy when he visited Ankara in April of last year, shortly after

that notorious address to the Muslim world in Cairo.

Erdogan is no longer eager to minimize or deny his Islamic roots, but his old assurances to the

contrary — long belied by his actions — are still being recycled in Washington, and treated as

reality. This reflects the propensity of this ddministration, just like its predecessors, to cherish

illusions about the nature and ambitions of our regional “allies,” such as Saudi Arabia and

Pakistan.

The implicit assumption in Washington — that Turkey would remain “secular” and “pro-Western,”

come what may — should have been reassessed already after the Army intervened to remove the

previous pro-Islamic government in 1997. Since then the Army has been neutered, confirming

the top brass old warning that “democratization” would mean Islamization. Dozens of generals

and other senior ranks — traditionally the guardians of Ataturk’s legacy — are being called one

by one for questioning in a government-instigated political trial. To the dismay of its small

Westernized secular elite, Turkey has reasserted its Asian and Muslim character with a

vengeance.

Neo-Ottomanism – Washington’s stubborn denial of Turkey’s political, cultural and social reality

goes hand in hand with an ongoing Western attempt to rehabilitate the Ottoman Empire, and to

present it as almost a precursor of Europe’s contemporary multiethnic, multicultural tolerance,

diversity, etc, etc. In reality, four salient features of the Ottoman state were institutionalized

discrimination against non-Muslims, total personal insecurity of all its subjects, an unfriendly

coexistence of its many races and creeds, and the absence of unifying state ideology. It was a

sordid Hobbesian borderland with mosques. An “Ottoman culture,” defined by Constantinople

and largely limited to its walls, did eventually emerge through the reluctant mixing of Turkish,

Greek, Slavic, Jewish and other Levantine lifestyles and practices, each at its worst. The mix was

impermanent, unattractive, and unable to forge identities or to command loyalties.

The Roman Empire could survive a string of cruel, inept or insane emperors because its

bureaucratic and military machines were well developed and capable of functioning even when

there was confusion at the core. The Ottoman state lacked such mechanisms. Devoid of

administrative flair, the Turks used the services of educated Greeks and Jews and awarded them

certain privileges. Their safety and long-term status were nevertheless not guaranteed, as

witnessed by the hanging of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch on Easter Day 1822.

The Ottoman Empire gave up the ghost right after World War I, but long before that it had little

interesting to say, or do, at least measured against the enormous cultural melting pot it had

inherited and the splendid opportunities of sitting between the East and West. Not even a prime

location at the crossroads of the world could prompt creativity. The degeneracy of the ruling

class, blended with Islam’s inherent tendency to the closing of the mind, proved

insurmountable. A century later the Turkish Republic is a populous, self-assertive nation-state of

over 70 million. Ataturk hoped to impose a strictly secular concept of nationhood, but political

Islam has reasserted itself. In any event the Kemalist dream of secularism had never penetrated

beyond the military and a narrow stratum of the urban elite.

The near-impossible task facing Turkey’s Westernized intelligentsia before Erdogan had been to

break away from the lure of irredentism abroad, and at home to reform Islam into a matter of

personal choice separated from the State and distinct from the society. Now we know that it

could not be done. The Kemalist edifice, uneasily perched atop the simmering Islamic volcano, is

by now an empty shell.

A new “Turkish” policy is long overdue in Washington. Turkey is not an “indispensable ally,” as

Paul Wolfowitz called her shortly before the war in Iraq, and as Obama repeated last April. It is no

longer an ally at all. It may have been an ally in the darkest Cold War days, when it

accommodated U.S. missiles aimed at Russia’s heartland. Today it is just another Islamic country,

a regional power of considerable importance to be sure, with interests and aspirations that no

longer coincide with those of the United States.

Both Turkey and the rest of the Middle East matter far less to American interests than we are led

to believe, and it is high time to demythologize America’s special relationships throughout the

region. Accepting that Mustafa Kemal’s legacy is undone is the long-overdue first step.

Tags: Srdja Trifkovic

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