Fethullah Gulen, International Man of Mystery, RIP

The CIA-affiliated leader of Turkey's insidious test prep cult and U.S. charter school mogul has died in exile in the Poconos.

President Erdogan (L) and Imam Gulen (R) back when they were allies against Turkey’s secular Kemalist military before becoming arch-enemies in 2013

Turkish cult leader Imam Fethullah Gulen, who had been holed up in Saylorsburg, PA since 1999, presumably in case the CIA ever needed a new pro-American ruler in Ankara, has died at age 83.

One of my old essays that was always a frontrunner for inclusion in my anthology Noticing was my January 1, 2014 Taki’s Magazine column on Gulen, whom I’d barely heard of before I started researching him days before. But the topic turned out to be a goldmine of implausibly byzantine Steve Sailer content, all of it, strangely enough, apparently true.

The Shadowy Imam of the Poconos

Steve Sailer

January 01, 2014

As 2014 dawns, the world continues to keep me furnished with material. For example, the current political shakeup in Turkey turns out to be a mashup of various obsessions and hobbyhorses of mine, such as byzantine conspiracy theories, test prep, the naiveté of American education reform, immigration fraud, the deep state, and even the Chechen Bomb Brothers’ Uncle Ruslan.

This lattice of coincidence begins with Turkey’s prime minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan, who is presently besieged by graft scandals following police raids on his inner circle.

With Turkey’s traditional ruling class — the secularist Kemalist generals — finally neutralized by the Ergenekon show trial, the Muslim civilian factions now appear to be plotting against each other. It is widely assumed among Turkish conspiracy theorists (i.e., roughly 98% of all Turks) that the prosecutorial assault on the prime minister was at the behest of Erdogan’s former political ally, Fethullah Gulen, a powerful and mysterious Muslim cult leader holed up since 1999 in, of all places, the Poconos, where he has become America’s largest operator of charter schools.

The imam has been preparing for the struggle in Turkey for decades, launching his adherents on a long march through the institutions. The holy man’s Turkish enemies leaked a video in 1999 just before he defected to the US and took up exile in his fortified compound in Saylorsburg, PA. Gulen was shown advising his believers:

You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers….You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power….

Gulenists have since become common within Turkey’s police and judiciary, playing a lead role in last year’s conviction of 254 secularists for allegedly conspiring against the Islamic government. According to Wikileaks, the American ambassador to Ankara, James Jeffreys, cabled Foggy Bottom:

I’m going to put the paywall up here. If you’ve bought my book, you can read it on pp. 70-76 of Noticing.