By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.:

The Loudoun County School  Board is reaching the denouement of a multiyear deliberation about an  application for a charter school that has strong ties to Fethullah Gulen,  a Turkish Islamist. His followers have already started some 135 American charter  schools. Their focus is to promote an increasingly Shariah-dominated Turkey.

Incredibly, the school board’s  members are studiously avoiding any acknowledgment or discussion of the role of  Fethullah Gulen and his movement in the charter  school. They have wrestled for many months with a host of problems with the  application — such as serious deficiencies with the proposed curriculum, the  financing, the management, the teachers and Maryland’s  Chesapeake Science Point Public Charter School, the school  in Anne Arundel County specifically cited as the “model” for the Loudoun  Math and Information Technology Academy.

Yet the members of the school board  have, to date, been unwilling to recognize that these problems are actually  endemic in Gulen-associated schools — including Chesapeake Science Point. These problems are also  much in evidence in three Gulen charter schools in  Fulton County, Ga. Two of the three have lost their charters; the third — an  elementary school — may soon follow suit.

I had the occasion to visit Fulton County last week and talked with several  people involved in one aspect or another of its difficulties with the Gulenists.  These included a former teacher, the parent of a former student and a local  administrator. One thing is clear from these conversations: You simply cannot  begin to understand, let alone cope with, the sorts of issues inherent in “Gulen-inspired” schools if you indulge — for whatever  reason, be it “political correctness,” sensitivity to “diversity,” fear of  litigation or being branded an “Islamophobe,” racist, etc. — in the pretense  that applications like the one in Loudoun County can be properly evaluated while  excluding from the evaluation process the 800-pound gorilla in the room: the  applicants’ manifest associations to the Gulen  movement.

Read more at The Washington Times

Related posts:

http://counterjihadreport.com/category/fethullah-gulen/