Citizens of Turkey are being increasingly and inescapably entangled in the tentacles of mafia rule. In the past, the secular military mafia in the name of patriotism and protection of Turkey’s secular system against the religion groups took tax money to become rich. The military mafia wrote the Turkish Constitution and appointed the judges. Now Gulen’s religious mafia has orchestrated the removal of the military mafia from politics by fabricating evidence and staging Communist-like show trials to put the generals in jails. Currently, Pennsylvania is the home base of the Turkish mafia, and it seems to have set up a satellite office to run Turkey from Pennsylvania. It continues taking donations to become one of the richest religious movements on earth. Where in the world can you take money from business people and build an empire based on that source? Gulen has been taking alms or zakat from the people to become a rich organization as well as a government inside the government.
Gulenists have had a corrupting influence on all Turkish institutions, including the administration, the parliament, and the judiciary. In an attempt to maintain their influence regardless of who is power, Gulenists give support to all the major political parties except the ruling Justice and Party, the AKP party. As those individuals have expanded their enterprises into legitimate businesses, they have attempted with success to buy their way into the corridors of power. According to Cesare Terranova, an Italian magistrate murdered in 1979, a mafia signifies oppression, arrogance, greed, self-enrichment, power, and hegemony above all and against all others. It is not an abstract concept, a state of mind, or a literary term; it is rather “a criminal organization regulated by unwritten but iron and inexorable rules.“ For those who claim or imply that the Gulen organization is not a mafia type operation are either in denial, intentionally deceived, self-serving, or plain ignorant. The Gulen mafia group has demanded Zekaat or donations from the people, and the mafia has demanded pizzo from the people who fall under its jurisdiction. Now, the religious mafia lobbyists in the U.S. and in Europe fabricate news stories to discredit a perfectly legitimate legal battle against the shadow state inside the Turkish state.
The Gulen mafia organization, like other mafia organizations, is based on a centralized organizational structure with a single man at the top, like a Pope. The mafia has flourished outside Turkey, eventually developing an empire under Gulen’s leadership that included the United States, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Central Asia, among other countries. At the beginning the Gulen mafia was supported by the nobility and conservative Muslim devotees, but later on they were extorting money from teachers, academics, business leaders, and those who do commerce with them. The reason the Gulen mafia has flourished for a long time is because of its deception and lies and because the ruling class failed to recognize it as a threat to the very fabric of Turkish society or humanity around the world. The Gulen mafia organization, like other mafias, is closed, secretive, and indicative of a mentality that fostered the development of a secret parallel state in Turkey. Of course, the mafia is funneling the donation money into profitable businesses, such as supermarkets, banks, hospitals, oil companies, soccer clubs, education, construction projects, restaurants, and NGOs across Turkey and abroad.
But the organization has worsened in recent years because of a failed coup against the AKP and Erdogan. The Gulen mafia owns shopping centers and apartments; it extorts more money each year to buy ever more such businesses. In addition to politicians, many lawyers, police, doctors, sportsmen, journalists, and army officers are directly or indirectly involved with the Gulen mafia. As President Erdogan said, “It is a cancer that hides for a while but just won’t die; it needs chemotherapy to kill all the cells. “
Gülen’s mafia group has nothing to do with ethics, love, peace or justice; it has to do with an ideology that is based on lies, manipulation, control, deception, lack of transparency, bribes, blackmail, and now a game based on a victim mentality just to avoid accountability and honesty. Gülen is one of the most authoritarian, arrogant, and prideful person on earth, and his arrogance will finish him. The Gülen mafia is a fraud; everything they do, say, or worship has to do with gaining more power for the mafia group. Gülen’s main goals and dream are to bring back the Ottoman Empire via his Golden Generation in which all will speak Turkish, and all will accept him as the Mehdi or chosen one. Gülen’s mafia group is using the notions of interfaith dialogue, love, peace, and awards to lure naïve politicians to their platform, and they offer free dinners and expensive trips to Turkey with the purpose of disseminating Gülen’s ideology and exalting Gülen.
Gülen has not done anything for mankind. What problems about justice, equality, peace poverty, or education has Gülen solved? Gülen lived most of his life in Turkey, and during that time what did he do to solve the Kurdish problem? Instead he encouraged the military to burn and killed all the Kurdish people who did not agree with the government or the military’s treatment of the Kurds. What has Gülen contributed to the Palestinian and Israeli peace process? What education problems did Gülen solve in Turkey or around the globe? What medicine did Gülen discover to find a cure for humanity? Turkey still has education problems, because Gülen just pays free tuition for those who are very intelligent. The rest of those who are poor cannot affort go to school, and he shuts the door on them. Often Gülenists claim their students are the best in the world. However, undercover work discovered that they did well on tests and received awards because they were stealing the answers and giving them to their students. Gülen talks about justice and democracy. Yet, free individuals should be able to express their opinions freely, but we cannot forget that those who did speak out against Gülen were sued or locked up. It is up to the reader to look at the number of people being sued just because they are critiquing Gülen’s ideas and how many go to jail just for writing a book that criticizes the way Gülen’s mafia group operates. Where on earth would a religious leader curse and give hate speeches against the leader of a country in which more than several millions of citizens voted for him? Gülen would always criticize Christians for creating problems, but Gülen failed to learn anything under the purported “Interfaith Dialogues” particularly where the Bible it says, “Love your enemies, and if they attack you, turn the other cheek. Instead Gülen continues to spew hate speech and encourages his followers to take revenge when they can, as any casual look at Turkish media will show.
Now Gülen’s mafia cartel has presided over a litany of corruption scandals, some of which have been well documented. The police officers with alleged links to the Gülen mafia cartel have been detained or removed from their posts for illegal wiretapping on the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, government ministers, businessmen, and academics. Gülen has illegally obtained diplomatic passports, illegally orchestrated a coup against the democratically elected AKP government, and illegally conducted business for Bank Asya creating a banking scandal to add to its other religious and educational group scandals, such as the above-mentioned theft of the answers for entry exams, and many others. The Gülen mafia fears that if Erdogan continues in power, those scandals will be investigated, so that now day and night they all pray for Erdogan’s death.
We know generals have been the most notorious in looting the Turkish economy through the so-called military contracts. In the name of security concerns, the Gülen mafia offered these contracts, worth billions of Turkish lira, taking advantage of the weakness of the central state and maneuvering to a considerable extent to substitute itself for the state authorities, allegedly providing functions of protection, mediation, and repression. The Gülen mafia group meanwhile saw immediately how to benefit from this new situation by offering itself as an ally to the opposing ruling political elites in the struggle against the AKP and Erdogan. Initially, the group was an important ally of President Erdogan’s, but as of now he has become a chief rival for political power. To this end, Turkey issued a warrant for Gülen’s arrest, but the U.S. government will probably not honor the extradition laws. Instead the mafia cartel is thinking of sending him to Canada.
An important obstacle to combating the spread of the Gulen’s mafia rule is a basic lack of awareness among ordinary citizens and some policymakers about the extent of the phenomenon. Ignorance of the scope and scale of the problem will make it difficult to close down all his schools and institutions. Gülen’s religious mafia group has integrated by the speed and flexibility of transnational networks with the legal protections and diplomatic privileges enjoyed only by the leaders of the organization, such as obtaining diplomatic passports for the Turkish teachers, as well as for Gülen himself, with the help of his police chief followers.
Gülen’s religious mafia has morphed in the Turkish government from the guard of citizens’ natural liberties into a tiered system of cronies who hand out limited freedoms only in exchange for its ironclad rules. At the heart of every mafia enterprise is the business in which private citizens are forced to pay the mafia to protect them from harm. Every member of Gulen’s group is forced to pay dues in order to survive in the group. The ultimate way to earn power over other people is to threaten them with their lives, their livelihood, and the lives of those they love. Everyone knows that the mafia’s presence often means mysterious deaths. The Turkish Armenian journalist and a couple of Christians are the two most obvious examples of unsolved murders. It has been years, in both cases, and it is still an utter mystery as to why these people were killed in Turkey. That may have something to do with the Turkish Justice Department’s utter lack of curiosity about massive crimes being committed on its watch, but keep in mind that where there is a mafia, there are corrupt police, judges, attorneys, and courts.
For a long time the Pennsylvania home base mafia protected Gulen with codes of silence, maintained his support equally, and ensured that everyone who spoke anything negative about him or the organization was incarcerated. Thanks to President Erdogan, who broke the taboo about Pennsylvania, some of the high ranking group is breaking the silence to air the dirty laundry, making huge revelations, but still many people are afraid of what will happen if they exhibit independent minds about them. Mafia leaders never directly call the hits. The same is true for Gulen because he always denies that he has any connections with the organization. He had to know what was going on, however, because his police were eavesdropping on people. He had to know that his media has slandered so many innocent Kurdish people and forged documents against other religious groups.
Turkey is being run by the religious mafia group the Gulen movement under the name of religion, democracy, modernization, peace, love, dialog, justice, equality, human rights and such other rhetorical traps and deceptive methods designed to fool people. Now we all know that this group has nothing to do with love, peace, dialogue, justice and peace but rather has an insatiable hunger for power, willingness to rule by deceiving and by manipulating people as well as a desire for revenge against his opponents. If Erdogan does not finish the group under his term, when they come to power, they will use the same tactics against Erdogan and the others who are against them. Now the AKP is trying to clean them out, but it has become a state within the Turkish state. It will take such courage for the AKP to get rid of the Gulen mafia groups.The Gulenists have slandered many innocent people, fabricated documents against those who oppose them especially the military and the Kurds, triumphed up charges to send them to jail, and replaced the military generals with their group members who are loyal only to the mafia leader Gulen himself, not to anyone one else.
If you are following the news in Turkey, you have to make a choice as to how you interpret what the Republic of Turkey has been going through. All the evidence notwithstanding, the Turkey’s special courts are in the grip of a mafia that fabricated and planted evidence as well as framed innocent individuals, but the prime example is the President of Turkey Recep Tayipp Erdogan and AKP party. Gulenist mentors had planted and nurtured Erdogan along his career. Now people who spent most of their years with Gulen have come forth to reveal the true face of the organization and its leader. The maxim that those who touch get burned should sound familiar to anyone who has followed the cases of Nedim Sener, Ahmet Sik, Hanefi Avci, and so many who have gone to prison after taking on Gulen’s mafia group.
Since the founding of the Republic of Turkey, Turkey has not yet witnessed the establishment of rule of law in the country. The greatest crime that the Turkish Republic has committed is that it did not establish rule of law, equality, and justice for all. Instead, what exists before the citizens’ eyes is such a great dust that it does not let them see and distinguish clearly the corruption of politics and religion that have compounded these two forces inseparably into one. Whether the Gulenist group is transforming into criminals or criminals are easing into politics, it is certain that mafias have already pervaded Turkish politics. What we see today in Turkey is class division. The bureaucracies who are not affiliated with the religious Gulen mafia group or political party are treated as though they were not even citizens of the Turkish state. Because of the absence of an entrenched rule of law, these Gulenist elites have converted into mafias and in time, not only have the number of Gulenist mafia groups increased, but also their range and scope have expanded to form a parallel state within the Turkish state. Police, mafia, banking mafia, media mafia, judiciary mafia, education mafia, medical mafia, bureaucracy mafia, real estate mafia, business mafia, party mafia, trade union mafia, and forgery mafia have dominated all aspects of the Turkish state. There are yet others thing arising that need to be added to the list, and this does not exclude the criminal mafia.
Religion is supposed to be about justice, ethics, rule of law, peace, and equality, but Gulenists do not practice any of these instead acting on unethical behavioral practices that took root and flourished in an environment where no rule of law prevailed. More importantly, under such circumstances a new creature took birth in Turkey. It is devoid of any norms, manners, ethics, or moral principles and regards any rules and laws with arrogance. Members the Gulen religious mafia increase daily under the present favorable circumstances, and now they are at war with Prime Minister Erdogan and the AKP party because they do not like rules and laws since they hinder the growth of his mafia. The present government under the leadership of Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and President Erdogan has as its top priority the decontamination of the Turkish Republic from the Gulen religious mafia. In the past Gulenists talked about peace and love, but now they are on the defense talking about how to topple Erdogan and how to keep their members by offering them free ticket to heaven.
The Gulen mafia does not want competition and dominates every aspect of Turkish culture using it to create his version of Islam and the Golden Generation. And their method for gaining dominion is through the aforementioned business, government, media, sports, art and entertainment, education, NGOS avenues, appealing to the society’s desire for health, family and religion. That is how you take nations; in fact, it is the only way you take the hearts of nations; there has never been a nation taken as the result of conversion. For example, the Tahsiye religious group is known to be a branch of the Nur movement. The group and its leader, Mehmet Dogan are known for their opposition to the Gulen mafia group and take a firm stance against Interfaith Dialogue compared to others movements. Prior to the operation, in his speech on April, 2009, Gulen denounced the Tahsiye group by saying the group would be used by domestic and international powers as a tool to threaten national security, similar to the Turkish Hezbollah of the 1990s and Al-Qaida Following Gulen’s mafia speech, his newspaper the Zaman Daily made references to the issue on its page along with other media outlets affiliated with the Gulen media mafia and depicted the Tahsiye group as a terrorist organization in the television series, and Gulen mafia members in the police once again fabricated evidence about the Tashiye group leader Mehmet Dogan and his followers landing them in jail. There is enough support for the Turkish government to prove that Gulen’s mafia was linked to the prosecutors and that the police plotted a scheme to portray the Tahisye group as a terrorist group, unjustly imprisoning the leader Mehmet Dogan. This is just one of the cases that shows that Gulen’s mafia movements emulates the early model of universal hegemony in politics and culture. They aim to establish the Gulen version of Islam in its entirety in every soul and upon every inch of this earth, in every home, institution, and aspect of society. His mafia is dangerous to humanity, as he tries to regulate the totality of the individual lives of its followers. If the Gulen mafia decides that everyone should have purple toenails, then it tries to make everyone paint their toenails purple. That’s the law.
The Gulen mafia group has already lost its legitimacy no matter how powerful they are, how many schools they have, or how many businesses they own. Once you lose your legitimacy, you cannot regain it easily nor can you have effective results for your goals. In order to make the Turkish Republic a country which is not ruled by mafias anymore, but by laws, every one in Turkey from the civil society to bureaucrats, media, academics, and the business community should stand up and fight to save their country from rule by religious mafias like Gulen’s. The members of the dreaded Gulen mafia have infiltrated the Turkish community, so that all Turks, as concerned citizens, need to root them out. For the Western readers, when looking for more information on Turkey, they must approach Gulen’s mafia media and affiliated groups with care. At the very least, it would be advisable to double check sources obtained from his organization. After all, understanding which particular mask the Gulen mafia wears at each particular time might prove extremely challenging for Western readers unfamiliar with his tactics.
Dr. Aland Mizell is with the MCI and a regular contributor to The Kurdistan Tribune, Mindanao Times.You may email the author at:aland_mizell2@hotmail.com
