Gülen: Those Forming Terrorist Organizations are Making New Plans
Internationally respected Turkish intellectual and scholar Fethullah Gülen has said those forming terrorist organizations for their own interests may now be plotting new conspiracies in Turkey.
In one of his weekly speeches broadcast on the herkul.org Web site, Gülen elaborated on the problem of terrorism in Turkey. Some circles in Turkey, he said, attracted militants to the mountains (i.e., to join the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party [PKK]) with the aim of managing drug and arms trafficking in the Southeast, which has caused trouble for Turkey and divides the country, but their ultimate goal is to set the stage for an intervention in lawful administrations. "They formed these terrorist organizations themselves. These organizations spun out of the control of these circles due to a conflict of interests related to drug and arms trafficking. Then another team of brigands formed in opposition to these organizations, such as Hizbullah [a terrorist organization that reportedly has links to an illegal group within the gendarmerie known as JİTEM]. Then, they say that the sons of this country are fighting with bandits. When acid wells [located in the Southeast in which hundreds of victims were reportedly buried after they were killed in the 1990s by the Ergenekon organization, a clandestine crime organization nested within the state hierarchy] come to light, their bad deeds are thrown in their faces. I do not know whether they are ashamed," he said.
In response to a question about the relationship between Turkey and the al-Qaeda terrorist organization, he said the latter was created by these same circles as a new illegal formation in Turkey. "They created al-Qaeda in Turkey after Hizbullah. They can now, for example, invent another formation. They can try to have the members of this new organization infiltrate some Muslims groups that read certain religious books [written by a particular Islamic scholar]. They can hang the posters of the writer of these books on the walls of their houses, put Kalashnikovs in their hands and then say these people can be armed whenever they find an opportunity. So, they can label those who do not even have a needle as terrorists," Gülen said.
Stressing that the word "irtica," meaning backwardness or fundamentalism, is used as a political instrument to accuse people in Turkey, Gülen said some unfortunate people try to defame Muslims by using such words. Gülen also said some people are trying to associate hypocrisy with Muslims, adding: "There is no hypocrisy in Islam. However, we see double the hypocrisy displayed by others nowadays. Those calling Muslims who go to mosques reactionaries rather than Muslims and aiming to defame Islam by associating it with fundamentalism and reactionism are the slinkiest hypocrites of this age."
Noting that expressions like "Islamist" and "religionist" do not exist in Islamic terminology, Gülen said they were purposefully uttered by some.
Gülen said people who try to depict sincere Muslims as terrorists will make a fuss over fundamentalism again. Before the Feb. 28 period, which started when the military overthrew the government in an unarmed intervention, he remembered some people who were different -- from their clothing to their ways of praying -- that were presented as stage performers in a play to the public.
"A role was assigned to each of them. Some of them appeared in the media as tarikat leaders in disguise, some pretended to be reactionaries who wanted a theocratic order, some played the roles of victims who were deceived by reactionaries and some took the stage as ‘loyal soldiers of the army of God’ in the fundamentalism play, even though they were hit men hired by shadowy powers."
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