A Tale of Two Clerics

This is a tale of two clerics. Although they were born and raised on opposite sides of the world, their lives were fated to become intertwined in a way that neither of them could possibly have imagined, for they have both become key players in the fulfilment of Bible prophecy.

The name of the first cleric is Muhammed Fethullah Gülen. Gülen was born in the tiny village of Korucuk, not far from the Turkish city of Erzurum. His actual date of birth however, is uncertain. While some say that he was born on 10 November 1938, others contend that this should be 27 April 1941.

According to his biographer, the reason for this difference is that his parents waited for three years to register his birth. Critics however, say that the earlier date was deliberately chosen to coincide with the death of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey.

The Early Years

His father was an Imam, an Islamic leader of a mosque according to the Sunni tradition, while his mother was a teacher of the Quran in the village in which they lived. Although he lacked a formal education, the young Gülen was given a religious education when his family later moved to Erzurum.

It is said that he gave his first sermon at the age of 14, and that he was particularly attracted to the teachings of a Kurdish Sunni Muslim theologian named Said Nursi, who taught that modern science and logic was the way of the future, and that science should be taught in all religious schools.

Having completed his religious education, Gülen went on to become an Imam like his father. In 1966, he moved from Erzerum to a mosque in Izmir, a city on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. It was here that he soon captivated congregations with his inspiring orations.

While his sermons were devoted mostly to matters of the Islamic faith, he nevertheless urged his listeners to embrace capitalism and to combine their education with social activism.

Because the city of Izmir consisted primarily of Muslims who were drawn to western ideas, his teachings soon attracted millions of followers, both within the country and abroad. These teachings were the foundation of what became known as the Gülen movement.

The Gülen Movement

Also known as Hizmet (the Turkish word for “service”), the Gülen movement became a transnational Islamic social movement that was founded on the principles of peace within a civil society, as well as universal access to education based, as we have seen, on modern science and logic.

Over the years the Gülen movement has founded schools, universities, student organizations, radio and television studios and newspapers, and its members include students, teachers, businessmen, academics, journalists and other professionals.

By the year 2017, it was estimated that over a million Turks had been educated in Hizmet schools and universities, including the son-in-law of Recep Erdogan, the current president of Turkey. These schools can be found today in more than 160 countries all over the globe.

Because this movement is not a centralized organization, but rather a set of loosely organized networks of people inspired by Gülen, it is difficult to say accurately how many people may have been involved. But a 1997 estimate stated that up to four million people had been influenced by his ideas.

Gülen continued to perform his clerical duties up until 1981, when he retired from his formal duties as an Imam. For the next twenty years or so he devoted himself to giving sermons in various Turkish cities, as he travelled around the country spreading his ideas.

Moving to America

Early in 1999 however, Gülen developed serious health problems and went to the United States for treatment. Following his recovery, he applied to become a permanent resident in the United States. Although ultimately successful, his application for a Green Card was mired in controversy.

Gülen initially applied for permanent residence on the basis that he was “an alien of extraordinary ability” specializing in the field of education. This application was rejected by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service on the grounds that he had no degree and had published no academic works.

Yet despite the objections of the FBI, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, his application was finally approved as a result of personal letters of recommendation written on his behalf by three former operatives of the CIA.

Gülen subsequently retired to a 25-acre wooded estate known as the Golden Generation Worship and Retreat Centre, which was run by members of his movement that was located a few miles from Saylorsburg, a tiny village in Pennsylvania. He has remained there to this day.

Having never married, he continues to lead a spartan and reclusive life. His living quarters consist of two small rooms, one of which has a mattress on the floor, a prayer mat, a desk, bookshelves and a treadmill. Nearby is a hall which residents use as a mosque.

Today Gülen spends his time writing and studying Islamic scripture. He also gives speeches that are broadcast to members of the movement around the world, as well as occasional interviews with journalists and media outlets that are not affiliated with the Hizmet movement.

One might have imagined that over time the name of Fethullah Gülen would have faded into obscurity, especially in the country of his birth. Instead his name has been reviled and he has become the central figure in a brutal reign of terror that has manifested on the other side of the world.

The Emerging Tyrant

Gülen had always professed his support for a Turkish state that promoted a tolerant form of Islam emphasizing altruism, education and hard work. For this reason, he was an early supporter of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) founded in 2001 by Recep Erdogan.

However, things began to change in 2013 when the AKP was accused of a massive corruption scandal involving both Erdogan and his son, who was living in Italy at the time while studying for a PhD at the Bologna campus of America’s Johns Hopkins University.

Turkish prosecutors named 14 people, including several family members of cabinet ministers, of bribery, fraud, money-laundering and corruption, accusing them of being involved in a scheme designed to bypass United States sanctions on Iran.

It was at this time that five audio recordings appeared on YouTube in which Erdogan appeared to be telling his son to hide very large sums of money. Although Erdogan later acknowledged that the voice was his, he claimed that the recordings had been tampered with to include false information.

Erdogan adamantly insisted that neither he nor his son were involved in any wrongdoing. Instead, he maintained that these accusations were instigated by the Hizment movement, and that it was Fethullah Gülen himself who was to blame for spreading these malicious rumours.

The Abortive Coup

It was in the aftermath of this uproar that the ruling party announced that Erdogan would resign as Prime Minister and stand for the office of President in the upcoming elections. And in August 2014 he was elected with a majority of 52% of the popular vote.

Erdogan had already begun to reveal strong authoritarian tendencies before he was elected President, but it was his response to the attempted coup just a few years later that completed his transformation from pragmatic politician to yet another ruthless dictator.

On 15th July 2016, while President Erdogan was on holiday at Marmaris, a tourist resort on the shoreline of the Turkish Riviera, a group of military officers launched an attempted coup. Fortunately, Erdogan was able to fly back to Istanbul in time to quell this rebellion.

No sooner had this insurrection been suppressed when Erdogan again blamed Fethullah Gülen for instigating this attempted coup. What made this accusation so surprising to outsiders was that Gülen was living in Pennsylvania at the time and had remained there since 1999.

Undaunted by this absurdity, Erdogan immediately turned his wrath on all those who he claimed were followers of the Gülen movement in Turkey. What followed was nothing short of a nation-wide pogrom directed at anyone deemed to be an enemy of the state, as defined by Erdogan himself.

Calling this attempted coup “a gift from God”, Erdogan initiated a state-wide purge designed to cleanse the nation of any sympathizer of the Hizmet movement, by dehumanising its prominent members and placing them in custody. He even freed existing prisoners in order to make room for them.

To date Erdogan’s government has dismissed more than 150,000 judges, teachers, police and civil servants. On April 18, 2018, the Turkish Interior Minister announced that 169,013 people had been the subject of legal proceedings, and that 77,081 had been imprisoned.

The Failed Abduction

Not content with directing his wrath at citizens within his own country, Erdogan also directed his agents to target and abduct others who were living outside of the country. His reach even extended to a Turkish educator who had been living in Mongolia for the past twenty-five years.

Although the Turkish government insists that it only extradites suspected Gülenists with the permission of the foreign governments involved, this was clearly not the case with educator Veysel Akcay, who ran a network of international schools associated with the Gülen movement.

Early one morning in July 2018, Mr. Akcay was approached by three masked men near his apartment building in the capital, Ulan Bator, when he was bundled into a Toyota minivan and taken to the airport. A short time later, a Bombardier jet operated by the Turkish Air Force landed there.

Mr Akcay was lucky. As word leaked out about his abduction, his friends and family congregated at the airport. Later that afternoon, the Mongolian government ordered the plane to be grounded. Mr. Akcay was released, and the jet fled back to Turkey without him. But others have not been so fortunate.

Earlier in 2018, Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT) announced that six Turkish nationals had been captured in Kosovo and had been flown back to Turkey on the same day. This was confirmed by The Turkish Foreign Minister who said that over 100 people had been abducted abroad.

Naturally, the concern within the Hizmet movement was whether Gülen himself would be abducted from his retreat in Pennsylvania. And according to a report in The Wall Street Journal on November 10, 2017, an attempt was made to do so shortly after President Trump was elected.

The alleged plan involved now disgraced former National Security Advisor to the President Michael Flynn and his son. According to this report, Flynn was to be paid 15 million dollars to forcibly kidnap Gülen and fly him in a private jet to the Turkish prison island of Imrali.

According to former CIA Director James Woolsey, this was “a covert attempt in the dead of night to whisk this guy away”. For his efforts, which fortunately did not come to fruition, General Flynn and his son have since become subjects of a criminal investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

The Second Cleric

And that brings us to the second cleric in this convoluted story. His name is Andrew Brunson. Brunson hails from Black Mountain, a small town located on the outskirts of the Pisgah National Forest in the American state of North Carolina, where he was born in 1968.

After leaving school, Brunson attended Trinity Evangelical Divinity School just north of Chicago, where he gained a Master of Arts degree in 1991. He then went on to become a pastor in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, where he expressed an interest in serving the church abroad.

It was in the Biblical town of Smyrna, now known as the Turkish city of Izmir, that the lives of these two clerics first became intertwined. For two years after graduating from Trinity, Brunson and his wife Norine moved to Turkey where he served as pastor of the Resurrection Church in Izmir.

For the next 23 years, Brunson continued to live in Izmir where he raised three children while ministering to a small Protestant congregation of about two dozen people. Having lived there happily for so long, he finally applied to the Turkish government for permanent residency in 2016.

On the morning of 7 October 2016, Brunson and his wife were summoned to the Police station in Izmir. Thinking that this was in connection with their residency application, both went along willingly. But when they got there, Andrew and Norine were taken into custody.

To their surprise and dismay, they were told that they had engaged in missionary activities that were “against national security”, and that because of this they and their family would be deported. Although Norine was released thirteen days later, Andrew remained in prison.

On 11 December 2016, he was moved to a counterterrorism centre and charged with being a spy with links to the outlawed Kurdistan People’s Party (KPP), as well as being a member of FETO, the Fethullah Gülen Terrorist Organization, as President Erdogan liked to call it.

In short, it soon became apparent that Brunson had become enmeshed in Erdogan’s web of terror following the abortive coup. Because Brunson was an American citizen, his wife Norine made repeated appeals to the Trump administration to intercede on his behalf.

In March 2017, then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Turkey where he met with senior officials, including Erdogan himself. He also had a 20-minute meeting with Norine, who expressed her gratitude on Facebook for the chance to discuss her husband’s incarceration.

Although a State Department spokesman would not confirm whether Tillerson had discussed the case of Andrew Brunson in his talks with Turkish officials, there was at least one good outcome from his visit. On 25 July 2018, Brunson was released from prison and held under house arrest.

Presidential Fireworks

After Rex Tillerson had returned to the United States following his visit to Turkey, the US position regarding the continued captivity of pastor Brunson was clearly expressed by John R. Bass, the US Ambassador to Turkey, who had this to say on the matter:

“He appears to be held simply because he’s an American citizen who as a man of faith was in contact with a range of people in this country who he was trying to help, in keeping with his faith”.

And Mike Pompeo, who had replaced Tillerson as Secretary of State, followed this up with a statement of his own. “We have seen no credible evidence against Mr. Brunson and call on Turkish authorities to resolve this case immediately in a transparent and fair manner”.

It did not take long for President Trump to weigh in with a tweet of his own.

“Pastor Andrew Brunson, a fine gentleman and Christian leader in the United States, is on trial and being persecuted in Turkey for no reason. They call him a Spy, but I am more a Spy than he is. Hopefully he will be allowed to come home to his beautiful family where he belongs!”

Trump then followed this up with a tweet that was copied to Erdogan’s personal account, saying: “A total disgrace that Turkey will not release a respected U.S. Pastor, Andrew Brunson, from prison. He has been held hostage far too long”.

Trump went on to say that the US would impose “large sanctions” on Turkey if they did not comply. This threat triggered an immediate response from the Turkish authorities. The Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu issued a tweet of his own, saying:

“No one dictates to Turkey. We will never tolerate threats from anybody. Rule of law is for everyone; no exception”.

A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Hami Aksoy, said that the American threats were “unacceptable”, and that “it is impossible to accept the U.S. Administration’s threatening messages, which totally disregard our alliance and friendly relations between our countries”.

Never one to back away from a fight, President Trump followed this up by demonstrating that his words were no idle threat, and by issuing the following tweet on 10 August 2018:

“I have just authorized a doubling of Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum with respect to Turkey as their currency, the Turkish Lira, slides rapidly downward against our very strong Dollar! Aluminum will now be 20% and Steel 50%”.

President Erdogan responded by announcing that pastor Brunson would not be released, and that countervailing tariffs would be levied on a variety of US imports, including cars, tobacco and alcoholic drinks, and that Turkey would in future boycott all American electronic goods.

All of this prompted Asli Aydintasbas, a fellow of the European Council on Foreign Relations, to wonder where this outburst between two combustible presidents would lead:

“The combination of the personalities of Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Trump leave everyone guessing as to the outcome. It is possible that, in seven or eight months, Brunson will be sitting in his home in North Carolina, Atilla will be back in Turkey, and Trump will be raving about Erdogan on Twitter once again.”

Ms. Aydintasbas was referring here to a proposed deal to exchange Andrew Brunson for Mehmet Hakan Atilla, a Turkish banker who had been convicted by an American court and was now in a US prison. However, she went on to warn:

“But it is also possible that Turkey will become the next Venezuela, clashing with the West and dealing with a dire economic downturn. No one can be sure.”

West Versus East

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded shortly after the end of the second world war. It was founded at a time when the cold war was at its peak, and the Soviet Union was swallowing up surrounding countries and subjecting them to communist rule.

NATO was a defensive pact signed by twelve countries. It was formed to defend themselves against future Soviet aggression. Article Five of this treaty stated that an attack on any single member state would be regarded as an attack on them all and would be met with armed force if necessary.

Although the original pact involved the United States and Canada, together with ten allied countries in western Europe, it has grown over the years to embrace 29-member states. All of them are located in the west, with the exception of one country, and that is Turkey.

Turkey joined NATO in February 1952. Its membership was of primary importance because of its location. It not only flanked the Soviet Union, but it also controlled access to the Black Sea where the Soviet navy was based, through the narrow strait known as the Dardanelles.

Over the years Turkey has remained a staunch member of NATO, and at one stage even considered applying for membership of the European Union. The Incirlik Air Base on its southern border provided NATO with a vital launching pad for its bombing attacks on ISIS in Syria in 2016.

Outside of the United States, Turkey has by far the largest number of active troops among all the member nations that make up NATO today. In fact, its army is greater than that of the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined. It continues to be a crucial bulwark against Russian aggression.

You would think that President Trump might have stopped to consider the likely consequences before launching his economic sanctions against the Turkish government, simply to secure the release of Protestant pastor Andrew Brunson. Instead, it has merely strengthened their resolve to defy him.

For whatever the fate of these two clerics may happen to be, the outcome of this contest of wills is bound to be the same. It will drive Turkey away from the West and into the arms of the Russians, exactly as the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel predicted over two thousand years ago.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2018 at 10:53 am and is filed under Signs of the Times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments and pings are closed.