When wrapping up the recent International Gulen Conference that’s been held in the University of Chicago, Dr. Scott Alexander, Chair of the Catholic Theological Union’s Department of Intercultural Studies, said he’s been very much inspired by M. Fethullah Gulen. “I am neither Turkish nor Muslim but still a member of the movement” stated Dr. Alexander.
Dr. Ihsan Yilmaz’ of Fatih University has written an article in Today’s Zaman titled ‘Towards the Conference-I Kamil’ passing all the details regarding the conference.
Those who attended the conference have had the opportunity to listen to a bunch of distinguished speakers. Tough all papers presented in the conference worth perusing, Dr. Dogan Koc’s article titled “Fethullah Gulen’s Strategic Defamation: Turkish vs. English.” was the most interesting among them. In his quantitative study, Koç shows that there are two common but contradicting pictures of Gulen in the harsh claims raised against him. While on the one hand he is portrayed as a CIA/Mossad/Vatican agent in Turkish language pieces, on the other hand, the pieces in English claim that he is an anti-Semitic, anti-Western Khomeini. Koç argues that these claims are not random and that there is a common strategy followed in certain languages. By running a time concurrency test, Koç reaches the conclusion that these efforts at defamation happen in a campaign manner, not randomly.More interestingly, Koç shows that these totally contradicting pictures of Fethullah Gulen are depicted by using same sources and each other. Read rest of the story