As a longtime subscriber to Newsweek, I have valued your mixture of news and opinion pieces. It is getting harder, however, to tell the difference.

Case in point, the article by Soner Cagaptay in the March 8 issue, entitled “Turkey’s Turning Point.” It appears in the “Scope” section, which describes itself as “News, Scoops, and the Globe at a Glance.” It does not serve your readers well to label in that way a biased and conspiracy theory laden diatribe against the Gulen Movement and Turkey’s current governing party.

In the past week, two supposed experts in Middle Eastern policy have put forth their opinions of the Gulen Movement.  First, we heard from Soner Cagaptay, whose argument piece entitled, “What’s Really Behind Turkey’s Coup Arrests?”, appeared in Foreign Policy magazine on February 25th.  Daniel Pipes, erstwhile Director of the Middle East Forum, jumped on the bandwagon to trash Fethullah Gulen and his followers, in his article, “Crisis in Turkey”, which appeared on National Review Online on March 2nd.  Both continue to profess that any Muslim, anywhere, who actively practices and promotes his/her religion are inherently incapable of desiring freedom and democracy and must be Islamists (the accepted term for those who specifically advocate radical, purist, even pro-violence interpretations of the Prophet’s Message).  Because Fethullah Gulen and those who agree with his teachings actively identify as Muslims not embarrassed by their beliefs who recognize that “secular” does not have to mean “un-religious”, they must be suspect.  However, in actuality, Gulen believes that all true Muslims yearn for freedom (Advocate of Dialogue, 2006) and has repeatedly denied promoting any particular political party (Foreign Policy, 2008).

My name is Lawrence Arthur Forman and I am the Faculty Advisor of the Turkish-Muslim Better Understanding Club of Old Dominion University, where I am an adjunct Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion. I am also the rabbi-emeritus of Ohef Sholom Temple in Norfolk, Virginia, where I served as senior rabbi for 30 years, and my wife, a clinical psychologist and I, have been affiliated with the Rumi Forum in Washington, D.C. for many years.

I am responding to Soner Capagtay's article that appeared on February 25.

I am distressed--perhaps outraged would be a better word--on two accounts. First, that Mr Capagtay makes a series of serious accusations without offering a stitch of evidence. His thesis that "the balance of power in Turkey has shifted.." and that "the force behind this dramatic change is the Fethullah Gulen Movement" is presented as a fact but without justifiying the claim. So, too, his assertion that "the Gulen movement...controls the national police and its powerful intelligence branch": where is his evidence--a single scintilla of evidence--to support this assertion? Later, he refers to Zekeriya Oz and Ramazan Akyurek "as well as other powerful people in the police" as among those "thought by some to be Gulen sympathizers." Thought by whom? Who is "some"? And by the way, the notion of  "Gulen sympathizers" within a group is a far cry from that group having become an arm of the Gulen Movement. Innuendo has long been a political weapon--it is the very weapon Mr Capagtay accuses the Gulen Movement of wielding. But he seems more than adept himself at levelling it at the Movement that he clearly dislikes and wishes to discredit.

"In a recent commentary (“What's Really Behind Turkey's Coup Arrests,” Feb. 25, 2010) published in Foreign Policy magazine, and another one (“Turkey's Turning Point,” Feb.26, 2010) in Newsweek, Soner Çağaptay of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) accuses Fethullah Gülen, 72, a retired preacher, prolific writer, and an advocate of interfaith-intercultural dialogue who lives in a self-imposed exile in a small town of Pennsylvania, of being the one responsible for the recent arrests of the former Turkish army generals who apparently plotted several times to overthrow Turkey's democratically elected Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government.

"A piece titled “What’s Really Behind Turkey’s Coup Arrests?” by Soner Çağaptay, who works for the pro-Israeli Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), was published very recently by the Foreign Policy journal.

He starts his unsubstantiated claims by saying that the Gulen movement is a shadowy Islamist movement. I have written here several times that unless you call every single practicing Muslim an Islamist, Fethullah Gülen and his movement can never be called Islamist. Quite the contrary, the movement has always stayed away from politics. It is well known that if someone is called Islamist, it is implied that he is not an ordinary Muslim but is instead a radical and possibly a pro-violence one. Some hooligan right-wing Islamophobic tabloid journalist could write such a thing, but an academic such as Çağaptay must know that serious academics never call the Gülen movement Islamist. Even this misuse of the term shows that Çağaptay is not objective or unbiased toward the movement.