Thread by @Shikima_King_

Seeing as how he continues to demand attention - an Enes Kanter is sus thread.

Part of my on going series on Uyghur Gladio

Feb 13 2019 Enes Kanter, recently waived by the Knicks, signs an offer sheet with the Portland Trailblazers and enters my life.

Kanter had struggled that season with the Knicks and was only a few years removed from a particularly embarrassing playoff run with the OKC Thunder that earned him the nickname Enes “Can’t Play Him” Kanter

But the Blazers needed depth at the 5, a decision that paid dividends after their starting center, Jusef Nurkic, literally broken his fucking leg in half

On Kanter I have the inverse opinion of most NBA fans; I’ve been at times a dogged apologist for his on court production while perhaps the sharpest critic of his human rights activism

He probably shouldn’t be your starting center but he’s a serviceable rotation player who can terrorize the opposing bench with his offensive rebounding and interior scoring.

So having defended Enes Kanter the basketball player (and my beloved 2019 Blazers) lets eviscerate Enes Kanter the human rights activist

Kanter is first and foremost a follower, almost certainly the most visible and famous one in America, of the Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen

The Gülen Movement, also known as Hizmet (“service”) and referred to as FETO (Fethullahist Terrorist Organization) by the Turkish govt, has received fawning coverage from western media describing it as a tolerant, moderate Islamic movement, open to western technology and science

The next thing they should probably say is that the Gülen Movement is also an incredibly effective user of media and public relations and has succeeded in creating powerful allies in America and the west

Gülen is perhaps best known in the US for his charter schools. Education is big for the Gülen Movement and they run schools throughout the world. Kanter himself attended one of these schools from a young age where he first got involved with the Gülen movement

This is not an unusual story and certainly not one unique to Kanter. While the schools don’t provide an explicitly religious education, critics accuse the schools of grooming and recruiting the best and brightest students to the movement, for instance a teenage basketball phenom

In turn the Gülen Movement does everything they can to place these exceptional individuals they’ve recruited through their schools into critical bureaucracies like the military, police and intelligence services.

Now this is where the organization of the movement itself is kind of an indictment of dirty dealing. Originally a response to Turkey’s laws on secularism and govt approved Imams, the structure of the
Gülen movement is purposefully opaque and secretive.

So here’s a bit outlining it from Turkish state media, obviously they’re making it sound as sinister a possible but this basically what it described by most other accounts of their organizational structure.

The lengths members were allegedly willing to go to avoid being detected as a member of the Gülen movment