60 Minutes On The Gülen Movement
May 14, 2012 § 6 Comments
Another Monday, another post about 60 Minutes. Last night’s segment of interest was on Fethullah Gülen and the Gülen movement, and centered on the growing number of Gülen charter schools in the U.S. The gist of the report was that Gülen is himself a secretive figure whose true motivations cannot be entirely ascertained, but that he preaches a tolerant brand of Islam focused on education and social mobility and that his Harmony Charter Schools are by all accounts doing great work while at the same time stirring up controversy by appearing to skirt immigration laws. On the whole, the segment’s tone was a positive one, and in a lot of ways it painted Gülen as a cleric who fits in well with the general American creed of hard work, education, and capitalist ethos leading to success. The Gülenists, who can be notoriously thin-skinned, have to be happy with 60 Minutes for portraying them in a good light.
Far more interesting to me is not what 60 Minutes reported but what it didn’t report. All Turks of every political stripe would find it inconceivable that a major American network did a profile on Gülen and his followers without one mention of either Prime Minister Erdoğan or the AKP. In fact, someone with no prior knowledge of Gülenists at all would have thought after watching the report that the Gülen movement has little role in Turkish politics and is nothing more than a somewhat shadowy business conglomerate. The reality is that the Gülenists and the AKP have long been intertwined in many ways with their twin rises coinciding with each other, and the AKP’s decade in power has led to Gülenists now filling many high posts in Turkey’s judiciary and police. Gülen and his followers are not easily separated from politics and their many business interests are not the only part of the story. Gülen media organs, such as Zaman, championed Erdoğan’s rise and now consistently back him, and it has been alleged that the Ergenekon investigation is a reward to the Gülenists as a way for them to get back at the military that oppressed them during the 1980s. While recently there have been rumblings of a power struggle between the Gülen movement and the AKP, the fact remains that it is difficult to discuss one without discussing the other, yet this is the very feat that CBS managed to pull off. For someone who studies Turkey, it came off as a very strange omission.
One thing to give 60 Minutes credit for is that it did not give undeserved airtime to those arguing that the Gülen schools represent a secret plot to introduce creeping Islamization or sharia into American society. To begin with, while the Gülenists are controversial in Turkey because they often come off as a personality cult, there is little question that Gülen preaches tolerance, interfaith dialogue, and a distinctly non-confontational brand of Islam. The folks who rail against Gülen and his schools on ideological grounds have a problem with Islam in general and not with anything that Gülen is saying. There is also the inconvenient fact that the schools are all public charters, which means that like any other public school in this country, there is no religious instruction or school-supported religious activity of any kind. Opening a group of public charter schools would be a pretty boneheaded way of trying to carry out a program of religious indoctrination given that there is literally zero space or opportunity for religion to be pushed, and whatever else people may think of Gülen and his followers, stupid is one of the last words that comes to mind.
Most people who saw the 60 Minutes report probably came away with the impression that Gülen is a secretive guy who genuinely believes in promoting math and science education and whose followers are looking for creative ways to come to the U.S. and carry out this message while simultaneously making money. I don’t think this is a bad read on the situation at all, but given the fact that Lesley Stahl went to Turkey to see what was going on for herself, the absence (aside from a few seconds from Andrew Finkel) of any reporting related to the movement’s political activities in Turkey and the intense controversy that it has stirred up surrounding the prosecution of the military and its critics – no doubt Ahmet Şık would have had something interesting to say on the matter – was odd to say the least. Does this mean that CBS and 60 Minutes are naive or guilty of sloppy reporting once again, or is this more fodder for those who conspiratorially proclaim the awesome and secretive power of the cemaat to silence its accusers? Given what we saw from 60 Minutes a few weeks ago, I’d vote for the former, but no doubt the latter explanation will quickly gain currency among those who see Gülen’s hand in everything that goes on related to Turkey.
Some Thoughts On 60 Minutes and Palestinian Christians
April 23, 2012 § 3 Comments
60 Minutes ran a segment last night on Christians in the Holy Land that examined their dwindling numbers in cities like Bethlehem and Jerusalem and how this relates to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. A report like this is bound to draw controversy and this one did not disappoint, with Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren taking lots of heat due to the disclosure during the segment that he called the president of CBS News and tried to have the story killed. Before I dive in, a disclaimer: Ambassador Oren was one of my professors at Harvard and is a friend, and I spent many fond hours chatting with him about all sorts of topics in his office at Georgetown (he arrived one year after I did) before he was appointed ambassador. Since then, I have seen or spoken with him only two or three times, and I continue to hold him in the highest regard.
Given the above facts, I am certainly not the world’s most objective commentator on Michael Oren. But I fail to see why heads are exploding over the fact that the Israeli ambassador is trying to protect his country’s image. Did he come off as tongue-tied when Bob Simon ambushed him on camera with a question that was purely about process rather than substance? Sure. Let’s remember though that THIS IS HIS JOB. He is not paid to be an objective analyst. He is not paid to project a balanced and nuanced view of events in the Middle East. He is paid to be Israel’s spokesman in the United States and to advance Israeli interests, and if he gets wind of the fact that a network is planning on airing a story that is unfairly critical of Israel (more on this below) on its flagship news magazine program, it would be diplomatic malpractice for him not to try and keep the story off the air. Does anyone reading this actually believe that diplomats from every country on the planet do not do the same thing? Is this legitimately more surprising than the stories that emerged just last week about the Pentagon and the State Department trying to suppress reports and leaked photos of American troops in Afghanistan posing for pictures with Taliban corpses? This is what governments do, folks. Michael Oren is a high ranking official of the Israeli government and his first and only priority is to protect his country and its image, and if he comes off looking poorly in the course of doing so, it’s because that comes with the territory. Please spare me the feigned outrage, particularly when Bob Simon claims that this is the first time he has encountered a reaction to a story before it has been broadcast, which was far and away the most outrageous statement of the night.
Moving to the substance of the story, the gist of the 60 Minutes report was that the Christian population in the West Bank is shrinking and that Palestinian Christians are leaving in large numbers, and that this can be blamed on Israel. It is difficult to assess the size of this reported exodus or how rapidly it is taking place since Bob Simon provided little in the way of hard numbers. The implication is that this is a direct result of the Israeli occupation, and while this may very well be true, there was nothing but purely anecdotal evidence provided to support the charge. Simon interviewed the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem who said that in 1964 there were 30,000 Christians in Jerusalem and now there are “very few” with Simon putting the number at 11,000. Damning stuff, until you find out that according to Menashe Harrel (whose numbers are widely considered authoritative) there were 25,000 Christians in Jerusalem in 1948 and only 12,646 in 1967, which leads one to conclude that the Jordanians must have been secret Israelis given the dastardly effect their control of Jerusalem had on the Christian population. With Jerusalem’s Christian population now standing at 11,000, it is impossible to claim with a straight face that Israel is responsible for a rapid mass migration by Christians elsewhere.
In addition, there is the inconvenient fact that while the Christian population is shrinking, the Muslim population is growing. Are we supposed to take away from this that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank disproportionately affects, or even purposely targets, Christians? If Israel’s actions are the direct and proximate cause of Christian flight, then it would have been helpful to see some sort of causal chain established by 60 Minutes, but instead the viewers are told that Christians residents are disappearing and that this is due to occupation of the West Bank, yet no effort is made to ascertain why Christians are leaving (aside from Ari Shavit’s observation about Christians being squeezed between political Islam and political Judaism) but Muslims are not. Christian communities are disappearing across the region, have been driven out of Iraq entirely and are coming under sectarian pressure in Egypt, yet 60 Minutes finds Zahi Khouri’s claim that he has never heard of someone leaving because of concern over Islamic fundamentalism to be a completely credible one. Bob Simon asked Shavit, “Do you think the Israeli government ever thinks of the fact that if Christians aren’t being treated well here, and America is an overwhelmingly Christian country, that this could have consequences?” yet there was no documentation at all of ways in which Christians are being specifically mistreated for being Christian, just an allegation hanging in the air as if the question itself were somehow proof.
The bottom line is that this was a sloppily reported and lazily researched segment falling far below 60 Minutes’ usual standards. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I carry no water for the Israeli occupation of the West Bank or mistreatment of Palestinians, and would be thrilled to see both of those things ended immediately. I call out what I view to be Israeli missteps and bad behavior all the time. But Michael Oren was correct to view this piece as a hatchet job that was undeserving of being aired. Yes, Israel has made life very unpleasant for plenty of Palestinians, and Christians in Bethlehem are particularly ill-served by the occupation and the separation barrier given their proximity to Israel proper and their reliance on religious tourism, but there was simply no proof presented by CBS outside of empty conjecture that Israel is deserving of more blame for this than are the Palestinian terrorists that prompted the construction of the barrier in the first place, nor was there even a scintilla of historical or regional context to place this story in perspective. Being a Christian in the West Bank cannot be easy for a variety of reasons, and I can understand why Palestinian Christians would feel uncomfortable under both Jewish and Muslim rule, particularly when they each rely on an increasingly assertive religious nationalism. It should be perfectly clear though that Israel is not targeting Christian Palestinians, that the Christian population of Jerusalem has remained steady since Israel claimed the entirety of the city in 1967, and that the Christian population of the West Bank is shrinking for a variety of reasons, some of which have to do with the occupation and some of which have nothing to do with it whatsoever. The public perception following the 60 Minutes report is that Michael Oren did not come off well, but 60 Minutes and Bob Simon did not exactly cover themselves in glory (the segment has been in the works since last year and this is the best they could come up with??) and deserve any criticism that might come their way.
