Turkey President's Proxy War Against Enemies Now in OC Thanks to Anaheim Educators
Students, parents and teachers nearly filled the 1,290-seat Cook Auditorium at Anaheim High School on March 8 for a sneak peek of the documentary Killing Ed: Charter Schools, Corruption and the Gülen Movement in America. The carefully orchestrated event was spearheaded by a who’s-who of Anaheim liberal leaders—Anaheim Union High School District (AUHSD) superintendent Mike Matsuda, trustee Al Jabbar, and Jose Moreno, a former Anaheim City School District president and current Anaheim city council candidate—who hoped the screening would catapult them as national thought leaders in the fight against charter schools.
The trio had much to be proud of. They had scored an early screening of the film, which focuses on publicly funded charter schools affiliated with Fethullah Gülen, a wealthy imam based in Pennsylvania who leads a popular, controversial Islamic movement in Turkey. Director Mark S. Hall was flown in. The crowd featured teachers, parent activists, students, and politicos. Questions were shared among panelists before the screening, along with a script for speakers, all hitting on Killing Ed’smessage: that Gülen’s movement presented a danger to not just schools, but America itself.
But by doing so, Jabbar, Matsuda, and Moreno, whether wittingly or not, became puppets in a proxy war waged by Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Read more on my latest OC Weekly Navel Gazing Blog post:
