Published in Today’s Zaman, April 5, 2009(Turkey’s largest circulating English daily) Long before Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States of America, people in Turkey had expressed a sentiment of hope about his presidency. Reporting for The New York Observer in January 2008, Suzy Hansen quoted Omer Taspınar, director...

Huffington Post, March 26, 2009 A recent headline on CNN read, “FBI planting spies in U.S. mosques,” Muslim groups allege. This outrage was sparked by revelations that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had sent an agent provocateur into a mosque in southern California who was coercing worshippers in becoming informants and inciting them to make...

An edited version was first published in Fayetteville Observor on March 19, 2009 In January 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) told Fox News that it severing its ties with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a leading American Muslim organization. A month later, I was surprised to see a FBI agent stop by my office in Jacksonville seeking...

Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 17 March 2009 Jacksonville, Florida – The noted Indian poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore said, “Music fills the infinite between two souls”. I experienced this while attending a recital by Choir Al Farah, a musical group that aims to highlight the reality and the possibility of Christians,...

Orginal Published in Islamic Horizons, Mar-Apr, 2009. The State of U.S. Economy On the verge of taking over the Presidency of the United States of America, Barack Obama described the U.S. economy as “very sick” with the situation “getting worse.” This worry is best reflected in the fact that U.S. unemployment rate now stands at 7.2 percent,...