The Huffington Post, May 8, 2009 The Justice Department has now found that the FBI’s terrorist watch list is flawed. Not only does the list consist of a mind-boggling 1.1 million names of 400,000 people, the Justice Department has also found that the FBI was “sometimes dangerously slow to add suspects to the nation’s terrorist watch list, and even slower to...

Huffington Post, April 14, 2009 During his recent visit to Turkey, President Obama spoke about the promise of a new era in Turkish-U.S. relationship that can serve as a “model partnership” between the West and the Muslim world. America’s quest to find a “model” Muslim partner is not new. In January 2008, then U.S. President George W....

Huffington Post, April 9, 2009 A week before Passover, a local interfaith group called the Table of Abraham organized a Seder event at Congregation Ahavath Chesed, a Reform Jewish congregation in Jacksonville. The goal was to enact all of the rituals that are part of Seder as a way of informing and teaching people who are unfamiliar with this tradition. Turning the...

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...