My latest in PJ Media:
Mohamed Khairullah is back, and he’s mad.
Khairullah, the mayor of Prospect Park, New Jersey, recently enjoyed a junket to Turkey to visit relatives who are, according to the North Jersey Record, “Syrians displaced by war.” (Khairullah himself fled Syria in 1980.) Khairullah and his family “visited a beach, historic sites around Istanbul and a mosque.” The mayor also made the trip into a working vacation: Khairullah “met with mayors of different towns to talk about government and business.” But the warm glow of his holiday vanished when he flew into JFK International Airport, and was, he claims, held for no less than three hours for questioning. It was, he says, “hurtful.”
“It was definitely a hurtful moment where I’m thinking in my mind that this is not the America that I know,” said Khairullah. “I am very familiar with our laws and Constitution, and everything that was going on there was a violation.”
Khairullah says that when he and his family got off the plane at JFK, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials were waiting for him. He claims that they told him they were doing a random check, and asked him his college major, his place of work, the name of his mother, his nicknames, and where he had been. Worst of all, they “asked whether he’d visited any towns with terrorist cells and whether he personally met with any terrorists.”
This made the mayor furious. “It’s flat-out insulting,” he fumed. “It’s flat-out stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs.”
There is much more. Read the rest here.