My latest in PJ Media:
Sometimes things aren’t as they seem, and sometimes, on the other hand, they are exactly as they seem. Back in September, the mayor of Prospect Park, New Jersey, Mohamed Khairullah, was at JFK International Airport in New York City, on his way home from visiting relatives in Turkey, when “Islamophobia” struck and destroyed everything in its path. “We just wanted to go and have a good time,” he said, but upon return, he was held for no less than three hours for questioning. “I don’t go near shady organizations,” he declared and added: “I believe that my constitutional rights were violated” by questions about whether he had met with any terrorists. It turns out, however, that maybe those who questioned Khairullah weren’t racist, bigoted “Islamophobes” after all: Khairullah has a history of support for jihad activity.
Terrorism researcher John Rossomando noted Thursday that “it is more likely that Khairullah was pulled aside by the CBP [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] due to his frequent travel to the Syrian war zone via Istanbul, former CBP agent Phil Haney, who specialized in targeting potential terrorists, told the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT). “This has to do with indicators of potential terrorism,” said Haney.
Not only that. “Khairullah’s social media shows he repeatedly expressed support for Jabhat al-Nusra,” al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. “Khairullah even thanked ISIS for taking bandits off the streets of Syria.”
“A good thing that ISIS has done is to eliminate the thieves and bandits in their area of control. Allah knows what was behind this move,” Khairullah wrote in a Jan. 5, 2014, tweet.”
But Khairullah didn’t note any of that when he decided to go public with this complaint about his questioning by the CBP. “It was definitely a hurtful moment where I’m thinking in my mind that this is not the America that I know,” he said. “I am very familiar with our laws and Constitution, and everything that was going on there was a violation.”
Even worse, “it’s flat-out insulting. It’s flat-out stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs.”
The litigation director for the New York chapter of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Ahmed Mohamed, added: “And the only reason they’re taken back to secondary inspection and questioned that way is because of their faith, what they happen to be wearing, and what direction they pray.”
There is much more. Read the rest here.