This lawsuit could destroy FOIA
One of my favorite stories about former Louisiana Gov. Huey Long involves one of his early political campaigns in the 1920s. While stumping in the northern part of the state, he would tell a story about waking at 6 o'clock every Sunday morning, hitching his family's old horse to a buggy, and bringing his Baptist grandparents to church. When addressing audiences in south Louisiana, he would tell the same story, only this time his grandparents were Catholic.
It was an effective speech that played well to Louisiana's geographic religious divide. Once, after a rally, a local politician remarked, "Why Huey, you've been holding out on us. I didn't know you had Catholic grandparents," to which Long replied, "Don't be a damn fool. We didn't even have a horse."
That story came to mind when I first learned about Ergun Caner, a Baptist minister and public speaker whose shtick is to describe his early life as a Muslim extremist, and then his discovering Jesus and becoming, well, a Christian extremist. This rhetoric played especially well after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and earned him a considerable following. Jerry Fallwell was one notable fan, and he hired Caner to teach at Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary.
Caner's work is boilerplate stuff: Muslims are misguided and dangerous, but it's nothing a little Jesus can't fix. Over the years, he has given a lot of speeches, and as happens to a lot of public speakers, at some point he seems to have gotten carried away. People began to notice discrepancies in Caner's story. Was he from Turkey or Sweden? Did he and his family move to Ohio when he was a teenager or a 3-year-old? When, exactly, did he have time to visit "my madrassa in Istanbul, Turkey" and "my madrassa in Cairo, Egypt," where "there's no question of what the doctrine of jihad was."
http://theweek.com/article/index/247171/this-lawsuit-could-destroy-foia
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