Muslims residing in the San Francisco Bay Area have become miffed at the FBI finally ending its cozy relationship to the reputed terrorist front group, CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations).

For background, see Anti-CAIR, which has been blowing the whistle on CAIR for years, along with well known scholars like Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer. Despite warnings from reputable people, the FBI has received extensive training from CAIR of very dubious value about how to be "sensitive" toward Muslims.

Recent revelations have put the kibosh on more Islam-flavored kumbaya, and the thrill is gone from Muslims' special relationship with the FBI. What's a Son of Allah to do? [U.S. Muslims debate how much to help FBI, San Francisco Chronicle, April 6, 2009]

A petition organized by a Newark nonprofit urging Muslims to limit social outreach with the FBI has provoked a national debate within the Muslim community about how to deal with law enforcement.

The curb proposed by the petitioners - eliminating joint FBI town halls and other meet-and-greet events - is largely a response to the FBI's restricting its work with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil rights group.

The petitioners say their stand on behalf of CAIR, which has an extensive presence around the country and in the Bay Area, has larger meaning for all Muslim institutions.

"We're fighting against being relegated to second-class citizenship," said Agha Saeed, chairman of the Newark-based American Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and Elections, the coalition of national Muslim organizations that issued the March 17 petition.

A long overdue realization of how dirty CAIR is came from the information disclosed during the Holy Land Foundation trial last year.

The current situation has its origin in the 2008 trial and convictions of five leaders of a Texas charity, Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. The men were convicted in November of 108 criminal counts, including support of terrorism, money laundering and tax fraud. The group was accused of funneling millions of dollars to Hamas, which the government declared a terrorist group in 1995.

As part of the trial, the government labeled roughly 300 different individuals and groups as "unindicted co-conspirators." The label does not affect anyone's rights, but Muslims complain it functions as a public smear. A federal official speaking on condition of anonymity told The Chronicle that the FBI is limiting its contact with CAIR because one of its founders was named as an "unindicted co-conspirator."

Was the FBI really so naive to think that CAIR wasn't hopelessly rotten through and through? Or were the feds doing a little tapdance with evil in an attempt to extract information? Information about mosques diseminating anti-American propaganda has been around for years, particularly the 2005 Freedom House report, Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques. It's hard to know, since political correctness has gained enormous influence even among law enforcement officers who should know better: the power of the dark side is strong.