Abukar Arman admits that it has been a tough few weeks following a FrontPage exposé last month that examined his extensive online writings in defense of terrorist organizations and individuals, all while he sat on the blue-ribbon Franklin County Criminal Justice Planning Board that oversees Central Ohio Homeland Security programs (“Hometown Jihad: The Somali Terror Apologist Next Door”).As a direct result of that report, Arman was forced to resign last Friday from the Planning Board after officials discovered that as a non-US citizen he wasn’t eligible to be on the board; and in a curiously-timed bureaucratic move, he also lost his Columbus Public Schools adult education job after they discovered that he hadn’t kept up his teaching credentials and the grant funding his position suddenly disappeared. A CPS spokesman said the move had absolutely nothing to do with the FrontPage report though these events occurred immediately after it was published, though Arman told a local paper that he believed the FrontPage story had everything to do with his present woes.
Meanwhile, the County Commission continues to sit on an Open Records Act request submitted by FrontPage on July 30th regarding Arman’s appointment to the Planning Board and their alleged investigation into his extremist statements while simultaneously sharing some of the same information with a local media establishment reporter – a possible violation of state law. Other local media outlets who have been critical of the Commission’s handling of the matter, such as radio talk show host Dirk Thompson of 610WTVN, have also complained of being stonewalled in their request for information.
Following these developments, the same politicians who appointed Arman to his Planning Board post have carefully crafted a narrative to make it appear that nothing has really happened, even though they were forced to cut their losses with Arman, and continuing to insist that FrontPage had nothing to do with it. And they have enlisted the help of their establishment media allies in Columbus to float it...
Thank you, FrontPage! For the rest of this remarkable tale, go here.
