Excerpt:
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.