CJ Werleman

Career

Werleman has published five books and more than 100 columns for Middle East Eye, The Contributor, Salon, The Bangkok Post, and Alternet. He hosts the podcast Foreign Object and was a keynote speaker at the Atheist Alliance of America 2013 Annual Convention in Boston.

Werleman is a critic of prominent New Atheists Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. During an October 2014 episode of The Young Turks Werleman compared the latter to Sarah Palin.

Published works

In October 2009, his debut book was published, God Hates You. Hate Him Back, criticizing the character of Yahweh in the Old and New Testament of the Bible. In September 2010, Werleman's second book Jesus Lied. He Was Only Human was released. Koran Curious was published in 2011. Werleman released Crucifying America: The Unholy Alliance between the Christian Right and Wall Street, in November 2013. He published Atheists Can't Be Republicans: If Facts And Evidence Matter in June 2014.

Plagiarism

In October 2014, atheist author and philosophy professor Peter Boghossian brought Werleman's plagiarism of Vali Nasr's The Dispensable Nation to the attention of Stephen Knight of the Godless Spellchecker's Blog. Subsequent investigation by both Knight and Boghossian revealed that Werleman had repeatedly plagiarized the work of numerous writers including Fareed Zakaria, William Broyles Jr., Robert Pape, and Eduardo Porter. Whole sentences and passages from Werleman's published articles in Salon Magazine and AlterNet were found to have been copied or adapted from previously published works without any citation or attribution.

Upon learning of this discovery, reporter Michael Luciano of The Daily Banter began searching for more instances of plagiarism, unearthing over a dozen additional examples drawn from a wide range of sources including works by attorney and secular activist David Niose, author Hedrick Smith, reports by Pew Research Center and by People for the American Way, a speech given by U.S. President Barack Obama, and Wikipedia. Werleman responded to the allegations in a Facebook post, admitting some instances of plagiarism.

AlterNet went on to remove all of Werleman's articles from their archives and issued an apology to readers and those who had been plagiarized. Salon also addressed Werleman's plagiarism in their "Corrections" section under 2014, telling readers that plagiarized passages would be marked with bold text and hyperlinks to the original sources.

Falsified Video

In a December 2015 tweet, Werleman falsely cited images of Guatemalan soldiers "roughing up" a teenager as being "...Israeli soldiers beating and torturing Palestinian detainees in occupied West Bank." The original video of the Guatemalan soldiers was first posted by Al Jazeera and shown on Yahoo! News.

Personal life

Born in Sydney, Australia, Werleman migrated to Bali, Indonesia in 2003. In 2005, he witnessed the twin suicide bomb attacks on Bali's Jimbaran Beach and it was this experience that piqued his interest in studying religious fanaticism and fundamentalism in organised religions. In 2012, Werleman emigrated to the United States, currently residing in Southern California.