Career
He has published five books and more than 100 opinion-editorials for The Contributor, Salon, and Middle East Eye. In 2014, more than a dozen of his opinion-editorials were found to contain instances of plagiarism. Werleman has published five books and more than 100 columns for Middle East Eye, The Contributor, Salon, The Bangkok Post, and Alternet.
During an October 2014 episode of The Young Turks Werleman compared the latter to Sarah Palin.
Subsequent investigation by both Knight and Boghossian revealed that Werleman had repeatedly plagiarized the work of numerous writers including Fareed Zakaria, William Broyles Junior., 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 United States. 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. 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 First Rate (at Lloyd's) Jazeera and shown on Yahoo! News. 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.