A Staten Island interfaith leader is in agreement with a coalition of more than 40 groups calling for the immediate resignation of NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly and both internal and external investigations into the covert surveillance of mosques in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
Hesham El-Meligy, a member of Noor Al-Islam Society in Mariners Harbor, along with civil liberties, human rights and interfaith groups, backed a statement by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-NY) responding to a secret NYPD report revealed by The Associated Press.
The Shiite Muslim community was the main target, with the NYPD allegedly looking for ties between 15 local mosques and Iran, CAIR-NY said.
While the most recent report focuses on Shiites, who are a minority of Muslims in the city and throughout the world, previous revelations by The AP and other sources indicate that virtually every mosque, school and most Muslim businesses and neighborhoods on Staten Island and the other boroughs were targeted by the NYPD, El-Meligy said.
“This is the third time in the past few weeks that the NYPD was caught lying about their own breaking of the law and the Constitution,” El-Meligy said.
“They calculated that they would get a pass on these violations because of the fearmongering atmosphere against Islam and Muslims, that they themselves helped to grow even unintentionally.”
The coalition claims Kelly has “demonstrated a complete lack of accountability, total disregard of jurisdictional limitations, and an inability to protect and serve members of his constituency.”
In addition to stopping surveillance, the coalition is asking for independent oversight of the NYPD.
The group maintains the department violated the civil rights of Muslims “through excessive stop-and-frisk practices, overzealous surveillance measures and a complete lack of transparency.”
The coalition claims that these tactics were part of a “well-documented history of NYPD’s targeting of communities of color through discriminatory policing practices.”
“The NYPD’s use of widespread ethnic, racial, and religious profiling is a threat to all Americans’ constitutional rights and freedoms,” the coalition statement said.
“This behavior creates distrust and suspicion among all vulnerable communities and sends the message that law enforcement is not accountable for upholding the right of all Americans to be free from unwarranted police scrutiny”
The Associated Press has reported for months that the NYPD infiltrated mosques, eavesdropped in cafes and monitored Muslim neighborhoods with plainclothes officers. Its spying operations were begun after the 2001 terror attacks, with help from the CIA, in a highly unusual partnership.
The May 2006 NYPD intelligence report, “US-Iran Conflict: The Threat to New York City” made a series of recommendations, including: “Expand and focus intelligence collections at Shi’a mosques.”
The NYPD document offers a rare glimpse into the thinking of intelligence officers and how, when looking for potential threats, they focused their spying efforts on mosques and Muslims. Police analysts listed a dozen mosques from central Connecticut to the Philadelphia suburbs. None has been linked to terrorism, either in the document or publicly by federal agencies. according to the AP.
The NYPD is prohibited under its own guidelines and city law from basing its investigations on religion. Under FBI guidelines, which the NYPD says it follows, many of the recommendations in the police document would be prohibited.
The report, drawn largely from information available in newspapers or sites like Wikipedia, was prepared for Kelly and was written at a time of great tension between the U.S. and Iran. That tension over Iran’s nuclear ambition has increased again recently.
Police estimated the New York area Shiite population to be about 35,000, with Iranians representing about 8,500 people. The document also calls for canvassing the Palestinian community because there might be terrorists there.
The secret document stands in contrast to statements from Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who said the NYPD never considers religion in its policing. Kelly has said police go only where investigative leads take them, but the document described no leads to justify expanded surveillance at Shiite mosques.
The document also renews debate over how the NYPD privately views Muslims. Kelly faced recent calls for his resignation from some Muslim activists for participating in a video that says Muslims want to “infiltrate and dominate” the United States. The NYPD showed the video to nearly 1,500 officers during training.
Neither David Cohen, the NYPD’s top intelligence officer, nor department spokesman Paul Browne responded to e-mails or phone calls from The Associated Press this week.
Asad Sadiq, president of Bait-ul-Qaim mosque in the Philadelphia suburb of Delran, N.J., said the NYPD was being unfairly broad.
“If you attack Cuba, are all the Catholics going to attack here? This is called guilt by association,” Sadiq, a dentist, said after seeing his mosque in the NYPD document. “Just because we are the same religion doesn’t mean we’re going to stand up and harm the United States. It’s really absurd.”
At the Al-Mahdi Foundation mosque in Brooklyn, worshipers intoned their prayers Wednesday while touching their foreheads to disks of clay on the floor, a Shiite tradition.
“After 1,400 years, the Shias are being targeted in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, everywhere,” Imam Malik Sakhawat Hussain said after being told that his mosque was in the NYPD document. “If U.S. authorities become suspicious of the Shias, I would say we are a very oppressed community of the world.”