I stood last week on City Hall’s plaza, as a gray wet January day pressed in, and thought: How completely isolated they look.
A few dozen Muslim New Yorkers had trooped there to protest police trainers’ showing of an inflammatory video that depicted most Islamic leaders as deceitful and suspect.
Their anger was to be expected; the sense of betrayal was more striking. “The police are mapping us, they are following us, they are listening to us,” said Amna Akbar, a lawyer and law professor. “They are treating us like we are suspects when we are New Yorkers just living our lives day to day.”
Politicians can be hounds to the hunt after news conferences. A video that slanders 600,000 New Yorkers may be expected to send them tripping down the steps to splutter with outrage.
Not this day. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was en route to Queens, where he would explain, not so helpfully, that the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, had visited more mosques than most Muslims. (The mayor did not add that undercover officers and informers had visited the most mosques of all.) A few City Council members offered strong words of support, but no Council leader was in sight.
Such isolation no doubt counts as a success for the deep-pocketed backers of the video, “The Third Jihad,” who apparently hope to tar Muslim leaders as “radical Islamists” and so render them politically toxic. Mr. Kelly does not play this low game. He said he had mistakenly given an interview to makers of “The Third Jihad.” Few describe him as personally intolerant.
But in the balance of partner versus suspect, Muslims as often find themselves living in a shadow of official doubts since 9/11. The Associated Press in a riveting series last year recorded in detail police spying on Muslims. A demographic unit mapped where Muslims ate, bathed, bought meat, got haircuts and prayed. Any given day, someone is listening in, trolling for hints of anger, of disappointment, of disloyalty.
The Police Department was open about its ambitions in a 2007 report, “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat.” The authors claim to detect a path from “preradicalization” to “jihadization,” driven by a fundamentalist ideology “proliferating in Western democracies at a logarithmic rate.”
The department is intent on finding young Muslim men in a “preradicalization” state before they embark on jihad.
The commissioner and the mayor proclaim a grand payoff: There’s been no successful attack here since 9/11. Which is true, except that Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco have also suffered no attacks, and have nothing like New York’s official spy network.
Some in the Department of Homeland Security, and the British secret service, are not taken with New York’s approach. They argue it is chancy to try to peer into a psyche in search of “preradicalization.” Far better, they argue, to look for signs of suspicious behavior. So a Muslim street vendor happened to notice in 2010 that smoke was pouring from an S.U.V. in Times Square. He was among those who alerted the police, and a terrorist attack was narrowly averted.
A Marine Corps corporal called me last week. He recalled attending class at the Navy and Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center in Virginia in June. Toward the end, he said, an instructor screened “Obsession” as “cultural training.” Produced by the same people who made “The Third Jihad,” “Obsession” offers a throat-clearing parenthetical that most Muslims are not jihadists. Then it portrays an Islamic world in the grip of crazed, violent sorts.
“The movie obliterated nuance,” recalled the Marine, who has done tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to offend his superiors. “The danger is that you’re teaching guys to see an Afghan farmer not as angry because we’ve walked over his crops, but as part of a global Islamic conspiracy. It’s the enemy of thought.”
Speaking of thought, I called the imam Mohammad Shamsi Ali of the Jamaica Muslim Center in Queens. There are few more pacific figures than Mr. Ali. He declined to join imams in boycotting a recent interfaith breakfast with the mayor, and he declines to call for Mr. Kelly’s resignation. He pushes back hard against fundamentalist strains of Islam.
And yet police spies infiltrated his mosque. An internal police report described his mosque, according to The A.P., as a “hub of radicalization” that offered martial arts training. “Look, this information was wrong,” Mr. Ali said. “If all you have are suspicions to lead you, then you end up misleading yourself.”