The New York Police Department announced Tuesday, the first anniversary of theBoston Marathon jihad attack, that it was disbanding a special unit that had beendedicated to watching for jihad terror threats in Muslim communities.
That’s good; afterall, who ever heard of a Muslim staging a terror attack? And what better day to announcesuch news than the first anniversary of what New York officials evidently think is the lastIslamic jihad attack ever on American soil?
As I show in my book Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In, this NYPD program had been under fire for several years for “profiling” Muslimcommunities in New York and New Jersey – that is, for operating on the assumptionthat communities of Muslims might be more likely to plot a terror attack than, say,communities of Amish, or bowling leagues.
Despite cries of rage from leftist and Islamic supremacist groups, this was a sensibleassumption, born of long experience. Just last February, U.S. District Judge WilliamMartini threw out a lawsuit against the program, explaining that “the police could nothave monitored New Jersey for Muslim terrorist activities without monitoring theMuslim community itself… The motive for the program was not solely to discriminateagainst Muslims but to find Muslim terrorists hiding among the ordinary law-abidingMuslims.”
Indeed. The lawsuit was a craven attempt to end NYPD counter-terror efforts. If it hadsucceeded, it would have given a green light to Islamic jihad activity, with the NYPDhandcuffed and unable to do anything to stop jihad terror plots. And that is exactly whatNew York Mayor Bill de Blasio did Tuesday when he ended the program, just as he hadpromised to do during his campaign last summer. In doing so, he declared: “This reformis a critical step forward in easing tensions between the police and the communities theyserve, so that our cops and our citizens can help one another go after the real bad guys.”
Who the “real bad guys” were, de Blasio did not explain; however, as I show in ArabWinter Comes to America, in Obama’s military there have been several presentationsdepicting evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics as terror threats, so they mayhave been the groups de Blasio had in mind. In any case, de Blasio also did not explainwhy counter-terror efforts would create “tension” in Muslim communities full of loyalAmerican Muslims who reject and abhor jihad terrorism as a twisting and hijacking oftheir peaceful religion.
The usual suspects were thrilled. The Hamas-linked Council on American-IslamicRelations (CAIR), which has opposed virtually every counter-terror measure that has everbeen proposed or enacted, and whose California chapter once distributed posters advisingMuslims not to talk to the FBI, issued a press release “welcoming” the decision. Likewisethrilled was New York Palestinian leftist activist Linda Sarsour, who has said that “nothing is creepier than Zionism” and equatedit with “racism.” Sarsour is also a frequent visitor to the Obama White House and hasclaimed that the jihad underwear bomber was a CIA agent — part of what she claims isa U.S. war against Islam.
What could be the result of accommodating such forces? The Boston bombing happeneddespite the fact that the Russians had warned the FBI that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was “afollower of radical Islam and a strong believer” and that he “had changed drasticallysince 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region tojoin unspecified underground groups.” Coming at a time when the Obama Administrationwas jettisoning counter-terror training materials of all mention of Islam and jihad inconnection with terrorism, this was intelligence that FBI agents could not evaluateproperly, or could not act upon properly even if they had wanted to.
The gutting of the NYPD counter-terror program is likely to have similar results. Andgiven the current dominance of the politically correct paradigm, no matter how highthe bodies are stacked after that attack, officials will not reexamine their core mistakenassumptions that enabled the attack to be successful. That unwillingness will, in turn, leadto yet more jihad. Unless there is a massive change in both parties in Washington on howthey think the jihad threat should be dealt with, this will not end well.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and author of the New York Timesbestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In.