A federal judge tossed a lawsuit yesterday brought against the New York City Police Department (NYPD) for conducting a surveillance program within the Muslim community in New Jersey following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
The plaintiffs, comprised of several Muslims, two organizations that operate mosques, two Muslim-owned businesses, and the Muslim Students Association at Rutgers University, alleged that the sole purpose of the NYPD’s surveillance program was to discriminate against Muslims.
The surveillance program was not publicized until the Associated Press broke the story in 2011, after obtaining confidential documents from the NYPD. Shortly thereafter, the plaintiffs filed suit.
The court dismissed the lawsuit, ruling, quite appropriately:
“[T]he Plaintiffs in this case have not alleged facts from which it can be plausibly inferred that they were targeted solely because of their religion. The more likely explanation for the surveillance was a desire to locate budding terrorist conspiracies. The most obvious reason for so concluding is that surveillance of the Muslim community began just after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The police could not have monitored New Jersey for Muslim terrorist activities without monitoring the Muslim community itself. While this surveillance program may have had adverse effects upon the Muslim community after the Associated Press published its articles; the motive for the program was not solely to discriminate against Muslims, but rather to find Muslim terrorists hiding among ordinary, law-abiding Muslims.”
In short, the court upheld the surveillance program in light of a fundamental (albeit, politically incorrect) truth: violent terrorist acts are being waged against innocent civilians in the United States in the name of Islam (i.e., jihad). It should come then as no surprise that these Islamic terrorists would be found (and thus searched for) within the Muslim communities here in the United States.
Indeed, the Mapping Sharia project that was co-authored by AFLC’s Co-Founder and Senior Counsel David Yerushalmi affirms the logic and importance of the NYPD’s program—and the court’s decision dismissing this lawsuit, which if successful, would have harmed our safety and security.
Hassan, et al. v. City of New York