Mosques, students and NGOs: Journalist blows the lid off police spying on NYC Muslims

Two weeks after an Associated Press investigation exposed the New York Police Department (NYPD)’s  ”demographic units” used to spy on a wide array of Muslim New Yorkers, a journalist has published startling new details that reveal the breadth of that operation.  The details are sure to raise new alarms in the Muslim-American community in New York City (NYC) as the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks approach. 

Leonard Levitt, a long-time writer on the NYPD beat, reports:

The New York City Police Department has been spying on hundreds of Muslim mosques, schools, businesses, student groups, non-governmental organizations and individuals, NYPD Confidential has learned.

The spying operation has targeted virtually every level of Muslim life in New York City, according to a trove of pages of Intelligence Division documents obtained by NYPD Confidential.

The documents do not specify whether the police have evidence or solid suspicions of criminality to justify their watching the Muslim groups.

The breadth and scope of the surveillance described in the documents suggest that the police have been painting with a broad brush and may have targeted subjects without specific tips about wrongdoing.

Specifically, Levitt reveals exactly who the NYPD spied on:

The NYPD’s spying operation has compiled information on 250 mosques, 12 Islamic schools, 31 Muslim student associations, 263 places it calls “ethnic hotspots,” such as businesses and restaurants, as well as 138 “persons of interest,” according to the Intel documents.

Police have singled out 53 mosques, four Islamic schools and seven Muslim student associations as institutions of “concern.” They have also labeled 42 individuals as top tier “persons of interest.”  

At least 32 mosques have been infiltrated by either undercover officers, informants, or both, according to documents, which are dated between 2003 and 2006 and marked “secret.”  

The NYPD has also been monitoring Muslim student associations at seven local colleges: City, Baruch, Hunter, Queens, LaGuardia, St. John’s and Brooklyn.

The department calls the two student groups at Brooklyn and Baruch colleges “of concern” and has sent undercover detectives to spy on them, the documents reveal.

The department defines a Muslim student association as “a university based student group, with an Islamic focus, involved with religious and political activities.”

The documents reveal that an Intelligence Division Cyber Unit has monitored MSAs at Brooklyn, City and Queens colleges.

The department also lists 10 non-governmental organizations as “of concern.” According to the documents, all 10 organizations have been spied upon by NYPD undercovers, informants, detectives with the Joint Terrorist Task Force or what the documents describe as a “secondary.”

On the NYPD list of 42 top tier “persons of interest” are: a corrections officer, a former imam, an un-indicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a lecturer at Brooklyn College and what the department describes as a “Brooklyn College MSA member [who] has expressed desire to be a suicide bomber in Palestine.”

The police have spied on all these people with either an undercover officer, an informant, or both, the documents say.

The spying operation–which appears to run afoul of a 2004 NYC law that prohibits racial and ethnic profiling by the NYPD–was created by former CIA agent David Cohen.  Cohen has previously been criticized for helping spearhead an expansive NYPD operation that saw the department travel the globe to monitor social justice activists ahead of the 2004 Republican National Convention.

Muslim-American and civil liberties groups have slammed the NYPD operation.  A statement by the Muslim-American Civil Liberties Coalition demands:

• the New York City Council to investigate and oversee the NYPD’s operations, as well as a City Comptroller Audit;
• the Obama Administration to initiate a federal investigation into the extent to which the CIA has engaged in domestic spying within the United States, in violation of law and its manadate;
• Congress and the New York State Senate to hold hearings into the NYPD’s, FBI’s, and CIA’s  surveillance and policing practices in Muslim communities with a focus on the role of informants;
• Congress and New York State Senate to pass enforceable anti-racial profiling legislation;
• NYPD and the Department of Justice to revise their internal guidelines to disallow the use of surveillance and informants absent suspicion of specific criminal activity. 

The response to the relevations about the NYPD casting a large net over NYC Muslims is by no means the first time civil liberties and Muslim-American advocacy groups have clashed with the NYPD.  As I reported for the Gotham Gazette last November:

Arguably the biggest irritant came when the police department released a 2007 report, titled Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat. The report detailed the process by which it saw some American Muslims as being “radicalized” into terrorists and said that, while Americans Muslims are “more resistant to radicalization than their European counterparts, they are not immune.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations promptly criticized the report, saying, “Its sweeping generalizations and mixing of unrelated elements may serve to cast a pall of suspicion over the entire American Muslim community.” In the wake of the report, the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition formed and critiqued the report for presenting “a distorted and misleading depiction of Islam and its adherents.”

Following meetings with Muslim organizations, the police department quietly issued a two-page clarification that stressed that the “NYPD’s focus on al Qaeda inspired terrorism should not be mistaken for any implicit or explicit justification for racial, religious or ethnic profiling.”

While Muslim organizations welcomed the clarification, criticism of the report remains.

“It’s not clear what the NYPD really thinks, because it’s leaving the bulk of its assertions and its conclusions in place,” said Faiza Patel, who works with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Project. The clarification “didn’t address all of [the Muslim community's] concerns. The way it was done — really kind of hidden there — makes it seem as if the police department is talking out of two sides of its mouth.”

A separate Associated Press article on the NYPD documents states that they “paint the clearest picture yet of how the past decade’s hunt for terrorists also put huge numbers of innocent people under scrutiny as they went about their daily lives in mosques, restaurants and social groups. Every day, undercover officers and informants filed reports from their positions as ‘listening posts’ inside Muslim communities.”

The expansive intelligence operation is representative of perhaps the most enduring legacy of the September 11 attacks:  the harassment and surveillance of the Muslim-American community and the alarming rise of a national security state that strips away Americans’ civil liberties. 

 

 

Dispatch from Beit Ommar: IDF raids same West Bank town 5 times in last 2 weeks

This article originally appeared in +972 Magazine.

Israeli soldiers push down Mousa and Yousef Abu Marya, Palestinian residents of Beit Ommar protesting land confiscation and illegal settlements. (PHOTO: Alex Kane)

Beit Ommar, West Bank—The Islamic holy month of Ramadan is meant to be a time for reflection and spirituality.  But for the 16,000 residents of this rural, agricultural village near Hebron in the occupied West Bank, it has been an unusually tense one.I

A spate of Israeli army raids at night and arrests of young Palestinians have occurred since the beginning of August, shattering any hope for calm during Ramadan.  While Israeli military incursions into Beit Ommar are common, residents and activists say that the number of raids and arrests that have occurred in August is particularly high.  There have been five occasions this month in which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have invaded the village, three of them that have occurred this past week—and the month is not even half over.

Witnesses to the raids and local activists say that the Israeli army has been shooting tear gas, sound bombs and flares into residential areas—in some cases causing injuries—and have arrested fifteen young Palestinians under the age of eighteen this month.  A landmark B’Tselem report recently released highlighted how common the arrest of minors is in the occupied territories.

“It just looked like a training exercise.  It just looked like they were practicing coming into town tear gassing people back and practicing flares,” said one international activist with the Palestine Solidarity Project (PSP), a Beit Ommar-based Palestinian-led direct action group, when asked to describe an August 11 raid he was witness to.

One incursion, which took place on August 6, saw the IDF invade the village and disrupt a party held in a local park meant to celebrate the release of a prisoner from Beit Ommar. Five Palestinians were arrested, and some Beit Ommar residents, including women and children, were hospitalized due to tear gas inhalation, according to the PSP.  A 16-year-old Beit Ommar resident described the scene at the park similarly.

Mousa Abu Marya, a popular committee coordinator in Beit Ommar, said he thinks the high number of raids is meant to intimidate people ahead of September, when the world’s eyes will turn to Palestine as the Palestinian Authority makes a statehood bid at the United Nations.

The August 11 raid affected the Abu Marya house, with tear gas canisters hitting the residence, leaving visible marks on their driveway.  The tear-gas caused the bottom half of their house to become inhabitable for the night.

“Maybe they’re scared of September,” Abu Marya told me as we were sitting in an office at the Beit Ommar-based Center for Freedom and Justice.  “I think they want to make the soldiers ready for anything in September.”

A joint coalition of popular committees, including Beit Ommar’s, who held a popular resistance conference in mid-July drafted a statement that called September an “immense popular battle.”

September is “not the end of the road,” said Younes Arar, the executive manager of the Center for Freedom and Justice.  “But it is an important station in the Palestinian political situation.”

Meanwhile, a senior minister in the Israeli government has said that Israel may call up its reserve forces for September.  The IDF has also purchased $22 million worth of new military equipment in preparation for large-scale September protests.

The Israeli army’s repression in the village has not been limited to night raids, though. For the first time during the month of Ramadan, Beit Ommar residents and Israeli and international activists held a demonstration August 13, protesting land confiscation and the nearby settlement of Karmei Tzur.  At the demonstration, IDF soldiers repeatedly pushed back Palestinian residents of Beit Ommar attempting to access their land near the settlement, which was declared a closed military zone.  Beit Ommar is surrounded by six settlements, of which Karmei Tzur is one.

When the demonstration was over, one Palestinian, a forty-two year old man named Sakhar Abu Marya, was arrested and taken into a military jeep. Recounting the events later, he said that a hood was placed over his head, and that he was beaten by the soldiers. While he was interrogated, soldiers said that, while they would release him now, they would come to his house later and arrest him.  Soldiers also brought out food and soda to mock Abu Marya, who is fasting for Ramadan.  He was then dropped off at the gate of the Karmei Tzur settlement, without being charged with anything.

The Norway massacre and the nexus of Islamophobia and right-wing Zionism

This article originally appeared in Mondoweiss, and was also picked up by AlterNet.

Details on the culprit behind yesterday’s massacre in Norway, which saw car bombings in Oslo and a mass shooting attack on the island of Utoya that caused the deaths of at least 91 people, have begun to emerge.  While it is still too early for a complete portrait of the killer, Anders Behring Breivik, there are enough details to begin to piece together what’s behind the attack.

Although initial media reports, spurred on by the tweets of former State Department adviser on violent extremism Will McCants, linked the attacks to Islamist extremists, it was in fact an anti-Muslim zealot who committed the murders.  An examination of Breivik’s views, and his support for far-right European political movements, makes it clear that only by interrogating the nexus of Islamophobia and right-wing Zionism can one understand the political beliefs behind the terrorist attack.

Breivik is apparently an avid fan of U.S.-based anti-Muslim activists such as Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and Daniel Pipes, and has repeatedly professed his ardent support for Israel.  Breivik’s political ideology is illuminated by looking at comments he posted to the right-wing site document.no, which author and journalist Doug Sanders put up.

Here’s a sampling of some of Breivik’s comments:

It’s all about Israel: Why the Jewish establishment didn’t speak up about Peter King’s anti-Muslim hearings

There has been little objection from the mainstream Jewish establishment to Representative Peter King’s anti-Muslim hearings that took place yesterday, and some commentators are asking why.  Given the history of discrimination against Jews in the U.S., it should be an easy call to speak out against the McCarthy-like hearings that seek to demonize Muslim-Americans (laudably, J Street has spoken out, as well as, surprisingly, the Anti-Defamation League ).

But it should come as no surprise that the likes of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) have been silent about the March 10 hearings titled, “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response.” It all comes down to Israel.

Rep. King, for one, a Long Island Republican with a past of strong support for the Irish Republican Army, is a staunch advocate for Israel, making any potential criticism of him by mainstream Jewish organizations all the less likely.

Immediately after the Israeli naval attack on the Gaza-bound aid flotilla last May, which resulted in the deaths of nine activists, King introduced a House resolution to “prohibit United States participation on the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and prohibit contributions to the United Nations for the purpose of paying for any United Nations investigation into the flotilla incident.”

On his website, King proclaims that he has “consistently voted in favor of military and economic aid packages benefiting Israel and sponsored legislation that prohibits direct assistance to Palestinian Government entities associated with Hamas or other terrorist organizations.”

In return for his “Israel can do no wrong” attitude, King rakes in the dough; according to Open Secrets, over $100,000 in pro-Israel contributions have been deposited in King’s campaign war chest between 1998 and 2010.

And then there’s the larger issue of the Israel lobby turning a blind eye to Islamophobia, or actively aiding it, in service of their larger political goal:  unquestioning support for anything Israel does.  These hearings do nothing more than give Islamophobia more mainstream credibility in the United States, something that even the Anti-Defamation League, the AJC and others have no problem with, as demonstrated by these organization’s shameful positions when the furor over Park 51 occurred last summer.

Maintaining blind support for Israel in the United States requires the demonization of Muslims and Arabs, and contributes to the narrative, pushed by neoconservatives, that Israel is the West’s bulwark against Islamist extremism.  As Scott McConnell, the founding editor of the American Conservative magazine, put it, “it is hard to miss that anti-Muslim bigotry is becoming embedded in American political culture, and Israel and its supporters are playing a substantial role in generating it.”

M.J. Rosenberg, a liberal blogger and former staffer at the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, made this point succinctly in an interview I conducted a couple of months back.  Islamophobia “is tactical bigotry to weaken the voices of Arab-Americans and friends of Arab-
Americans when it comes to Israel/Palestinian issues,” he said.

Establishment groups are “just trying to protect AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby’s political power. In other words, if you discredit every Arab group by saying they’re extremist or ‘pro-terror,’ then who’s ever going to stand up to the lobby on Capitol Hill?”

So there shouldn’t be any astonishment at the deafening silence from the mainstream Jewish establishment on these hearings.  If there was dissent, that would be news.

U.S. funded Israeli-linked security company pushes anti-Muslim ideology

As Representative Peter King’s hearings on “Muslim radicalization” refocus attention on Islamophobia, a new report sheds light on the  network of private security firms tapping into public funds that push an anti-Muslim agenda to law enforcement agencies.

An organization called Security Solutions International (SSI) is one focus of the Political Research Associates’ report (pdf) , titled “Manufacturing the Muslim Menace:  Private Firms, Public Servants, & the Threat to Rights and Security.”

SSI “trades on the reputation of Israeli counterterrorism expertise by using Israeli veterans as trainers.”

This is the ideology that SSI, which “taps into public funds for its trainings,” promotes, according to the report:

Following civil liberties advocates’ criticism of SSI’s courses on “Radical Islamic Culture” in 2008, SSI intensified its promotions for the course. SSI Chief Executive Officer Solomon Bradman responded to criticism by saying, “I can’t take the responsibility of my course linking their religion [Islam] to terrorism. I think their religion got linked to terrorism a long time ago.”56 SSI planned to expand the reach of its “Islamic Jihadist Threat” seminar, holding it in even more venues, including Detroit, Minneapolis, Washington, DC, Dallas, Kansas, and Boston…

The Counter Terrorist’s coverage [, an SSI publication,] includes infrastructure protection, school shooting threat assessments, intelligence gathering and what SSI calls “the Radical Islamic Threat.” Articles like “U.S. Prison Recruitment for Jihad”—a piece by M. Zuhdi Jasser and Raphael Shore, founder of the Clarion Fund, a nonprofit organization “that aims to alert Americans about the real threat of Radical Islam”—reinforce an image of Muslims as menacing militant fundamentalists. The magazine’s regular inclusion of such articles allows the publication to function as a credentialed law enforcement outlet for authors who exaggerate and distort terrorist threats.

The report also notes other instances where a far-right pro-Israel agenda has been promoted hand-in-hand with Islamophobia.

Here’s the bottom line the report gives on support for Israel and Islamophobia:

Islamophobic story lines characterize the widespread support for Palestinian statehood and opposition to the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands among Muslim-American leaders as evidence of sympathy for terrorism.

The report is further evidence of Scott McConnell’s observation “that anti-Muslim bigotry is becoming embedded in American political culture, and Israel and its supporters are playing a substantial role in generating it.”

 

 

 

Far-right Jewish white supremacist authors Tennessee anti-Islam bill

The wave of Islamophobia continues to spread across the United States, as a Tennessee bill now on the table would make “following the Islamic code known as Shariah law a felony, punishable by 15 years in jail.”  The author behind this bill, one of 15 similar pieces of legislation being considered in states around the U.S., is a notorious, far-right figure:  David Yerushalmi.

Mother Jones‘ Tim Murphy has the story:

Yerushalmi, a lawyer, is the founder of the Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), which has been called a “hate group” by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). His draft legislation served as the foundation for the Tennessee bill, and at least half a dozen other anti-Islam measures—including two bills that were signed into law last year in Louisiana and Tennessee.

With the exception of SB 1028, much of Yerushalmi’s legislation sounds pretty innocuous: State courts are prohibited from considering any foreign law that doesn’t fully honor the rights enshrined in the US and state constitutions. Because a Taliban-style interpretation of Islamic law is unheard of in the United States, the law’s impact is non-existent at best. But critics of some of the proposed bills have argued they could have far-reaching and unintended consequences, like undoing anti-kidnapping statutes, and hindering the ability of local companies to enter into contracts overseas.

But Tennessee’s SB 1028 goes much further, defining traditional Islamic law as counter to constitutional principles, and authorizing the state’s attorney general to freeze the assets of organizations that have been determined to be promoting or supporting Sharia. On Monday, CAIR and the ACLU called for lawmakers to defeat the bill.

Yerushalmi has quite the checkered past.  Here’s what I wrote on him following an event in which two Congressional Republicans were presented a report, co-authored by Yerushalmi, on the “threat” sharia law apparently poses to the U.S.:

Yerushalmi has been aptly described as a “Jewish fascist” by blogger Richard Silverstein.  As Silverstein highlighted in August 2007, Yerushalmi has said:

One must admit readily that the radical liberal Jew is a fact of the West and a destructive one…Indeed, Jews in the main have turned their backs on the belief in G-d and His commandments as a book of laws for a particular and chosen people…What interest does America have in a strong Israel? If your answer is democracy in a liberal or western sense, know you have sided with the Palestinians of Hamas.

Yerushalmi was a member of the Stop the Madrassa Coalition, which was instrumental in the anti-Arab, anti-Muslim smear campaign that brought down Debbie Almontaser, the founding principal of Khalil Gibran International Academy, a dual-language Arabic school in Brooklyn.  He has followed his Islamophobic buddies Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer in joining in their war against the Muslim community center near Ground Zero, and is an attorney with the so-called American Freedom Defense Initiative, which is run by Geller and Spencer.

That’s not even the worst part.  Charles Johnson, the blogger at the formerly right-wing, hawkish website Little Green Footballs who “parted ways with the right” for, in part, its “Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.),” has the rundown on Yerushalmi:

This is a good time for some background information on Pamela Geller’s associate David Yerushalmi, who is an advocate for criminalizing Islam itself and imposing 20-year sentences on practicing Muslims. Yes, really.

He’s not simply anti-Muslim, though; Yerushalmi also wrote a now-infamous article titled “On Race: A Tentative Discussion, Part II,” in which he advocated a return to a pre-Bill of Rights Constitution, and the restriction of voting rights to white male land-owners. Again … yes, really.

Here’s a lengthy article at Talk To Action on the bizarre views and causes of David Yerushalmi: Anti-Semitic White-Supremacist Orthodox Jew Tries To Ban Islam In US.

Yerushalmi has deleted as much evidence of the “On Race” article as he could; he removed it from the Internet Archive and the Google cache, and put his entire website behind a registration wall. But here’s a PDF that contains the full article, and it’s as ugly and twisted a piece of racism as anything I’ve ever seen. Yerushalmi opens by calling Islam “an evil religion,” and “blacks … the most murderous of peoples.”

A quote:

“There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote. You might not agree or like the idea but this country’s founders, otherwise held in the highest esteem for their understanding of human nature and its affect on political society, certainly took it seriously. Why is that? Were they so flawed in their political reckonings that they manhandled the most important aspect of a free society – the vote? If the vote counts for so much in a free and liberal democracy as we ‘know’ it today, why did they limit the vote so dramatically?”

Will Mideast revolts force U.S. to talk to Islamists?

Since at least the Clinton administration, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has propped up dictatorial regimes that were favorable to U.S. and Israeli interests while refusing to engage with the forces of political Islam.  Could the current wave of uprisings shaking the Middle East and North Africa force the U.S. to deal with Islamist movements that are integral parts of these societies?  That’s what journalist and author Mark Perry argued in a recent Palestine Center panel discussion–a development that would have far-reaching implications for Palestine, among other countries.

Upcoming elections in Egypt could be the first major test for the Obama administration on whether the U.S. will respect the democratic will of Egyptians, regardless of whether the Muslim Brotherhood makes electoral gains.

The Muslim Brotherhood, while promising to not field any presidential candidates for elections scheduled for later this year, is certainly angling to be a part of a new Egyptian government.

The Obama administration has sent mixed signals on their stance on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ominously warned against Egyptians allowing their revolution to be “hijacked,” a veiled reference to the Muslim Brotherhood.  But President Obama, in a speech given after Hosni Mubarak stepped down, said that “all” Egyptian voices must be brought “to the table.”  In an interview with Fox News‘ Bill O’Reilly, Obama said that he thinks “that the Muslim Brotherhood is one faction in Egypt. They don’t have majority support in Egypt but they are well organized and there are strains of their ideology that are anti U.S., there is no doubt about it.”

This is what Perry, the author of Talking to Terrorists: Why America Must Engage with its Enemies, said on the subject:

We’re going to have to deal with the governments that emerge from what I think is an unstoppable revolution across the region, and that means talking to political Islam.  We’re not going to be able to not talk to Hamas after we talk to the Muslim Brotherhood and we’re going to have to talk to them.  So, once we start down that road, of recognizing the political currents and movements that matter in the region, everything else will follow.

Still, it’s clear the pro-Israel lobby, and the American right, will continue to line up against talking to any Islamist movement.

The Convergence of Islamophobia and U.S. Policy (Updated below)

Prominent anti-Muslim activists such as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer like to run around castigating the Obama administration for submitting to sharia law or coddling Islamic terrorists.  But in reality, the right-wing movement to shut down Muslim-American political activity in the U.S. shares an agenda with the U.S. government.

Case in point:  Chip Berlet, a scholar on right-wing movements in the U.S., adds to the Washington Post‘s disclosure last week that “law enforcement agencies have hired as trainers self-described experts whose extremist views on Islam and terrorism are considered inaccurate and counterproductive”:

“Kill them…including the children.”

That’s how to solve the threat of militant Muslims?

This quote is from what one official involved in homeland security said was the theme of a speech by Walid Shoebat at an anti-terrorism training in Las Vegas in October 2010.

Shoebat, according to the Post, “lectures to local police” and spoke at “the first annual South Dakota Fusion Center Conference in Sioux Falls this June.”

Despite the U.S. government’s insistence on “winning the hearts and minds of the Muslim world,” having government agencies hire Islamophobic activists like Shoebat serves an important agenda that right-wing activists also promote:  stoking fear and hatred of Muslims in the service of maintaining the U.S. war machine in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen.  It’s the same agenda that leads the FBI to entrap young Muslim men in the U.S. and to then trumpet their arrest as another victory in the “war-on-terror.”

One part of how to shut the America public up about a never-ending war is to constantly demonize your “enemies” and to make people scared of them.  That’s why Shoebat is being hired by government agencies and that’s why the FBI is entrapping disaffected Muslim youth in the States.  And it’s also why the FBI is engaged in a witch hunt against anti-war and Palestine solidarity activists in the U.S.

The U.S. empire needs Islamophobia to function.

UPDATE:  The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) just put out a press release “urging the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Defense Department (DoD) not to use anti-Muslim extremists to train counterterrorism officials.”  This follows a similar CAIR statement that called for a “review [of] Justice Department policies on the reported use of anti-Muslim extremists to train counterterrorism officials nationwide.”

How the U.S. Government Promotes Islamophobia

I often focus on organizations and individual right-wing activists outside the U.S. government that have stoked anti-Muslim sentiment here.  But the U.S. government itself is just as culpable in promoting a McCarthyist climate of fear where every Muslim-American is considered a “terror threat” and Islam is turned into the new bogeyman of the day.

The latest installment in the Washington Post‘s investigative series by Dana Priest and William Arkin, “Top Secret America,” provides a look into how the U.S. government is mired in the deep swamp that is Islamophobia in America (emphasis mine):

Seeking to learn more about Islam and terrorism, some law enforcement agencies have hired as trainers self-described experts whose extremist views on Islam and terrorism are considered inaccurate and counterproductive by the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies…

Ramon Montijo has taught classes on terrorism and Islam to law enforcement officers all over the country.

“Alabama, Colorado, Vermont,” said Montijo, a former Army Special Forces sergeant and Los Angeles Police Department investigator who is now a private security consultant. “California, Texas and Missouri,” he continued.

What he tells them is always the same, he said: Most Muslims in the United States want to impose sharia law here.

“They want to make this world Islamic. The Islamic flag will fly over the White House – not on my watch!” he said. “My job is to wake up the public, and first, the first responders.”

With so many local agencies around the country being asked to help catch terrorists, it often falls to sheriffs or state troopers to try to understand the world of terrorism. They aren’t FBI agents, who have years of on-the-job and classroom training…

Amazingly, the Center for Security Policy, a neoconservative think tank, is also being listened to by the U.S. homeland security apparatus:

A book expanding on what Shoebat and Montijo believe has just been published by the Center for Security Policy, a Washington-based neoconservative think tank. “Shariah: The Threat to America” describes what its authors call a “stealth jihad” that must be thwarted before it’s too late.

The book’s co-authors include such notables as former CIA director R. James Woolsey and former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, along with the center’s director, a longtime activist. They write that most mosques in the United States already have been radicalized, that most Muslim social organizations are fronts for violent jihadists and that Muslims who practice sharia law seek to impose it in this country.

Frank Gaffney Jr., director of the center, said his team has spoken widely, including to many law enforcement forums.

“Members of our team have been involved in training programs for several years now, many of which have been focused on local law enforcement intelligence, homeland security, state police, National Guard units and the like,” Gaffney said. “We’re seeing a considerable ramping-up of interest in getting this kind of training.”

The fact that Gaffney speaks with law enforcement on how to combat “terrorism” is disturbing.  Matt Duss of Think Progress explains that Gaffney is a person who thinks that “Obama is a Muslim, question[s] whether Obama is an American citizen, [and] believe[s] that the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s new logo is a sign of the president’s ‘submission to sharia.’”  Gaffney is not an expert on Islam.  In fact, Gaffney did not consult a single Islamic scholar on his “report” on shariah law, and only started studying the religion three years ago.

What’s more, as I explained here, the Center for Security Policy’s general counsel is David Yerushalmi, an advocate for criminalizing Islam and who once wrote that “blacks [are]…the most murderous of peoples.”

Another recent instance of the U.S. government promoting Islamophobia was the arrest of Mohamed Osman Mohamud in Oregon, which in reality was, as Glenn Greenwald put it, the FBI successfully thwarting its own plot.

The next day, this happened:

U.S. investigators said a fire at an Islamic center in Oregon on Sunday was arson and warned they would tolerate no retribution for an attempt by a Somali-born teenager to detonate what he thought was a car bomb.

New York’s Muslims, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Israel

Protesters throw shoes at a portrait of Mayor Michael Bloomberg after the mayor's trip to Israel while Operation Cast Lead raged on. PHOTO: Zahra Hankir

Ever since Lawrence Swaim of the California-based Interfaith Freedom Foundation articulated his valuable insight to me that the question of Israel courses through Jewish-Muslim relations, I’ve been coming across stories that fit into that theme.  In general, strong support for Israel correlates with an aversion to understanding legitimate Palestinian, Arab and Muslim grievances about the United States and Israel, and given the dehumanization of Palestinians (the majority of them Muslims) that pervades Israeli and U.S. society, it’s no surprise that Israel is a big roadblock in Jewish-Muslim relations.  You have to place the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s opposition to Park 51 in lower Manhattan in that context.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been busy reporting on how Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City is perceived by the Muslim community here–which is at about 800,000 strong–in the wake of Bloomberg’s admirable defense of the mosque and community center near Ground Zero.  (The fruits of my labor are here at the Gotham Gazette.)  A lot of different issues came up in my discussions with Muslim community leaders in New York City, but Bloomberg’s staunch support for Israel came up in a number of interviews.  Bloomberg’s role in not standing up for Debbie Almontaser, the founding and former principal of the city’s first dual-language Arabic school who was felled by a right-wing smear campaign, also had something to do with Israel, as Kiera Feldman points out in this excellent article. Bloomberg’s relationship with the Muslim community is one prominent symbol of the role Israel plays in the challenge of forging strong Jewish-Muslim solidarity, all the more important in a time of rising Islamophobia that bears many of the same hallmarks that characterized anti-Semitism.

In early 2009, around the same time that the massacre of the al-Samouni family occurred in Gaza, Mayor Bloomberg flew in to Israel on his private jet along with NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelley and Representative Gary Ackerman.  Bloomberg went to Sderot, the Israeli town that saw many rockets from Gaza rain down, and laid the blame for the Israeli assault on Hamas: “That they are putting people at risk is an outrage. If Hamas would focus on building a country instead of trying to destroy another one, then those people would not be getting injured or killed.”

This trip enraged the Arab and Muslim community in New York City.  Shortly after Bloomberg’s trip, Palestine solidarity activists organized a rally outside of City Hall, throwing shoes at a portrait of Bloomberg.

“His relationship with Israel, supporting Israel with no limits, hurts us,” Zein Rimawi, a member of the New York City-based Arab Muslim American Federation, recently told me. “Don’t forget: We are Arabs, we are Muslims, and the people in Gaza are Arabs and Muslims and we support them.”

Bloomberg made many New York Muslims happy with his defense of Park 51.  But Israel looms large, and it’s obvious that his disregard for the suffering of the people in Gaza dealt substantial damage to his relationship with the New York City Muslim community.  Take the relationship between Bloomberg and Muslims as a lesson that those interested in forming stronger Jewish-Muslim coalitions must deal with the question of Israel.  Fighting Islamophobia and the right-wing Zionist project of expelling Palestinians from their historic homeland depends on strong Jewish-Muslim solidarity.