The NYPD: Islamophobia in Blue

by Deepa Kumar, Empire Bytes, February 6, 2012

NEW YORK City police officers were shown a movie called The Third Jihad which warns that ordinary Muslims are part of an age-old conspiracy to dominate the world. The police chief and his spokesperson participated in this “counter-terrorism training,” and then lied about their involvement. And Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who touts himself as a champion of religious tolerance, doesn’t plan to do anything about it.

This latest series of events that unfolded in late January only sheds more light on the depth of anti-Muslim racism in New York City. Home to about 800,000 Muslims, as well as the world’s largest police department, the Big Apple has become the crucible of entrenched Islamophobic policies enacted by the state since September 11.

“This is not stereotyping,” Talat Hamdani said at a January 26 press conference at City Hall.

Talat’s son Salman died on 9/11 as a first responder, but his sacrifice has never been officially recognized because police initially viewed him as a suspect in the attacks. “This is legal persecution of American Muslims,” Talat said. “This is our city, our state, our country.”

Almost a year ago, in January 2011, Tom Robbins of the Village Voice broke the story about the NYPD showing this racist film to its officers. At the time, police spokesman Paul Browne claimed the movie was only screened a few times, and that the clips of Ray Kelly in it were from old footageand not the police commissioner’s direct participation with right-wing filmmakers.

But when police were forced to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request from the Brennan Center for Justice, it came to light that the movie was a regular part of training for months, that more than 1,500 officers had viewed the film, and that Kelly had given a 90-minute interview for the pseudo-documentary.

After a year of denials and evasions, the truth was out, and it received some attention in the mainstream media. Yet this is only the tip of the iceberg.

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The Islamophobia network

The NYPD now wants to dismiss this film as a “wacky movie”–in Paul Browne’s words–and to distance themselves from it. Yet the list of interviewees for the film include a number of establishment figures, such as former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former CIA Director James Woolsey, former head of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman and others. This pseudo-documentary is part of an effort by a well-established network of Islamophobic groups whose credibility is based on their connections to the security and political establishments.

The Third Jihad was produced by the Clarion Fund, which was previously best known for mailing millions of free copies of another anti-Muslim film called Obsession to swing-state voters just before the 2008 election.

The Clarion Fund received over $18 million from 2001 to 2009 from several wealthy right-wing organizations like the Richard Mellon Scaife Foundation, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Fairbrook Foundation, a pro-Zionist organization. These foundations also pour money into other Islamophobic organizations such as Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch, Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum and more.

The Islamophobic network believes there is a conspiracy by Muslims to take over the U.S. and to replace the constitution with Muslim or Sharia law.

“This is the true agenda of much of Islam in America…to infiltrate and dominate America,” says the narrator of The Third Jihad, as an image of the White House topped by a supposedly Islamic flag appears on screen.

In the time-honored tradition of demagogues, the narrator of The Third Jihad argues that the Muslims who “seem” to be decent ordinary people are the most dangerous of all: “Americans are being told that most of the mainstream Muslim groups are moderate, when in fact, if you look a little closer, you’ll see a very different reality. One of their primary tactics is deception.”

Any doubts the officers in training might have had about whether the movie reflected official police department views would have been dispelled by the appearance of Ray Kelly, who is interviewed in the movie about the threat of a nuclear attack.

It short, this is not a “wacky” movie by some fringe elements. Rather, it reflects the efforts of the security establishment and the political elite to create an atmosphere of fear and suspicion in order to win public consent for the “war on terror.”

This isn’t the first time that police have been subjected to these warped and racist views. A nine-month investigation by Thom Cincotta and Political Research Associates found that the Islamophobic network routinely holds counter-terrorism training sessions with law enforcement personnel around the country. The use of The Third Jihad to train NYPD officers is but the latest revelation of such practices.

[For the rest of this commentary, click here.]