From The Daily Beast
What’s it like being a Muslim in New York City? The NYPD may have monitored your mosque under suspicions that it was a terrorist organization.
How would you feel if the police considered you suspicious simply because of your religious faith? What would be your reaction if the police viewed your religion as probable cause to monitor where you pray, study, and eat? Would you even attend your place of worship if you knew that someone there is possibly an undercover police officer sent to investigate you?
Well, that’s what it’s like to be Muslim in New York City. Paradoxically, as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech where he shared his hope that Americans, “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” we discover that the NYPD’s is still judging Muslims by their faith.
By way of a brief background, in 2011, the Associated Press released documentsrevealing that the NYPD had engaged in the wide spread surveillance of Muslims in NYC. The NYPD monitored Muslims at mosques, restaurants, bookstores and even Muslim college student groups in neighboring States.
And this week we found out that the NYPD surveillance of Muslims was more invasiveand troubling than previously known. The NYPD had labeled at least a dozen NYC mosques as terrorist organizations under the “terrorism enterprise investigations” (TEI).This designation allowed the NYPD to treat the mosque and those attending it as members of a terror cell. Thus, the police could monitor the mosque leaders and attendees without any specific evidence of wrongdoing. It also empowered the police to infiltrate these mosques with undercover agents and informants.
