Why Muslim Student Group Concerned the NYPD

from Creeping Sharia;

Why Muslim Student Group Concerned the NYPD

Posted on March 1, 2012 by creeping

Shouldn’t that be present tense – concerns? via The Investigative Project on Terrorism:

The Muslim community expressed its outrage this week over a New York Police Department surveillance report from 2006 that the Associated Press reported on Monday. The report disclosed that the NYPD monitored Muslim Students Association (MSA) chapters in the Northeast. The outrage, centered on the perceived violation of privacy, is based on an incorrect presumption that law enforcement had no cause for concern with the MSA.

The organization’s history with radical dogma, convicted terrorists and radicalized alumni tell a different story.

NYPD officials visited websites and forums of different MSAs and noted the posted information, all of which was in the public domain. No one hacked into any email accounts or sites as part of the surveillance. A separate story reports that an undercover officer attended a rafting trip with more than a dozen MSA members.

But NYPD officials say critics are off base when they claim the department did something wrong.

“There is no constitutional prohibition against a police department collecting information,” city senior counsel Peter Farrell told reporters Thursday.

“What’s unconstitutional is if they then use that information to chill someone’s First Amendment rights or to impose harm on them.”

The AP report chronicles different events that some MSAs held and speakers that chapters hosted on campus and provides some lists of event attendees. The surveillance was intended to track any potential radical speakers or behaviors of the different chapters or individual members.

The report lists six different incidents of monitoring in 2006 at the University of Buffalo, New York University, and Rutgers University. It also lists 12 other MSAs that were tracked, but did not provide “significant information posted to their web sites, forums, blogs and groups.”

“Some of the most dangerous Western Al Qaeda-linked/inspired terrorists since 9/11 were radicalized and/or recruited at universities in MSAs,” NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said as an explanation for the surveillance. “We were focused on radicalization and/or recruitment, specifically by groups like Al Muhajiroun, Islamic Thinkers Society, Revolution Muslim and others.”

Criticism of the NYPD surveillance has been swift.

“We believe that the NYPD clearly overstepped its boundaries when it began spying on average American Muslim college students who were simply taking whitewater rafting trips or innocently participating in school activities at their college or university campus,” said MSA National President Zahir Latheef.

“University officials may be the last line of defense for Muslim students whose rights were apparently violated by the clearly unconstitutional — and possibly illegal — tactics used by the NYPD,” Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) spokesperson Ibrahim Hooper said. “The NYPD continues to act as if it is somehow above the law that governs all other individuals and institutions.”

Cyrus McGoldrick of CAIR- NY said, “It’s very clear that this is not about police work this is about monitoring people based on ideology.”

“They’re just going out and casting a wide net around a whole community, so they’re criminalizing in a way a whole community based on their religion,” saidCAIR-Connecticut Director Mongi Dhaouadi.

The Rutgers MSA called on the community to “openly condemn the clear violations of the NYPD, who conducted illegitimate profiling outside of their jurisdiction and breached the constitutional rights of an individual.”

Leaders Found Trouble

The NYPD has a duty to protect New York City from terrorist attacks. And MSA leaders and members have been convicted of terrorist activities and plots.

The list is extensive, but among the MSA alumni who went on to terrorist involvement are:

• Anwar al-Awlaki, an influential American-born al-Qaida cleric who recruited a series of homegrown jihadists before being killed by a U.S. drone strike;
• Aafia Siddiqui, convicted of attempted murder and assault on U.S. officers and employees in Afghanistan;
• Zachary Chesser, convicted of attempting to provide material support to the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab and soliciting attacks on “South Park” producers for an episode in which the prophet Muhammad was shown in a bear suit;
• Jesse Morton, convicted with Chesser of threatening the South Park producers with murder;
• Adam Gadahn, an al-Qaida spokesman who is on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for treason and material support to al-Qaida;
• Waheed Zaman, who was convicted of plotting to blow up transatlantic flights;
• Adis Medunjanin, who is awaiting trial for plotting to bomb New York subways;
• Ramy Zamzam, who was convicted in Pakistan of conspiring to carry out terrorist attacks;
• Omar Hammami, who was indicted on charges of providing material support to al-Shabbab and is designated by the U.S. Treasury Department for his terrorist connections;
• Muhammad Junaid Babar, who pled guilty to his support to al-Qaida; and
• Syed Hashmi, who pled guilty to providing material support to al-Qaida.

MSA was founded in the United States in 1963 by members of the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood seeks a global Islamic state and has spawned leaders of a series of Sunni terrorist groups, including al-Qaida, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The Muslim Brotherhood motto established by founder Hassan al-Banna is, “God is our objective, the Quran is our Constitution, the Prophet is our leader, jihad is our way, and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.”

MSA members remain faithful to Brotherhood ideology. At the closing session of the MSA West conference in January 2011 at UCLA, attendees recited a pledge, “Allah is my lord, Islam is my life, the Quran is my guide, the Sunna is my practice, Jihad is my spirit, righteousness is my character, paradise is my goal. I enjoin what is right, I forbid what is wrong, I will fight against oppression, and I will die to establish Islam.”

…

More MSA Radicalism

Last May, the MSA chapter at the University of California, Irvine (known there as the Muslim Student Union or MSU), hosted an event with Amir Mertaban who is a former president of MSA West. During a 2007 conference, Mertaban urged students not to “ever compromise on your Muslim brothers and sisters in which you have no evidence. Osama bin Laden- I don’t know this guy. I don’t know what he did. I don’t know what he said. I don’t know what happened. But we defend Muslim brothers and we defend our Muslim sisters to the end. Is that clear?”

That didn’t mean people should support terror, he said, but they should never compromise on their faith “Because Islam is a perfect religion.”

Invited back in 2011, Mertaban admitted to having supported the Taliban in the 1980s, and refused to condemn the terrorist organization Hamas, claiming that it has done a lot of good in terms of social and political programming. In a subsequent interview with the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Mertaban emphasized that he does not know if Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9/11, refused to recognize Israel as a sovereign nation and said he supports Hamas “freedom fighting missions.”

MSA’s history and various connections are significant in evaluating the NYPD’s surveillance. Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the action as an important countermeasure to terrorist activity. “Of course, we’re going to look at anything that’s publicly available, in the public domain. We have an obligation to do so,” he said.

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne added that “[s]tudents who advertised events or sent emails about regular events should not be worried about a terrorism file being kept on them. NYPD only investigated persons who we had reasonable suspicion to believe might be involved in unlawful activities.”

One student who was on the rafting trip understood this. The AP quoted Ali Ahmed saying the NYPD was doing its job. “There’s lots of Muslims doing some bad things and it gives a bad name to all of us,” he said, “so they have to take their due diligence.”

If Ahmed’s views represented the MSA, rather than the radical ideas and actions of past leaders, NYPD would lose interest much faster.