The Muslim Students Association is a Muslim Brotherhood group. The NYPD was monitoring it. So what? As long as no Constitutional protections were genuinely violated, the NYPD is just doing its job. The purpose of articles like this is to stop them from doing that job, which will have the effect, intended or not, of allowing the jihadist and Islamic supremacist activities of the MSAs to advance unimpeded.
Discover the Networks here has documentation of the MSA's ties to the Brotherhood, as well as a lengthy list of inflammatory, jihadist statements and jihad activities by MSA members.
"NYPD monitored Muslim students all over Northeast," by Chris Hawley for the Associated Press, February 18 (thanks to all who sent this in):
NEW YORK—The New York Police Department monitored Muslim college students far more broadly than previously known, at schools far beyond the city limits, including the Ivy League colleges of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, The Associated Press has learned.Police talked with local authorities about professors 300 miles away in Buffalo and even sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip, where he recorded students' names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed.
Detectives trawled Muslim student websites every day and, although professors and students had not been accused of any wrongdoing, their names were recorded in reports prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
Asked about the monitoring, police spokesman Paul Browne provided a list of 12 people arrested or convicted on terrorism charges in the United States and abroad who had once been members of Muslim student associations, which the NYPD referred to as MSAs. Jesse Morton, who this month pleaded guilty to posting online threats against the creators of "South Park," had once tried to recruit followers at Stony Brook University on Long Island, Browne said.
"As a result, the NYPD deemed it prudent to get a better handle on what was occurring at MSAs," Browne said in an email. He said police monitored student websites and collected publicly available information, but did so only between 2006 and 2007.
"I see a violation of civil rights here," said Tanweer Haq, chaplain of the Muslim Student Association at Syracuse. "Nobody wants to be on the list of the FBI or the NYPD or whatever. Muslim students want to have their own lives, their own privacy and enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities that everybody else has."
In recent months, the AP has revealed secret programs the NYPD, built with help from the CIA, to monitor Muslims at the places where they eat, shop and worship. The AP also published details about how police placed undercover officers at Muslim student associations in colleges within the city limits; this revelation has outraged faculty and student groups.
Though the NYPD says it follows the same rules as the FBI, some of the NYPD's activities go beyond what the FBI is allowed to do.
Kelly and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg repeatedly have said that the police only follow legitimate leads about suspected criminal activity.
But the latest documents mention no wrongdoing by any students.
In one report, an undercover officer describes accompanying 18 Muslim students from the City College of New York on a whitewater rafting trip in upstate New York on April 21, 2008. The officer noted the names of attendees who were officers of the Muslim Student Association.
"In addition to the regularly scheduled events (Rafting), the group prayed at least four times a day, and much of the conversation was spent discussing Islam and was religious in nature," the report says....
Yes, and so? This is egregious, as far as Chris Hawley and AP are concerned, but when jihadis consistently explain and justify their violent actions by referring to Islamic imperatives, as the underwear bomber did just days ago, why shouldn't law enforcement consider it worth noting when young Muslims discuss Islam? What assurance can the Muslim Brotherhood-linked MSA give that discussions of Islam among its members differ fundamentally in character from discussions of Islam among people like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Nidal Hasan, and Faisal Shahzad? And in the absence of the possibility of any such genuine assurance, why shouldn't law enforcement be vigilant?
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If my church had such a jihadi movement going on, I would BEG the FBI to monitor our congregation, because I would rather help prevent a mass murder than b!tch about my rights while others are getting killed and maimed. That's because I have my priorities straight. I don't just care about me and no one else. I don't put my hurt feelers on par with death and terror. I guess you could say I'm a human being.