This is all very high-minded, of course, but Codey is acting at the behest of CAIR, which has never addressed its own problematic issues regarding jihad and Sharia. Also, it is simply a fact of life that Muslims are the ones committing the great majority of terrorist acts today. It is Muslim groups that have declared jihad war against the United States. Nor have American Muslim organizations done anything effective to weed out jihadists from their ranks. Consequently, for police departments to keep files on more Muslims than Methodists doesn’t trouble me. Innocent people should not be harassed, but when this article says that they were keeping files on some people just because they belonged to certain organizations — well, not all Muslim organizations are what they seem to be. Look at CAIR itself. “Codey demands rules for probes to avoid profiling,” from the Star-Ledger, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:
Acting Gov. Richard Codey yesterday gave state officials three weeks to come up with standards for identifying potential terrorists, to dispel fears that the label is being applied to people simply because they are Muslim.
Codey made the demand in response to revelations in yesterday’s Star-Ledger that State Police are refusing to accept computerized reports filed by the New Jersey Office of Counter-Terrorism after finding numerous entries targeting people merely because they practice Islam or have connections to Muslim groups.
Islamic civil rights groups quickly voiced their concern, with one calling for a nationwide review of terrorist databases to ensure they do not single out Muslims.
State counter-terrorism officials contend the problem is not religious profiling, but that some reports were filled out incompletely. Codey, calling the feud a “turf battle,” said the Attorney General’s Office, State Police and counter-terrorism officials “have all assured me that profiling is not going on.”
When asked whether he is comfortable with the standards for entering names into the database, however, Codey replied, “No, I’m not.” He said that is why he requested a report on the criteria for labeling someone a potential terrorist….
Muslim groups voiced long-standing fears of unequal treatment.
“I think a lot of us have realized for a while that we’re under surveillance and that’s just the way it is and nobody’s going to do anything about it,” said Yasser El-Menshawy, chairman of the Majlis Ash-Shura of New Jersey, a council of mosques and Islamic organizations based in Newark.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights group based in Washington, D.C., called for law enforcement agencies nationwide to examine their terrorist databases and ensure they are not being used to profile Muslims.