In 2006, the New York Times ran a laudatory multi-part series profiling Brooklyn imam Reda Shata — which noted that when the murderous Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin was killed, Shata told Muslims at a memorial service that a “lion of Palestine has been martyred.” He also praised suicide bomber Reem Al-Reyashi. The Times dismissed this as Shata’s zeal for what he believed to be a just cause, reassuring its readers that Shata didn’t hate Jews, and even had friends among New York rabbis. (I might believe it if they were from Neturei Karta.) In any case, Shata’s reverence for Yassin, who oversaw and glorified the murders of numerous Israeli civilians, showed the ridiculous dhimmi willful blindness of the Times whitewash.
Be that as it may, Shata is still playing his moderate act, and finding eager takers:
“NYPD spied on city’s Muslim anti-terror partners,” from the Associated Press, October 6 (thanks to all who sent this in):
NEW YORK “” Reda Shata considered himself a partner in New York’s fight against terrorism. He cooperated with the police and FBI, invited officers to his mosque for breakfast, even dined with Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Despite the handshakes and photo ops, however, the New York Police Department was all the while watching the Egyptian sheik. Even as Shata’s story was splashed across the front page of The New York Times in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series about Muslims in America, an undercover officer and an informant were assigned to monitor him, and two others kept tabs on his mosque that same year.
“What did they find?” Shata asked through an interpreter at his current mosque in Monmouth County, N.J., after learning about the secret surveillance. “It’s a waste of time and a waste of money.”
Shata welcomed FBI agents to his mosque to speak to Muslims, invited NYPD officers for breakfast and threw parties for officers who were leaving the precinct during his time at the Islamic Center of Bay Ridge. As police secretly watched him in 2006, he had breakfast and dinner with Bloomberg at Gracie Mansion and was invited to meet with Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, Shata recalls.
“This is very sad,” he said after seeing his name in the NYPD file. “What is your feeling if you see this about people you trusted?” […]
“You were loving people very much, and then all of a sudden you get shocked,” Shata said. “It’s a bitter feeling.”
Indeed it is, Shata, and it works both ways.
Pamela Geller has a great deal of revealing additional information on this here.