From a New York Times story about the NYPD recruiting Muslims to be informers comes this quote of the day, or possibly of the entire year, from a Muslim former police sergeant. The Times, of course, leaves it out there as a rhetorical question, without bothering to inform its readers that a Long Island mosque was recently revealed to have supported jihad terrorists, or that mosques in Austria were recently raided for supporting the Syrian jihad, or that Nigerian clerics are recruiting for Boko Haram in mosques, or that a mullah was recently killed in a bomb-making accident in a mosque in Afghanistan, or that a London mosque was used as a base for international jihad terror operations. Should the NYPD have informants in mosques? Absolutely. Is the New York Times once again on the side of America’s enemies by publishing a story suggesting that the placement of such informants is gratuitous and unwarranted? Absolutely.
“New York Police Recruit Muslims to Be Informers,” by Joseph Goldstein, New York Times, May 10, 2014 (thanks to all who sent this in):
…Bobby Hadid, a former sergeant with the unit and himself a Muslim immigrant from Algeria, said he had become increasingly uncomfortable with what he and his colleagues were doing, particularly when it came to asking questions about religion of many of the prisoners, who had been arrested for petty crimes or violations.
“We are detectives of the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division,” he said. “We are there to collect intelligence about criminal activity or terrorism. Why are we asking, ‘Are you Muslim?’ ‘What mosque do you go to?’ What does that have to do with terrorism?”
Once a well-regarded investigator who had worked on the F.B.I.-led Joint Terrorism Task Force before being tapped to join the Intelligence Division, Mr. Hadid was eventually removed from the force after being convicted of perjury in a case unrelated to his counterterrorism work. The conviction, which he is appealing, involved his role as a translator in a murder investigation that had led to his being sent to France.
According to Mr. Hadid, each morning, detectives with the debriefing unit received a list of immigrants, cataloged by country of origin, who had been arrested in New York the previous day. Arrestees from Middle Eastern and other predominantly Muslim countries, typically, attracted the most interest from detectives, along with prisoners with Arabic-sounding names, Mr. Hadid said. Periodically, there would be directives for the detectives to focus on immigrants of a specific nationality….