NYPD built secret files on NJ, Long Island mosques

Americans living and working in New Jersey’s largest city were subjected to surveillance as part of the New York Police Department’s effort to build databases of where Muslims work, shop and pray. The operation in Newark was so secretive even the city’s mayor says he was kept in the dark.

For months in mid-2007, plainclothes officers from the NYPD’s Demographics Units fanned out across Newark, taking pictures and eavesdropping on conversations inside businesses owned or frequented by Muslims.

The result was a 60-page report, obtained by The Associated Press, containing brief summaries of businesses and their clientele. Police also photographed and mapped 16 mosques, listing them as “Islamic Religious Institutions.” The report cited no evidence of terrorism or criminal behavior. It was a guide to Newark’s Muslims.

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CAIR asks FBI to probe anti-Muslim Facebook death threat

Edward VealThe Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called on the FBI to investigate a death threat posted on its Facebook page by a person claiming to be in the U.S. military.

A man who says he is an “M1 Abrams Armor Crewman” who lives in Colorado Springs, Colo., threatened to kill others who commented on an article posted Saturday on CAIR’s Facebook page.

In a series of comments on CAIR’s page, “Edward Veal” wrote: “no more islam! i will kill any who try to make my country muslim!. . .especially repliers to this post. . .all muslims are terrorists, they should have no rights at all. . .if i find out who you are, i will find you. . .and remove you!” [Grammatical errors maintained.]

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British Freedom Party links up with Brigitte Gabriel

On Thursday night, the Chairman of the newly formed British Freedom Party, Paul Weston, spoke to a group of New Yorkers at a meeting sponsored by Brigitte Gabriel’s Act For America organization. Weston also said he came to warn America that what is happening in Britain today could happen in America in the not too distant future.

The American Thinker reports. See also Urban Infidel.

Tennessee: state panel unanimously approves anti-Muslim training course for police officers

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A state panel has unanimously approved credits for a law enforcement training course that critics have called anti-Muslim.

The Muslim civil rights organization Council on American-Islamic Relations is among those that have publicly denounced the “Understanding the Threat to America” course by a Virginia nonprofit. One of the trainers was John Guandolo, who recently told a Nashville audience that local mosques do not have a right to constitutional protections.

Members of the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office participated in the training earlier this week and asked the Peace Officers Standards and Training Commission to approve it.

The commission gave its unanimous approval at its Friday meeting without discussing the objections from Muslim groups. New commission member Sen. Jim Summerville said he voted in favor because he supports anti-terrorism training.

Associated Press, 17 February 2012

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FBI purges hundreds of terrorism documents in Islamophobia probe

An internal FBI investigation into its counterterrorism training has purged hundreds of bureau documents of instructional material about Muslims, some of which characterized them as prone to violence or terrorism.

The bureau disclosed initial findings from its months-long review during a meeting at FBI headquarters on Wednesday with several Arab and Muslim advocacy groups, attended by Director Robert Mueller. So far, the inquiry has uncovered and purged over 700 pages of documentation from approximately 300 presentations given to agents since 9/11 – some of which were similar to briefings published by Danger Room last year describing “mainstream” Muslims as “violent.” And more disclosures may be forthcoming, as the FBI continues its inquiry and responds to Freedom of Information Act requests for the documents themselves.

Danger Room, 15 February 2012

Arson won’t chase him from home

Hilliard arson (2)Mohamed Soltan will always remember Martin Luther King Day. On the morning of Jan. 16, 2012, someone set fire to his parents’ home on Britton Farms Drive while he slept.

“I was sleeping and my roommate (Ahmed Mahmoud), thankfully, he’s a really light sleeper, he comes into my room and is waking me up,” said Soltan, a 24-year-old student at Ohio State University. He grabbed his cell phone and a sweatshirt and ran down the stairs of his parents’ home.

“We had already inhaled a wave of smoke,” Soltan said. “I was coughing, choking, calling the dispatcher. I was really worried that the fire was going to get out of hand, because we saw it coming from the side. I was really scared for my neighbors.”

No one was hurt, but there was a lot of damage to the structure, and most of the contents are not salvageable, Soltan said. However, the memories made over eight years – the longest Soltan has lived in any one place – remain.

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Newsweek and the ‘war on Christians’

Newsweek The War on Christians“Hirsi Ali pleads with readers that we must ‘please get our priorities straight…. Instead of falling for overblown tales of Western Islamophobia, let’s take a real stand against the Christophobia infecting the Muslim world’.

“It’s hard to know what she means; is there really some great danger that the West is doing too much to protect Muslims? The real implication here is that there is a genocide that must be stopped. That is an extremely serious charge. She fails to provide evidence to support that case, and manages to smear a major American Islamic advocacy group in the process.”

Peter Hart replies to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Newsweek article “The global war on Christians in the Muslim world”

FAIR, 15 February 2012