How the NYPD Gets Jihad Right

[Geee]

National Review:


‘Every conspiracy against Islam and scheming against Islam and the Muslims — its source is America.”

“Jihad is Jihad. There is no such thing as commerce, industry, and science in jihad. This is calling things other than by its [sic] own name. If Allah says, ‘Do jihad,’ it means do jihad with the sword, with the cannon, with the grenades, and with the missile. This is Jihad. Jihad against Allah’s enemies for Allah’s cause and his word.”

“Why do we fear the word ‘terrorist’? If the terrorist is the person who defends his right, so we are terrorists. . . . The Koran mentions the words ‘to strike terror,’ therefore we don’t fear to be described with ‘terrorism.’ . . . We are ordered to prepare whatever we can of power to terrorize the enemies of Islam.”

This rhetoric was not at all unusual. It was the sort of thing you’d hear on any given Friday at mosques in Brooklyn or Jersey City. Nor is there anything ostensibly criminal about it, at least according to the hash the Supreme Court has made of the First Amendment.
That wasn’t the case in the speaker’s native Egypt. There, Omar Abdel Rahman had been notorious for such fiery Friday sermons. There, the imam known as “the Blind Sheikh,” a renowned scholar of Islamic jurisprudence, had been jailed several times for inciting Muslims — urging that they kill regime officials for allying with America and for failing to implement sharia, Islam’s legal system.

But not here, not in the land of free expression: In the United States, the authorities regarded Abdel Rahman as a respected community leader. The federal government put out its welcome mat despite his appearance on its terrorist watch lists. Federal authorities never consulted the police force responsible for protecting the New Yorkers he would attack; they just issued him a green card to work as a “religious teacher” and sent him on his way.

It was Ray Kelly, one of the great police commissioners in American history, who finally arranged to place the blind sheikh in handcuffs. This was during the summer of 1993, when Kelly was in his first go-round as NYPD commissioner.

The sheikh was holed up in a favorite New York City mosque, surrounded by his followers — at least those of them who were not already in prison or on the lam for multiple bombing plots. As I recounted in Willful Blindness, when Attorney General Janet Reno green-lighted the arrest that we prosecutors had been seeking for weeks, it was Kelly and his savvy city cops who defused the potentially explosive situation. The NYPD spoke to people in the community, the sheikh was coaxed out of the mosque, and federal immigration agents took him into custody without incident. This was no small thing: In the two decades since, dozens of innocent people have been killed by zealots demanding his release.

What I most remember about that day is Kelly’s quiet confidence, instilling calm in a room full of NYPD cops, FBI agents, and immigration officers — not to mention a thirtysomething government lawyer who happened to be on hand. A panicky supervisor from INS (called ICE now) groused that the sheikh’s arrest — initially on immigration charges — would have to wait until he could get clearance from his office. I was speechless. After all, the attorney general had already made her decision — why would we now have to wait on a midlevel bureaucrat? Because, it turned out, INS had sent the wrong bureaucrat to the meeting, the New York supervisor instead of the guy from across the river who was in charge of the INS end of the investigation. “You don’t understand,” the supervisor muttered as he reached for a phone, “the case belongs to New Jersey.”

“Yeah,” countered Commissioner Kelly, “but the streets belong to me.”

Kelly is now in his second tour of duty as commish, and New Yorkers are extraordinarily fortunate that their streets have belonged to him for most of the decade since September 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 of our fellow citizens were murdered. You mightn’t think so, however, if all you had to go on was the hatchet-job published by the Associated Press last week.

By the AP’s lights, Kelly is running a rogue domestic-spying operation. To the contrary, the commissioner has crafted an unparalleled counterterrorism strategy. Ever mindful of civil rights and respectful of Islamic culture — just as the police must be respectful of the variegated cultures in the Big Apple’s ethnic goulash — Kelly has kept the world’s No. 1 terrorist target safe from mass-casualty attacks. He has managed this despite 13 known attempts — and who knows how many others that cannot be spoken of without compromising intelligence sources.

[Valin]

Geee

 

With CIA help, NYPD moves covertly in Muslim areas

 

Commentary: In Defense of the NYPD

[righteousmomma]

Andrew McCarthy has written a powerfully balanced intelligent argument based on reality and common sense.

 

Several quotes that I liked:

 

This menace has not gone away. What do you suppose gives us a fighting chance to protect ourselves: Ray Kelly’s NYPD or the Obama administration’s “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism”? Do we really want to mess with ten years of success?

....the hatchet-job published by the Associated Press last week.

 

By the AP’s lights, Kelly is running a rogue domestic-spying operation. To the contrary, the commissioner has crafted an unparalleled counterterrorism strategy. Ever mindful of civil rights and respectful of Islamic culture — just as the police must be respectful of the variegated cultures in the Big Apple’s ethnic goulash — Kelly has kept the world’s No. 1 terrorist target safe from mass-casualty attacks. He has managed this despite 13 known attempts — and who knows how many others that cannot be spoken of without compromising intelligence sources.

The AP hit was compiled with scads of cooperation from federal-government sources, Islamist organizations, and the Lawyer Left (fancying itself the “civil-rights community”). Its timing is no coincidence. We are approaching the tenth anniversary of 9/11, which our community-organizer-in-chief is feverishly recasting as a “community service” exhibition rather than a day of national remembrance. The AP dropped its purported bombshell hard on the heels of “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States,” Obama’s recently published strategy for countering terrorism without referring to it as “terrorism” — a term that, as the Blind Sheikh inconveniently points out, has roots in the Koran (e.g., Sura 8:12, in which Allah instructs Muslims, “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them”).

 

Naturally, the AP report did not see fit to mention the findings of the Mapping Sharia project, which determined that roughly 80 percent of American mosques disseminate Islamist literature that endorses violence. The imams in these mosques tend to promote that literature. Over half of these mosques host guest lecturers known for promoting violent jihad.

Make no mistake: There is a battle under way over how we should pursue national security. It is not enough to say the Left wants to move us back to a September 10 mindset — unless you mean September 10 sometime in the mid-1970s. That was when “intelligence” became a dirty word upon revelation that the CIA and various law-enforcement agencies had gathered it against such left-wing radicals as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the Weather Underground terrorists who would later become the friends, ideological allies, and activist partners of a certain upstart Chicago pol.

 

The winners write the history. Thus, “domestic spying” has become That Seventies Show: the revisionist narrative the Left uses to erase the fact that it wasn’t all about cracking down on peaceful, patriotic dissent. In truth, there really were evil people who built bombs and tried to kill hundreds of Americans in an effort to foment revolution — people like Ayers, who tartly concedes that he was “guilty as sin,” even though he ended up “free as a bird.”

 

The difference is that today’s threat comes from a mostly alien force inspired by a known (albeit consciously ignored) ideology rooted in fundamentalist Islam — which, in much of the world, is mainstream Islam.

[Valin]

Andrew McCarthy has written a powerfully balanced intelligent argument based on reality and common sense.

 

The difference is that today’s threat comes from a mostly alien force inspired by a known (albeit consciously ignored) ideology rooted in fundamentalist Islam — which, in much of the world, is mainstream Islam.

 

 

This is something so many (but not all) on the left don't understand...or it seems to me want to understand.

 

There are two opposite views/reactions to take on GWOT who what where when why,,,,

 

A. Ignoring and pretending the threat doesn't exist or saying it is somehow our fault. (the default position of a large part of the left.)

 

B. Over blowing the threat...refusing to see that the main and overwhelming victims of the Jihadists are Muslims and blaming all Muslims for this war. (sad to say the default position of a large part of the right)

 

Both are wrong. I place a large part of the blame for those of us on the right on Robert Spencer...and his followers. Whether they know it or not, they are some of the best allies the Jihadists have.

[righteousmomma]

...refusing to see that the main and overwhelming victims of the Jihadists are Muslims

Valin, I did not know this. You often ask for sources and I would like to know your sources or at least your own reasons for stating this.

 

 

and blaming all Muslims for this war. (sad to say the default position of a large part of the right)

 

I do not see this at all - at least not down here in the Southland. Granted I don't run in the so called Southern bigoted fundamentalist redneck circle but then I do not know anyone who does. (Mythical stereotypes and perceptions are hard to overcome) Most of the people I know - whether Right or Left - are so pc its nutso.

 

Both are wrong. I place a large part of the blame for those of us on the right on Robert Spencer...and his followers. Whether they know it or not, they are some of the best allies the Jihadists have.

 

Know that you are far more involved in this than I but... imo people like Robert Spencer and David Horowitz do serve a valuable purpose and are vital. I thank God (LITERALLY) for them.

I think they both are two of the best allies we Christians and Jews have in this post Christian world where humanism/socialism is once again rearing its head in alliance against God and against we who pledge allegiance to Him.

 

Btw sure you have read it but for those who have not here is Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, answering for himself.

 

http://www.jihadwatch.org/about-robert-spencer.html