Andy, the rot is everywhere. While Holder & Co. break down our legal defenses, propaganda outfits like the Associated Press sap the nation’s instinct for self-preservation by framing police surveillance of Muslims as a “civil rights” issue. From my New York Post column on Monday:
There’s a reason New York City has not been hit by radical Muslim terrorists since Sept. 11, 2001, and its name is the New York City Police Department.
Closely watching wannabe jihadis not only at home but across the country and around the world, the NYPD has foiled countless terror operations, including plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, the subway system, the Stock Exchange, the trans-Hudson tunnels and JFK Airport, among others.
But try to tell that to the Associated Press, which for months now has been waging a journalistic jihad against the NYPD and its counterterrorism tactics in the name of “civil rights.”
The latest salvo, “NYPD Monitored Muslim Students All Over Northeast,” discloses that undercover officers kept tabs on various Muslim student organizations — often viewed as breeding grounds for freelance jihadism — across New York state and New England and patrolled their Web sites.
By now it should be abundantly clear that “civil rights” is the trump card/wedge issue that the Left uses as the fulcrum of its efforts to “fundamentally transform” American society. No matter how tenuous the connection to the noble struggle of American blacks to achieve political parity, or dishonest the comparison, “civil rights” — like another all-purpose lefty bludgeon, “racism” — always wins out, at least in their minds:
. . . in some quarters, the “civil rights” meme trumps everything, including self-preservation. It’s hardly “racist” to prudently note that Islamic religiosity characterized the 9/11 hijackers, Maj. Hasan and others and is used as a motivational tool by jihadis.
Nor is it “racist” to note that, too often across the Islamic world, believers pour out of mosques on Friday nights whipped into a frenzy by their imams and shouting “Death to America.”
What the NYPD is doing is simply good — and entirely legal — police work. The events of 9/11 obliged the department to transform itself from a municipal police force into a combination cop shop, intelligence service and paramilitary organization that can and does operate globally, not just locally.
But the modern left is dubious at best about the moral legitimacy of pro-active self-defense — thus the smugly self righteous AP series.
It’s hard to decide whether the AP is actively trying to dishearten and intimidate law enforcement or simply infected with the standard soft-headedness of mainstream media publications. (Never discount the latter.) But either way, it’s still astonishing that little more than a decade after 9/11, we now have active apologists for radical Islam at the highest levels of our media and government.
Next thing I know, you’ll tell me that the communists weren’t really defeated after the fall of the Soviet Union, but only found another place to call home. . .