WhyDidTheNYPDSpyOnMeFor Years?
Our country protects equality and the freedoms of speech and religion for all Americans. When Muslims
are targeted because of our faith, it’s an assault on those values and on the country I love
couple of weeks after I began
lecturing on Islam at NewYork
City mosques, something
strange happened. Acquain-
tances and congregants told
me they’d been approached by law en-
forcement officers, who asked about me
and my talks. Soon after, I began to no-
tice suspicious people in the audiences.
One gentleman stood out —he was the
most frequent attendee, but he regularly
fell asleep while I spoke.
It was 2003. I was a student at Brook-
lyn College, studying English literature.
I’d grown up in NewYork and loved the
city. But I’d also seen the way Muslims
were discriminated against, particularly
after Sept. 11, 2001. In the year after the
attacks, hate crimes spiked tenfold. I
wanted to encourage Muslims to stay
strong in their faith in spite of these as-
saults. I spoke on theology and visiting
the sick, on skepticism and the sinful
pursuit of instant gratification, on the
gravity of injustice and the vastness of
God’s mercy.
I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I con-
sistently rejected violence and terrorism
in my lectures. Still, for a decade, I felt
like I was under surveillance, pursued by
shadowy law enforcement officials seek-
ing out a crime that didn’t exist.
In 2013, my fears were confirmed. I
found out from an Associated Press in-
vestigation that I was a victim of the New
York Police Department’s aggressive sur-
veillance of Muslims. According to news
articles, after 9/11 the NYPD began to
track large swaths of us. Officers secretly
labeled entire mosques as terrorist or-
ganizations, then spied on imams and
recorded sermons. The department con-
ducted at least a dozen of these “terror-
ism enterprise investigations” since
2001, often without specific evidence of
criminal wrongdoing and minimal over-
sight from judges. No charges were ever
brought as a result of the activities of the
so-called “demographics” unit.
Entire congregations were targeted.
Entire Muslim communities — from
bookstores to restaurants —were moni-
tored. Those practices turned innocent
people into suspects, making us feel iso-
lated and afraid of the police. Because of
the NYPD’s widespread use of inform-
ants, we stopped trusting our neighbors
as well.
Though I’d suspected that local cops
were spying on innocent Muslims, the
extent of their sur-
veillance surpassed
even my worst
fears. The police
had been following
me everywhere, ac-
cording to docu-
ments unearthed
in the investiga-
tion. After the Asso-
ciated Press
revelations, I wasn’t just uneasy. I was
terrified. I felt like I lived in a house with-
out walls, vulnerable to police scrutiny
all the time. I was constantly anxious
about what I said and whom I talked to. I
feared for my wife as well. I suspected
those around me, including friends and
family. People from outside our commu-
nity – they appeared to be undercover
officers or informants – were asking
about me. Friends and colleagues dis-
tanced themselves out of fear that they,
too, would be swept up in the net.
After 2013, I began creating mental
filters through which to run my speech
in sermons and among my peers hold-
ing back anything that could be seen as
controversial. In my lectures, I played
down Islamic val-
ues of valor and
heroism, worry-
ing that inform-
ants would
assume, incor-
rectly, that I was
promoting ag-
gression or vio-
lence. I hesitated
before publicly
discussing the devastation faced by in-
nocent civilians in the Muslimworld, in
case someone distorted my lessons on
empathy as something “anti-American.”
To justify its spying, the NYPD used
my charity work against me, suggesting
that the camping trips I’d organized for
low-income children and teens whom
I’d mostly met through my talks at
mosques was actually a military exer-
cise. In truth, during those weekends, we
simply played basketball, ran obstacle
courses and swam in races. The police
accused me of downloading the most
extreme parts of radical clerics’ talks. In
fact, I listened to a wide range of speak-
ers in preparation for my lectures. The
police pointed to suspicions about my
father, saying he was a close associate of
Omar Abdel Rahman, who was con-
victed of aiding in the 1993World Trade
Center bombing. I was a child at the
time, and my father was never charged
with any crimes. And the NYPD accused
me of radicalizing members of my
mosque whom I’d never met. The police
kept this investigation up for years, long
after the FBI determined that I wasn’t a
threat, according to the Associated Press.
Now, I’m hopeful that those difficult
years have ended. In June 2013, I joined
a lawsuit against the NYPD’s expansive
surveillance targeting NewYork’s Mus-
lims. Last month, the NYPD settled that
case with me and five other plaintiffs.
The department agreed to a number of
important safeguards on police prac-
tices, including a ban on investigations
that stemmainly from religion, race or
ethnicity. The settlement, subject to final
approval by the court, would also im-
pose reforms to prevent years-long,
open-ended surveillance. And it would
install a civilian monitor to act as a
check on any investigation relating to
political or religious activities.
I don’t expect my fellow citizens to
agree with all of my views, like my con-
viction that Islam is the divine truth re-
vealed from Almighty God, and that all
Muslims should follow the Quran. But
our country protects equality and the
freedoms of speech and religion for all
Americans.WhenMuslims are targeted
because of our faith, it’s an assault on
those values and on the country I love.
A
Mohammad
Elshinawy
Contributor
The Washington Post
uch of the toxic memories and
legacies around Partition in
1947, which continue to create
bad blood even seven decades
later arise out of misconcep-
tions about its reasons, dynamics, and
processes and its important to clarify these
so both India and Pakistanmove beyond
assigning blame to healing, say some his-
torians of the event.
It was also contended that Partition was
not necessarily inevitable, the violence it
entailed doesn’t seem to have been elabo-
rately planned and even shocked leaders
on both sides though they had contributed
to it with their careless, and inflammatory
statements, while there are many aspects
that have not received the level of attention
they should, such as the effect on people
outside the three major communities and
the areas like Punjab and Bengal that are
usually focussed upon.
At a session titled “The Great Partition”
at the Jaipur Literature Festival on Sunday,
Pakistani-American historian Ayesha Jalal,
who has argued Partition was one of the
possible outcomes being negotiated, said
the MuslimLeague’s March 23, 1940 reso-
lution calling for a separate homeland, was
part of its movement to settle the question
of minority rights but noted it ended up
aggravating the issue instead of solving it.
“Minority rights is a legacy of Partition,
and it is an issue in all three nations,” she
said.
Writer and journalist Nisid Hajari con-
tended that the genocide of Partition was
either triggered by being misguided by a
political figure, or falling prey tomadness
but in either instance, people could not
fully explain their actions, and nobody ad-
mitted responsibility.
British historianYasmin Khan noted the
demand for Pakistan has been conflated
with the violence that followed.
“They’ve been put on the same track...
disentangling both is difficult but impor-
tant,” she maintained.
U.S.-based history professorVenkat
Dhulipala noted the event had seen emer-
gence of a “hostage population” theory or
that minority rights can be ensured by a
certain terror and such rhetoric was wide-
spread then, as was talks about transfers of
populations, made by people like Moham-
mad Ali Jinnah and even B.R. Ambedkar.
“The violence can be understood by the
incendiary and passionate statements
made in the public sphere,” he said.
But Jalal noted that most of the violence
was not about religion as is commonly
thought, but about property or its forcible
seizure from those who could not resist it.
Publisher and writer Urvashi Butalia
highlighted how patriarchal Indian society
enabled violence and as families were al-
ready violent towards their women, it was
just the degree and the targets of violence
that changed during Partition.
She also suggested that it was a mistake
to define minorities in purely religious
terms during Partition, since many other
minorities were also affected, including
Dalits, hijras and women, or even inmates
of mental asylums.
On the responsibility for Partition, Ha-
jari said evenMahatma Gandhi did not
have political power to stop it though he
had tried to tamp down on the violence.
Khan said it should be known that the
leaders then were also human and faced
many pressures and compulsions and that
is why they couldn’t compromise. “There
were several missed opportunities. The
Cabinet Mission Plan was one...,” she said.
Jalal, however, maintained it was imper-
ative “to go beyond finger-pointing to heal-
ing”. She noted that a recent poll in
Pakistan had 39 percent of respondents
saying they were helped by a Hindu or a
Sikh during the Partition,but these stories
have not come into the mainstreamnarra-
tive yet. “Without them, the unimaginable
violence would have been uncon-
scionable.”
– IANS
TheNeedToCorrectMisconceptionsAbout Partition
M
By Vikas Datta
Opinion
5
News India Times February 12, 2016
