(h/t: Raza inc.)

Police: Man Menaced After Leaving Queens Mosque

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – Police are asking for the public’s help in finding a suspect who allegedly menaced a man as he left a Queens mosque.

The incident occurred after the victim left a mosque on Kissena Boulevard around 8 p.m. last Friday.

The suspect followed the victim for several blocks and pulled his SUV next to the victim’s vehicle at a traffic light at Union Turnpike and 199th Street, police said.

The suspect then displayed a firearm, threatened to kill the victim and made anti-Muslim statements before fleeing, police said.

The suspect is described as a white man between 55 and 60 years old with a light skin complexion, dark hair and a mustache, police said.

The suspect was last seen wearing a dark suit jacket with an emblem patch on the left pocket and was possibly driving a Toyota SUV with a New York license plate, police said.

Anyone with information is asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 800-577-TIPS.

The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the Crime Stoppers website or texting their tips to 274637(CRIMES) then enter TIP577.

Group Launches Grassroots Campaign To Counter Anti-Muslim New York Subway Ads

By Hayes Brown on Mar 5, 2013 at 10:15 am

A grassroots campaign aimed at countering hateful anti-Muslim ads in New York’s subway system has gone live, placing posters in ten locations across New York City.

Called Talk Back to Hate, the campaign first launched its crowdfunding appeal in January in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, seeking to raise the money necessary to post advertisements in major subway stations from among the citizens of New York.

“I started the project because, like many people I’ve spoken to, these ads feel like an attack on our most basic communal values,” Akiva Freidlin, the creator of the project, said in an interview with ThinkProgress at the time. “They’re doubly offensive, for both attempting to demonize and intimidate individual members of a particular religious group, and trying to exploit the city’s grief and anger.”

Talk Back to Hate’s poster message was chosen from various suggestions submitted by contributors to the campaign. The image depicts a pair of arms wrapped around the Big Apple that is New York and the winning words “Hatred is easy. It is love that requires true strength.” The poster also features the names of those who donated to make the poster a reality. The ad is currently running at some of the New York subway’s most-trafficked stops, including Times Square and Rockefeller Center, as well as eight other locations throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. Fundraising for a second round of ads is already on-going.

A digital version of the ad posted on the Talk Back to Hate website cycles through messages submitted by the campaign’s contributors. In a press release sent out by the campaign, Friedlin highlighted the several of those messages from New York City residents who donated to the project:

Campaign donor Omar Gaya is an American Muslim who moved to NYC about 2 years ago from California to work at a bio-pharmaceutical company. He calls TalkBackToHate.org “the voice of a formerly ‘silent’ majority.”

“We must raise our voices,” Gaya notes, “or else we risk letting the hatred of a few well-resourced individuals dominate the discourse and hijack the values of freedom and tolerance that we hold dear.”

Jessica Nepomiachi, a public policy & community outreach consultant, said that she gave in appreciation for the complexity and diversity of New York. “The NYC transit system carries millions of people a day through one of the most diverse cities in the world,” Nepomiachi says. “Our transit system should be a place of pride, a place to encourage thoughtful and peaceful dialogue, not hatred.”

The spark that launched the campaign was a series of Islamophobic subway ads funded by Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative that ran in New York City and Washington, DC last year. Much as in the case of the ads that inspired Talk Back to Hate, theoriginal series of ads from Geller — which referred to Muslims as “savages” — were likewise countered by various religious and civil groups.

by Belen Fernandez (AlJazeera English)

Joseph Goldstein’s New York Times article of February 3 outlines a request from US civil rights lawyers to federal judge Charles S Haight Jr for an independent evaluation of the New York Police Department’s counterterrorism techniques.

Writes Goldstein: “The lawyers said the police’s tactics have placed Muslim communities under surveillance in violation of longstanding federal court guidelines.” Among these guidelines is a prohibition on the retention of information collected during surveillance operations unless it pertains “to potential unlawful or terrorist activity”.

As the Associated Press revealed in 2011, Muslim populations in the New York area had been targeted by a pervasive spying apparatus known as the Demographic Unit, the fruit of collaboration between the NYPD and the CIA.

The network, which has since been promoted to the more politically correct title “Zone Assessment Unit”, relies on undercover officers and informants to perform critical national security tasks such as – the AP notes – “gather[ing] intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs often done by Muslims”.

According to Goldstein, the civil rights lawyers who filed the motion with Haight based their allegations on over 1,200 pages of reports on Zone Assessment Unit monitoring activities at Muslim establishments, including shops and cafes, where invasive demographic details were allegedly compiled and retained despite the lack of “potential unlawful or terrorist activity”:

“The NYPD is continuing a massive, all-encompassing dragnet for intelligence concerning anything connected with Muslim activity through intrusive infiltration and record-keeping about all aspects of life, politics and worship”, the court filing stated. “The NYPD operates on a theory that conservative Muslim beliefs and participation in Muslim organisations are themselves bases for investigation”.

How to grow terror at home

Of course, the absence of apparent “terrorist activity” is not always an obstacle for well-funded NYPD informants. The Egyptian informant Osama Eldawoody, for example, actively encouraged young Pakistani-American Shawahar Matin Siraj to undertake the bombing of a New York subway station – a plot for which Siraj was convicted despite his stipulation, recorded on tape, that he was against killing and that he would need to acquire his “mother’s permission” before signing on to the project.

These sorts of machinations lend a secondary, ironic layer of meaning to the so-called “homegrown threat” of Muslims “radicalised” in the West rather than abroad, a topic meriting especial hysteria from the NYPD.

In a lengthy 2007 police department report [PDF] complete with a colourful chart depicting “Trajectories of Radicalisation Inside the United States”, we learn about homegrown Syed Hashmi, a Brooklyn College alumnus who “travelled to the UK and joined-up [sic] with elements of al-Qaeda”. Hashmi is said to have become involved in “terrorist activities overseas” and then charged with “aiding the al-Qaeda plot to attack targets in London and… delivering military equipment and funds to radical Islamists in Pakistan and Afghanistan”.

A glance at other sources confirms the true heinousness of Hashmi’s mission. Particularly incriminating is a 2010 Huffington Post column entitled “Kidnapped by the State“, in which acclaimed author and professor Amitava Kumar explains:

[W]hen Hashmi was extradited to the US [from Britain], the FBI revealed that a man who had stayed at the detainee’s apartment in London had supplied “military gear” to al-Qaeda members in Pakistan. Then, Hashmi’s lawyer found out that the items being labelled as “military gear” were socks and rainproof ponchos. The rest of the details of the indictment remain shrouded in mystery.

Kumar also notes that, as a Brooklyn College student, Hashmi had been “articulate and very critical of the ways in which the civil rights of American citizens, especially Muslims, had been curtailed by the Bush administration”, while a part of his thesis had concerned “the government’s surveillance and harassment of four or five Muslim groups in the US”.

No hope for urban hip-hop gangsters

It’s worth noting that neither Bush nor his successor – two homegrown characters who have blatantly pursued “terrorist activities overseas” including continuous drone strikes on civilians - has been subjected to the “special administrative measures” applied to Hashmi, who was placed in solitary confinement for over three years prior to being convicted.

Efforts to provide the US Executive with a carte blanche to assassinate US citizens abroad might be viewed as constituting another kind of “homegrown threat”. The delivery of billions of dollars a year and items far more militarily destructive than socks and rain ponchos to a state that subsists on terror meanwhile further underscores US hypocrisy.

Incidentally, in its 2011 report on the NYPD’s “human mapping” of Muslim communities, the AP cited a former police official who described the programme as being modelled partly on Israeli operations in the West Bank. Moustafa Bayoumi, Brooklyn College professor and author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America, commented in an email to me on common denominators between security regimes in New York and occupied Palestine: “Both seek to become systems of total surveillance [and] both are invested in the idea of essentially dangerous Muslims.”

Total surveillance would indeed appear to be a prominent NYPD aspiration given the comprehensiveness of its list of common “radicalisation incubators” for germinating terrorists: cafes, student associations, non-governmental organisations, butcher shops, book stores, and so on.

According to the official “Homegrown Threat” manual [PDF], “[g]iving up cigarettes, drinking, gambling and urban hip-hop gangster clothes” may indicate a Muslim’s “progression along the radicalisation continuum” toward “Jihadisation”. The report fails to advise persons who continue to sport hip-hop gangster attire on how to go about avoiding disproportionate subjection to other violations of civil rights in the form of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk campaign.

Discriminatory mapping of Muslims clearly does nothing to resolve such homegrown threats as were on display during the December 2012 massacre in Connecticut, though it presumably contributes to the surge in anti-Muslim violence in the US – a natural byproduct of the selective elimination of human rights in favour of a narrative of fear.

As the current legal motion by US civil rights lawyers reminds us once again, the only unviolated Muslim right in this country is the right to oppressive surveillance.

Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, released by Verso in 2011. She is a member of the Jacobin Magazine editorial board, and her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books blog, The Baffler, Al Akhbar English and many other publications.

Hussein Rashid is a native New Yorker and Proud Muslim. Currently an instructor at the Center for Spiritual Inquiry at Park Avenue Christian Church and based at Hofstra University, he is deeply committed to interfaith work and is passionate about teaching. He believes we need to start talking more intelligently about Islam specifically, and religion generally.

Islamophobia is Real, Mr. Mayor—A New York City Muslim Explains

Post by HUSSEIN RASHID

My colleague, Haroon Moghul, wrote a masterful piece here called “What’s Islamophobia, and Do I Have It?” In it, he expounds on the myths that serve as the bases for Islamophobia. His voice is one of a growing chorus that shows that Islamophobia exists and has a persistent logic of its own, often grounded in anti-Semitic tropes.

In fact, one of the amazing elements of Islamophobia is the denial of its own existence—as Nathan Lean explains. In his article, Lean also offers several examples of the impact Islamophobia has had on the lives of Americans; Wajahat Ali has written about the fear and death that an Islamophobic environment sanctions; Erik Love gives us sociological background on the impact of Islamophobia. I want to offer a reflection of what a New York Muslim sees and hears as Islamophobia becomes so normalized that it becomes an institution.

Let’s begin with the double-standard tango. We hear about about an Alabama teen who is reported to have a near-operational plot to attack his school. He is allowed to go back home. A couple in New York, where one partner is a serial offender, is found with explosives in their apartment, ready to blow things up. In both cases, there is no ongoing coverage of these attempted terrorist plots. They are released on bail and told to behave themselves. Yet, any Muslim who meets another Muslim is tarred by six degrees of separation as being a potential terrorist, deserving of NYPD surveillance.

The situation of the NYPD is one of the great travesties of Muslim life in the city. The extensive program has, admittedly, resulted in no leads. We at RD have covered the betrayalof trust that Mayor Bloomberg’s policies represent. This betrayal is further compounded by the fact that members of the NYPD call it the “most corrupt police department,” and try to harass people for exercising their freedom of expression. Yet, by giving them unsupervised, unchallenged power, Mayor Bloomberg makes it easy for them start with the assumption that Muslims are guilty until proven innocent. And again, much like the Islamophobia Industry denying Islamophobia in the presence of a preponderance of evidence, no NYPD policy changes, despite the overwhelming evidence that the surveillance is misplaced.

This type of Islamophobia is becoming so ingrained into the mayor’s administration, that when Sunando Sen was slaughtered on the altar of Islamophobia, the mayor urged us to remember that while it was sad, it was okay because the real story was how cool the NYPD was. This statement was a day after he talked about the unappreciated deaths of the 34 people killed everyday by gun violence. Clearly, some causes of violence and some victims of violence are to be appreciated more than others.

If the words of Fox News can lead to an arson attack against a mosque, and general Islamophobia results in knifings in pizzerias, then the words and actions of the Mayor of New York have a much more profound impact.

Muslims in the city are bombarded by media coverage that paints us as suspect. The city’s police department paints us as suspect. Advertising in the veins of the city paints us as suspect. The mayor made a rousing speech during the Park51 controversy, but he has not internalized or exemplified those words. We are a community besieged by Islamophobia. Instead of building strong, resilient communities, we are left with “Be safe,” as our most potent protection. We cannot trust the police, we cannot trust people on the subway, and the mayor fiddles.

Islamophobia is real. People die because of it. Communities are weakened, and the only people profiting from it are the police state and the Islamophobia Industry. As a New York Muslim, I hope Mayor Bloomberg leaves us a better legacy than bike lanes and broken communities.

Mansoor Khalid is one of those regular, average Muslims who Geller termed a “savage.” Imagine her getting in Khalid’s cab and taking some candy, maybe she’d change her mind with some Skittles?

If you’re in New York be on the look out for the candycab! (h/t: Tarig):

This cab is a sweet ride

by MEENA HART DUERSON (NY Daily News)

Now that’s one sweet ride.

Taxi driver Mansoor Khalid is on a one-man mission to cheer up New Yorkers with a daily dose of candy.

“The New York life is not the easy life,” Khalid, 36, told the Daily News. “People are depressed. I see a lot of people stressed sitting back there.”

Khalid is no stranger to stress. He dubbed his taxi the NYC Candy Cab after his 2-year-old son died in April from a long battle with heart disease.

“I learned a lot of things,” he said of the trauma of losing his child, who underwent two heart transplants and lost a kidney before he passed away. “Life is too short.”

Khalid, who moved to New York from Pakistan in 1993 and has been driving a cab since 1997, had already seen the impact of small acts of generosity. During the two years he spent in the hospital with his son, he routinely brought coffee and desserts to the doctors and nurses when he got off his shift at 1 a.m.

“They got so happy when in the middle of the night I gave every person coffee,” he said. “I was so nice to them and they were so nice to me.”

After his son died, Khalid decided to bring his routine to the people he interacted with every day in his cab.

Sam Costanza Khalid said he was inspired to do something sweet after the death of his 2-year-old son.

“I was very depressed, losing my little boy,” he said. “Somehow, God gave me this idea. Now (I’m) chit-chatting and time is flying by!”

Though he doesn’t eat much candy himself — “Skittles, only” — Khalid offers a wide variety of sweets, and has started cataloguing his collection on Instagram. Fans can also follow him on Twitter (@CandyCabNYC), and he may even start a blog for his growing following.

One such fan was thrilled to discover the cab on a late night out last weekend, and quickly spread the word about him through social media.

“We all started freaking out,” said David Weiner, 27. “You don’t see piles of candy like that in adulthood. It’s just one of those things that reminds you you’re in New York and anything can happen.”

And Khalid’s unusual project has the full support of the city.

“We encourage drivers to go the extra mile in the name of customer service, and Mr. Khalid certainly does this,” said Taxi and Limousine Commission boss David Yassky. “We appreciate the loyalty he inspires in his passengers.”

Loyalty isn’t the goal, considering that Khalid responds to every hail, candy or no candy. His mission is to spread warmth.

“It’s a little thing,” he said, “but people get happy.”

Model for Underwraps Agency, NYC

There is no shortage of controversy about how Muslim women should dress.

Some argue Muslim women need to adopt Western-style fashion if they want to assimilate and flourish in Western culture. Others insist that modest dress is a non-negotiable article of the their faith, and challenge Western democracies to demonstrate their much-vaunted commitment to freedom by making room for everything from headscarves to burqas.

Is modest dress oppressive, or does it free women from superficial notions of beauty and command respect?  As the debate rages on, some Muslim women have staked the middle ground, where modest dress and fashion-forward styles are viewed as perfectly compatible.

A New York City modeling agency has brought bold interpretations of Islamic dress to the catwalk, turning heads and challenging stereotypes in the world of high fashion and beyond.

Modesty x Couture | New Muslim Modeling Agency in NYC

By Ada Lee, Schema Magazine

The American-born Muslim designer Nailah Lymus seeks out to bridge the gap between fashion and modesty. She does so by launching a new modeling agency in New York City for Muslim models.

The agency, Underwraps, will represent aspiring models that wish to work in the mainstream fashion industry without having to compromise their faith-led belief of modesty in dress. According to Lymus, it is a belief that requires clothes to be loose and not shape revealing, and that the only body parts that can be visible are your face, hands and feet.

“Being modest isn’t just a Muslim concept; it crosses many religions and cultures,” says Lymus. “Beautiful women who have always wanted to venture on to the catwalk but have declined because of their beliefs now have a chance.” Lymus’ goal with Underwraps, to me, seems to be creating a new space for reconciling concepts that are seemingly conflicting.

Lymus attracted attention when she first launched her line of clothing “Amirah Creations” last year. Her designs are hot but they’re also trail blazing—she’s determined to break stereotypes and limitations of what Muslim women can wear, and ultimately, how they can fit in without forfeiting their identities.

Underwraps Model

How will this agency fare in an industry where flesh-baring models are the standard? Judging by the comments online, it seems like everybody has their own idea of what modesty, Islam, modeling, and high fashion should be about. Many are skeptical of whether it’ll survive. Others are saying that there is no market for modest fashion.

But if fashion is an expression of the self, then what Lymus is doing resonates in Schema—Underwraps is to Muslim models as Schema is to hyphenated Canadians. It’s a space where 1st/2nd/3rd generations can navigate through cultures without having to compromise, without having to choose simply being one or the other.

So I say, you go, girl.

Ada Lee is a sixth year Human Geography/International Relations student who is interested in people and what makes them tick. The list ranges from social justice to astrology. She tries to get by in life by getting high on ideas, breathing deeply, and dreaming vividly. Follow 0415ADA at your own risk.

‘Blow Away’ Text Lands Muslim in Canada Jail 

MONTREAL — A Muslim businessman in Canada became a terror suspect for telling his sales staff in a text message to “blow away” the competition at a New York City trade show, a religious association said Friday.

Moroccan-born Saad Allami, who works as a telecommunications company sales manager, was arrested three days after he sent the message in January 2011 and detained while police searched his home, said the Muslim Council of Montreal.

“The whole time, the officers kept repeating to the plaintiff’s wife that her husband was a terrorist,” said court filings in a lawsuit filed by Allami, cited by local media. Allami was released after four hours of questioning.

Some of his colleagues reportedly claimed they were also held for hours at the Canada-US border on account of the accusations made against their boss.

“Mr Allami’s statements, when considered in the context of which they were given, were nothing to draw such alarm or suspicion,” said Salam Elmenyawi, president of the Muslim Council of Montreal.

“It is clear that his arrest was the result of racial profiling and a knee-jerk reaction to label him as a terror suspect simply due to his religious background.”

Allami is seeking Can$100,000 ($100,603) from Quebec’s provincial police, a police sergeant and the justice department for unlawful detention, unlawful arrest, loss of income and damage to his reputation.

The Quebec Superior Court is to hear the case on March 5.

The letter said Michael Bloomberg had 'defended the NYPD misconduct'. Photograph: Henny Ray Abrams/Reuters

New York Muslims to snub Bloomberg breakfast in surveillance protest

A group of prominent Muslim figures in New York City have said they will boycott an annual meeting on Friday with Mayor Michael Bloomberg in order to protest against police surveillance of their communities.

Bloomberg is scheduled to hold a multi-faith “Bagels with Bloomberg” breakfast with religious leaders from across the city on Friday morning, but the group has written to the mayor’s office outlining their reasons for refusing to attend.

In particular, the group says it is outraged at details that emerged earlier this year of a concerted effort by the New York police department to monitor activities of Muslims in New York. A series of reports by the Associated Press detailed the activities of a unit within the NYPD, called the Demographics Unit, that monitored daily life in Muslim communities, including eavesdropping in businesses and infiltrating mosques.

“According to the investigation, the police department monitored and collected information on New Yorkers at about 250 mosques, schools, and businesses throughout the city, simply because of their religion and not because they exhibited suspicious behavior,” the letter said.

It added: “Mayor Bloomberg, the extent of these civil rights violations is astonishing, yet instead of calling for accountability and the rule of law, you have thus far defended the NYPD’s misconduct. We, on the other hand, believe that such measures threaten the rights of all Americans, and deepen mistrust between our communities and law enforcement.”

The letter was signed by 15 prominent Muslim New Yorkers, including Khaled Lamada, head of the Muslim American Society, Omar Mohammedi, president of the Association of Muslim American Lawyers, Aisha al-Adawiya, founder of Women in Islam, and Iman Al Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid, who president of the Islamic Leadership Council of New York.

Another signatory, Linda Sarsour, the director of the Arab-American Association of New York, told the Guardian that the AP reports had confirmed her worst fears. “This confirmed what we already knew. It gave validity to our concerns that we are being spied upon just because of our religion. That undermines the security of all New Yorkers,” Sarsour said.

Sarsour added that lawsuits against the NYPD were being considered in the wake of the AP investigation, and called for an independent inquiry into the activities of the department when it came to monitoring Muslim communities.

So far, that call has fallen on deaf ears. Senior police figures have denied that they targeted Muslim communities in general, claiming they only followed leads. Bloomberg has also strongly and consistently backed the city’s police department and its tactics.

An investigation by the CIA had looked at its role in helping the NYPD and recently concluded no wrongdoing had taken place.

But Sarsour remained unsatisfied.

“How can someone from the CIA be the one to investigate the CIA? We are asking for an independent investigation,” she said, saying it should be carried out by the Department of Justice or a Congressional committee.

A spokesman for the mayor’s office downplayed the impact of the letter and the boycott, saying that other Muslim leaders were still planning on attending the breakfast gathering. “We have a couple dozen Muslim community leaders who have RSVP-ed that they will be at the breakfast, which is about the same as previous years,” said Stu Loeser.

NYPD officials also weighed into the spat, saying that the AP story had exaggerated its activities. “The NYPD lawfully follows leads in terrorist-related investigations and does not engage in the kind of wholesale spying on communities that was false alleged,” said Paul Browne, an NYPD deputy commissioner.

But the revelations about the Demographics Unit are not the only controversy surrounding NYPD actions around Muslim Americans and terrorism. An NYPD operation last month arrested a suspected “lone wolf” terrorist in the shape of New Yorker Jose Pimentel. NYPD officials hailed the arrest, which occurred after a lengthy undercover operation that saw an NYPD informant supply Pimental with bomb-making equipment, as a major triumph.

However, it later emerged that the FBI had passed on co-operating on the case, because it believed the target was not a viable threat. That has led to accusations that the NYPD “entrapped” Pimental.

“In our society, government is supposed to be public and you’re supposed to have a private life,” Moustafa Bayoumi, an English professor at Brooklyn College, said. “We’ve flipped that on its head.”

Police Eyes Hovering Over Muslims

By MICHAEL POWELL (NewYorkTimes)

Hello to you, and to whoever might be spying on us tonight.

This is how some Muslim New Yorkers have grown accustomed to opening meetings, on campus and at mosques from Steinway Street in Queens to Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Their assumption is that someone is always listening for hints of frustration and anger and disloyalty.

And that the listener works for the New York Police Department.

“In our society, government is supposed to be public and you’re supposed to have a private life,” Moustafa Bayoumi, an English professor at Brooklyn College, said. “We’ve flipped that on its head.”

The temptation is to dismiss such fears as post-9/11 paranoia. But The Associated Press, in a startling series, and the dependable Leonard Levitt, who writes the NYPD Confidential Web site, have put substantial meat on the bone of these suspicions.

They found that undercover officers, known as rakers, infiltrated hundreds of mosques; that a secret demographic unit compiled extensive dossiers on where Muslim New Yorkers eat, work, type on computers and transfer money to relatives; and that even imams who worked closely and courageously with the police have found themselves spied on and listed as “suspects.”

The Police Department’s reach extends to India, Pakistan and the Middle East, and less exotically to New Jersey, where undercover police cells have taken roost. And the department works with the F.B.I. and, more controversially, the C.I.A. in a way that sounds less fraternal than like a blood marriage.

Recently, the C.I.A. sent what The A.P. described as “one of its most senior clandestine officers” to work at One Police Plaza. It is highly unusual and troubling for the C.I.A. to work so closely with a police department.

So how should we parse these deeply unsettling findings? We live in an age of moral murk. It is to diminish none of the power of The A.P.’s work to acknowledge that some revelations fall into moral shadow rather than a Manichean play of pitch darkness and light.

Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly vibrates with certitude. He watched those towers transformed into calamitous clouds of dust. He learned of profound federal intelligence failures and bristles with a determination not to go there again.

“We’re paid to think the unthinkable,” Mr. Kelly told the City Council at a hearing 11 days ago. “We want to know how individuals traveling here communicate and conceal themselves. We go where the leads take us.”

I get that. The word “if” dominated our lives for many months after 9/11. Shortly afterward, my wife and I decided not to send our son to a fine public middle school in Lower Manhattan, for fear of having him too far removed from our Brooklyn home if. …

And I have felt a bubbling up of impatience with some religious leaders. The Al Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn was briefly home to the Blind Sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman, who helped plot the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, and since then other radicals are reported to have passed through. Does anyone there tend the door?

Councilman Brad Lander is one of those wrestling thoughtfully with such questions. But as he put pointed questions to Mr. Kelly at the hearing, the answers were illuminating in not terribly comforting ways.

It sounds, Mr. Lander said, as if you’re engaged in religious and ethnic profiling.

The commissioner shrugged. “I wouldn’t believe everything that I read,” he replied.

This fell well short of candor, which is unfortunate at a time when the police brass ask us to give them something like blind trust in their intentions. Afterward, an A.P. reporter asked, point-blank, Can you point to specific factual inaccuracies in our reporting?

And the commissioner replied: No.

This pattern recurs. Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, has a tendency to emphatically deny what has certifiably happened, whether the spying on and locking up of demonstrators for days at the Republican National Convention, or these recent revelations.

Credibility is like sand flowing through an hourglass. It runs out.

Professor Bayoumi rides subways and elevators and understands terrible possibilities. “I understand there need to be investigations,” he said. “But to base it on religious beliefs and what someone says at a meeting, rather than on actual leads …”

He paused, frustrated. “It weakens the bonds in a community and corrodes trust. Is that useful?”

Hate? Islamophobia? Oh no, it doesn’t exist! This Imam had it coming because he dared to be a Mooslim!

Two men accused in subway imam attack hit with hate crime charges

(NYDailyNews)

Two men accused of attacking a Muslim religious leader in a Manhattan subway station were the targets Thursday of a hate-crimes investigation.

The unidentified imam claimed the two men called him a “terrorist” and yelled ethnic and religious slurs when they assaulted him at the Canal  Street station early Wednesday, sources said.

Eddie Crespo, 28, of Staten Island, was charged with third degree assault as a hate crime and two counts of second degree robbery, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office said.

Albert Melendez, 30, of Manhattan, is expected to be arraigned later Thursday.

The incident happened at 3:25 a.m. on the northbound A-train platform, prosecutors said.

csiemaszko@nydailynews.com