CAIR CAMPAIGN TO PREVENT NYPD FROM USING THE THIRD JIHAD FOR COUNTERTERRORISM TRAINING
MEDIA COVERAGE
The New York Times, quoting the radical Islamic organization CAIR, has lambasted the New York Police Department for using the critically-acclaimed documentary The Third Jihad: Radical Islam's Vision for America in counterterrorism training. The Times published two news articles (http://tinyurl.com/nyt-ttj1, http://tinyurl.com/nyt-ttj2), as well as an editorial entitled "Hateful Film" (http://tinyurl.com/nyt-ttj3) all within two days. The articles were filled with innuendo and inaccuracies.
Background Articles About CAIR:
Media Links - Reactions to the NYT's Article
- The New York Times Collaborates with Hamas Front Group to Suppress the Truth
- American Muslim organization backs NYPD and Chief Kelly efforts to fight Islamist radicalization
- Lone Muslim Councilmember Defends NYPD's Screening of The Third Jihad
- The Third Jihad - Film's Muslim Narrator interviewed on The Lars Larson Show
NEW YORK TIMES - THE ARTICLE THAT KICKED OFF CAIR'S CAMPAIGN
In Police Training, a Dark Film on U.S. Muslims
January 23, 2012
Ominous music plays as images appear on the screen: Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs explode, executed children lie covered by sheets and a doctored photograph shows an Islamic flag flying over the White House.
"This is the true agenda of much of Islam in America," a narrator intones. "A strategy to infiltrate and dominate America. ... This is the war you don't know about."
This is the feature-length film titled "The Third Jihad," paid for by a nonprofit group, which was shown to more than a thousand officers as part of training in the New York Police Department.
In January 2011, when news broke that the department had used the film in training, a top police official denied it, then said it had been mistakenly screened "a couple of times" for a few officers.
A year later, police documents obtained under the state's Freedom of Information Law reveal a different reality: "The Third Jihad," which includes an interview with Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, was shown, according to internal police reports, "on a continuous loop" for between three months and one year of training.
During that time, at least 1,489 police officers, from lieutenants to detectives to patrol officers, saw the film.
News that police trainers showed this film so extensively comes as the department wrestles with its relationship with the city's large Muslim community. The Police Department offers no apology for aggressively spying on Muslim groups and says it has ferreted out.
But members of the City Council, civil rights advocates and Muslim leaders say the department, in its zeal, has trampled on civil rights, blurred lines between foreign and domestic spying and sown fear among Muslims.
"The department's response was to deny it and to fight our request for information," said Faiza Patel, a director at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, which obtained the release of the documents through a Freedom of Information request. "The police have shown an explosive documentary to its officers and simply stonewalled us."
Tom Robbins, a former columnist with The Village Voice, first revealed that the police had screened the film. The Brennan Center then filed its request.
The 72-minute film was financed by the Clarion Fund, a nonprofit group whose board includes a former Central Intelligence Agency official and a deputy defense secretary for President Ronald Reagan. Its previous documentary attacking Muslims' "war on the West" attracted support from the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a major supporter of Israel who has helped reshape the Republican presidential primary by pouring millions of dollars into a so-called super PAC that backs Newt Gingrich.
Commissioner Kelly is listed on the "Third Jihad" Web site as a "featured interviewee." Paul J. Browne, the Police Department's chief spokesman, wrote in an e-mail that filmmakers had lifted the clip from an old interview. The commissioner, Mr. Browne said, has not asked the filmmakers to remove him from its Web site, or to clarify that he had not cooperated with them.
None of the documents turned over to the Brennan Center make clear which police officials approved the showing of this film during training. Department lawyers blacked out large swaths of these internal memorandums.
Repeated calls over the past several days to the Clarion Fund, which is based in New York, were not answered. The nonprofit group shares officials with Aish HaTorah, an Israeli organization that opposes any territorial concessions on the West Bank. The producer of "The Third Jihad," Raphael Shore, also works with Aish HaTorah.
Clarion's financing is a puzzle. Its federal income tax forms show contributions, grants and revenues typically hover around $1 million annually — except in 2008, when it booked contributions of $18.3 million. That same year, Clarion produced "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West." The Clarion Fund used its surge in contributions to pay to distribute tens of millions of copies of this DVD in swing electoral states across the country in September 2008.
"The Third Jihad" is quite similar, in style and content, to that earlier film. Narrated by Zuhdi Jasser, a Muslim doctor and former American military officer in Arizona, "The Third Jihad" casts a broad shadow over American Muslims. Few Muslim leaders, it states, can be trusted.
"Americans are being told that many of the mainstream Muslim groups are also moderate," Mr. Jasser states. "When in fact if you look a little closer, you'll see a very different reality. One of their primary tactics is deception."
The film posits that there were three jihads: One at the time of Muhammad, a second in the Middle Ages and a third that is under way covertly throughout the West today.
This is, the film claims, "the 1,400-year war."
How the film came to be used in police training, and even for how long, was not clear. An undated memorandum from the department's commanding officer for specialized training noted that an employee of the federal Department of Homeland Security handed the DVD to the New York police in January 2010. Since then, this officer said, the video was shown continuously "during the sign-in, medical and administrative orientation process." A Department of Homeland Security spokesman said it was never used in its curriculum, and might have come from a contractor.
As it turned out, it was police officers who blew the whistle after watching the film. Late in 2010, Mr. Robbins contacted an officer who spoke of his unease with the film; another officer, said Zead Ramadan, the New York president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, talked of seeing it during a training session the previous summer. "The officer was completely offended by it as a Muslim," Mr. Ramadan said. "It defiled our faith and misrepresented everything we stood for."
When the news broke about the movie last year, Mr. Browne called it a "wacky film" that had been shown "only a couple of times when officers were filling out paperwork before the actual course work began."
He made no more public comments. Privately, two days later, he asked the Police Academy to determine whether a terrorism awareness training program had used the video, according to the documents.
The academy's commander reported back on March 23, 2011, that the film had been viewed by 68 lieutenants, 159 sergeants, 31 detectives and 1,231 patrol officers. The department never made those findings public.
And just one week later, the Brennan Center officially requested the same information, starting what turned out to be a nine-month legal battle to obtain it.
"It suggests a broader problem that they refuse to divulge this information much less to discuss it," Ms. Patel of the Brennan Center said. "The training of the world's largest city police force is an important question."
Mr. Browne said he had been unaware of the higher viewership of the film until asked about it by The New York Times last week.
There is the question of the officers who viewed the movie during training. Mr. Browne said the Police Department had no plans to correct any false impressions the movie might have left behind.
"There's no plan to contact officers who saw it," he said, or to "add other programming as a result."
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Bloomberg blasts use of movie during NYPD training
January 24, 2012
NEW YORK — Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday that New York police used "terrible judgment" in showing officers undergoing counterterrorism training a documentary-style film that says Muslim extremists are bent on establishing a worldwide Islamic regime.
Bloomberg said police have stopped showing "The Third Jihad," a 72-minute movie that has been branded inflammatory by some Muslim organizations and was produced by a conservative group called the Clarion Fund.
"Somebody exercised some terrible judgment," Bloomberg said in Albany. "As soon as they found out about it, they stopped it."
The criticism was unusual for Bloomberg, who in recent months has vigorously defended the police department's counterterrorism efforts after an Associated Press investigation exposed a secret program to gather intelligence on Muslim neighborhoods.
Bloomberg said neither he nor Police Commissioner Ray Kelly knew about the film being shown.
"The Third Jihad" shows TV images of Hezbollah rocket attacks, children being held hostage by Muslim militants and a woman it says was arrested in Iran for wearing immodest clothing. It shows images it says were taken from Islamic videos and websites, including a doctored picture of an Islamic flag flying over the White House.
It accuses Muslim extremists of posing as moderates and charges several Muslim organizations with being soft on terrorism. It accuses Middle Eastern studies departments at some American universities of supporting hard-line religious governments. Speakers interviewed in the film say "Islamism is like cancer" and urge a "battle for our civilization."
The film is narrated by M. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Foundation for Democracy, based in Phoenix. Jasser rejected Bloomberg's criticism.
"I could not disagree more," Jasser said. "For him to say that without contradicting any of the facts that are presented in the movie is, I think, careless."
The New York-based Clarion Fund did not return calls for comment. Its website, Radicalislam.org, says Clarion was founded in 2006 by Raphael Shore. Shore is a former leader of Aish HaTorah, a chain of Jewish educational centers.
The movie was shown on a continuous loop while officers were signing in for counterterrorism training sessions from October to December 2010, according to police documents obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank at New York University. As many as 1,489 officers who underwent training, including 68 lieutenants, may have seen it, the documents say.
Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne said that the police brass did not approve the use of the movie for training and that the decision to play it was made by a sergeant, who has since been reprimanded.
"This was never used in training, period. It was never authorized for use in training, period," Browne said.
The screening of the film inside the 36,000-member police department has been known for months, but police previously said only a few officers had seen it. They stopped showing the film after a trainee complained.
The film was used as "intermission filler" and to "provide information for students during breaks to keep their attention focused on counterterrorism issues," Assistant Chief George W. Anderson wrote in one of the documents obtained by the Brennan Center.
Anderson wrote that he believed the video was given to police by someone in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Homeland Security said it didn't authorize the distribution of the movie.
This is not the first time a law enforcement agency has been criticized for its counterterrorism training materials. The FBI was criticized last year for presentations used in a training session that painted a negative picture of Islam. The FBI and other federal agencies pledged to review all of its training materials.
Muslim activists said films like "The Third Jihad" are one-sided and teach police cadets that all Muslims are suspect.
"It's clearly a propaganda, anti-Muslim film," said Linda Sarsour, a member of the Muslim-American Civil Liberties Coalition. "It's overly dramatic, piecing together things out of context and threading it together to make this very false narrative about Muslim-Americans."
A recent AP series detailed efforts by the New York Police Department to infiltrate Muslim neighborhoods and mosques with aggressive programs designed by a CIA officer. Documents reviewed by the AP revealed that undercover officers known as "rakers" visited businesses such as Islamic bookstores and cafes, chatting up store owners to gauge their views. They also played cricket and eavesdropped in ethnic clubs.
The surveillance efforts have been credited with enabling police to thwart a 2004 plot to bomb the Herald Square subway station.
Critics said the efforts amount to ethnic profiling and violate court guidelines that limit how and why police can collect intelligence before there is evidence of a crime.
WATCH THE THIRD JIHAD
HUFFINGTON POST
NYPD Training Included Viewing Of Anti-Muslim Movie 'The Third Jihad'
January 24, 2012By Sonja Sharp
MANHATTAN -- A movie about radical Islam was shown to nearly 1,500 NYPD recruits for up to a year of their training, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
Police chiefs originally said the film, called The Third Jihad and promoting an image of American Muslims as radicalized, had been mistakenly screened "a couple of times."
But documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Law show it had been shown "on a continuous loop" for up to a year of training.
The revelation has raised questions about how the police force will repair its already strained relations with New York's large Muslim community.
Among its assertions, The Third Jihad claims that most American Muslims are involved, at least tangentially, in promoting terror, according to Tom Robbins of the Village Voice who initially discovered that recruits were being forced to watch the film in January of 2011.
"After it was over, I was thinking, 'What was that?' " an officer who saw the movie told Robbins for his 2011 article. "It was so ridiculously one-sided. It just made Muslims look like the enemy. It was straight propaganda."
At that time, police said that the film, which features an interview with Police Comissioner Ray Kelly, had only been screened for a few officers.
But a Freedom of Information request by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law revealed that it had been used far more often than initially indicated, the Times reported Tuesday.
The film was financed and produced by the right-wing Clarion Fund. It seems to have landed in the department in September of 2010, coming from either the Department of Homeland Security or a contractor, the Times reported.
In addition to graphic footage of the Beslan school massacre in Russia and other acts of terror, the film repeatedly shows a black Islamic flag flying over the White House.
The revelation comes as the NYPD continues to battle intense scrutiny over its extensive domestic spying program, which targeted Muslims across the city.
It monitored "every aspect of Muslim life and built databases on where innocent Muslims eat, shop, work and pray," according to the Associated Press.
An NYPD spokesman told The Times it no longer uses the film.
