The New York City Police Department (NYPD) intelligence division issued a 90-page report on August 15 entitled “Radicalization in the West and the Homegrown Threat,” which describes the trajectory of radicalization and follows the path of “non-radicalized” individuals to those who may be willing to commit acts of terror.
In the preface of the report, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly wrote that the bottom line of the report was to give a better understanding to local law enforcement agencies concerning the process by which Muslims become “radicalized,” which he said was one of the department’s priorities.
“This report paints with such a broad brush and casts suspicion on every Muslim,” Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) told the AmNews. Muslims are feeling kind of besieged, Hooper added.
The report, which estimates that there are 600,000 to 750,000 Muslims in the city, deals mostly with legal immigrants from the Middle East.
“The report was intended to explain how people become radicalized rather than to lay out specific strategies for thwarting terror plots. Hopefully, the better we’re informed about the process, the more likely we’ll be able to detect and disrupt it,” Kelly told a briefing with private security executives at 1 Police Plaza, according to MSNBC.
The report also talks about where these young Muslims could receive their terror indoctrination. “Terrorists often are indoctrinated in local ‘radicalization incubators’ such as cafes, flop houses, jails, butcher shops, cab driver hangouts and bookstores,” the report stated.
It also identifies the “four stages” to radicalization as pre-radicalization, self-identification, indoctrination and jihadization, and claimed the Internet drove and enabled the process.
“Whatever one thinks of the analysis contained in the report, its sweeping generalizations and mixing of unrelated elements may serve to cast a pall of suspicion over the entire American Muslim community.
“Despite raising suspicions against ordinary Muslims and the places they visit, the report itself states there is no useful profile to assist law enforcement or intelligence to predict who will follow this trajectory of radicalization,” CAIR board Chairman Parvez Ahmed wrote in a statement.
Shamsi Ali, deputy imam of the Jamaica Muslim Center in southeast Queens, told the Times Ledger that he had mixed feelings about the report.
“I think the report is giving us an alarm that we need to do more and that’s a positive thing,” he said. “Yes, extremism within Muslim communities is there, and it is our responsibility to do every possible thing to handle it.” But, he disagreed with what he called the report’s contention that extremists are multiplying in the city’s Muslim communities.
Reaction came as far away as Detroit. “This makes it sound like any pious, decent Muslim is a potential terrorist,” stated Victor Ghalib Begg, a founder of the Council of Islamic Organizations, according to Detnews.com. “Islamophobia is a bitter fruit from the same tree that produces anti-Semitism and racism,” he added.
Muslim leaders claim the NYPD report ignores efforts Muslims and people of Arab descent have made to cooperate with law enforcement to identify radicals who may embrace terrorism.
“The Hon. Min. Louis Farrakhan has been emphatic in his instructions to us that if we see anything suspicious, we are to call 911,” Min. Kevin Muhammad, the Nation of Islam’s representative in New York City, told the AmNews.
When asked by the AmNews if he felt the NYPD was looking specifically at the Nation of Islam (NOI), Min. Muhammad said he wasn’t sure if they were looking at any one group per se. “The NOI may be on the radar screen,” Muhammad said.
“Categorically, the NOI under the teachings of the Hon. Elijah Muhammad and the guidance of Min. Farrakhan are not the enemies of America,” Muhammad stated emphatically.
