The New York Police Department is caught up in a tangled spat with the city’s Muslim community and assorted liberal groups over counter-terrorism measures that seem to have crossed the line into rank anti-Muslim bigotry. The department’s chief spokesman has made matters worse by repeatedly offering explanations of police actions that turned out to be false. Some critics are now calling for his dismissal.
In a sense, it’s just the latest case — several cases, actually — of minority rights versus over-zealous law enforcement, post-9/11. This case is more complicated than most, however.
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The screening of a shockingly anti-Muslim film at an NYPD counter-terrorism training facility brings the Jewish community into the dispute. The 72-minute film, “The Third Jihad,” is produced and distributed by a small non-profit organization, the Clarion Fund, that shares staff and an address with a well-known, Jerusalem-based Orthodox outreach organization, Aish HaTorah. This adds a layer of volatility to discussions of the film’s anti-Muslim bias.
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“The Third Jihad” purports to show that “radical Islam” is at war with the West in a “battle for the very civilization and way of life that we believe in,” in the words of one on-screen expert, Walid Phares, a Clarion board member. True, the film opens with a claim, in text on a blank screen, that it “is not a film about Islam. It is about the threat of radical Islam. Only a small percentage of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are radical.” But the rest of the film undercuts that assertion with a barrage of claims about the irreconcilable values and “relentless determination” of Muslims and Islam.
