In Police Training, a Dark Film on U.S. Muslims - The New York Times
THE THIRD JIHAD - <https://www.youtube.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/
In Police Training, a Dark Film on U.S. Muslims
YouTube
An Islamic flag atop the White House in “The Third Jihad.” By MICHAEL POWELL
Published: 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.
YouTube
Footage of an interview with the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, is used in the movie.
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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 terror plots.
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.”
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NYT Readers' Comments:
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- some guy
- Brooklyn
NYT Pick"One of their primary tactics is deception."
Huh. Seems like you could say that about Ray Kelley, Paul Browne, and the NYPD. When are we going to get a department that isn't constantly making up stories to cover its actions?
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- Retired Cop
- New York
NYT PickThis is nothing new. Ray Kelly only cares about his political career. He wants to be mayor and has been since day one in the police academy some 50 years ago. He will step on anyone- Muslims, blacks, catholics, Irish, Latinos, Wall Street- ANYONE- even his own officers in order to gain this goal. End of story. OF COURSE he approved this video. It was shown at unit training sessions throughout the city at roll calls. Paul Browne releases a press statement to the Times and it's all good- a few officers disciplined, a new Operations or Interim Order and it's on with the show, business as usual: illegal summons quotas, illegal stop and frisks, fudging of crime stats- yep, this is Ray Kelly's NYPD. A joke. If the people in this City had a collective iota of intelligence he should be arrested and thrown into jail, instead he's throwing parties at Harvard Club on the Police Foundation's dime and hanging out with Ron Lauder and Jay Z.....
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- ZoetMB
- New York
NYT PickThat's absurd. Most Muslims living in the U.S. are peace loving people who came here to escape the intolerance of their homeland. I have personally worked with Muslims and all the people who I worked with were sweet and loving people who I would trust with my grandchildren.
That's not to say that there aren't any Muslims in the U.S. who hate this country and wish us harm, but there are Christians and Jews here who also hate this country or at the very least, hate the ideal of what it represents. There are a lot of Timothy McVeigh's out there.
At a company I recently worked at for five years, Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Jews and maybe a Buddhist or two (as well as some Atheists) all worked together. It's not that everyone loved each other, but if they didn't, it had NOTHING to do with their religion. That's the America that I love. Not the paranoid America that thinks every Muslim is a terrorist. We were wrong when we ostracized the Japanese during WWII and we're wrong now.
Having said that, we still have to defend ourselves against terrorists. But raising paranoid fantasies about terrorists taking over our government is ridiculous. It reminds me of that TV movie from decades ago which I think was called Amerika in which we lose a war to Russia. The purpose of that show was to make us paranoid about the Soviets and hate them. All we've done now is changed the team that we've decided we're supposed to hate.
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- princeknyc
- New York
NYT Pickthe country has been gripped by xenophobia! if this is what is being shown to police officers of New York, the most liberal of all cities in this country, wonder what's being shown to the rest of the police forces? It's no longer the land of the free...its the land of the persecuted.
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- Rev. Jim Bridges
- Arlington, WA
NYT PickWhy is not the leadership of the police department held accountable for the showing of this piece of propaganda? Likewise, why were not officers who used violence against non-violent demonstrators in the Occupy movement prosecuted for assault? When police behavior is unacceptable, there needs to be serious negative consequences, not some mere reprimand.
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- Paul King
- SF
I'm the son of a Holocaust survivor.
All you need to do is substitute Jew for Muslim in that film and you have the same Nazi garbage propaganda which whipped up the murderous behavior that cost my father his entire family, including his pregnant wife.
Shame on that Jewish billionaire from Vegas - the Newt sugar daddy.
This real Jew with real Jewish values and a sense of the injustice heaped on us would take arms to defend Muslims against fascists like him.
I'd be proud to do it!
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- NU
- New Jersey
Truly saddens me as a Muslim and concerns me for the future of my children. Most people believe these days that they have evolved to a higher social consciousness yet, it is my belief that the human instincts that led to holocaust and in more recent times the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia or the mass killings in Rwanda are not far from the surface of our modern day sophistication. What's more shocking is that these inflammatory demagoguery is funded by pro-Israel groups who are of the Jewish faith, honestly I ask, How can you be so irresponsible with your millions and your conscience? How can you look at yourself when that day might come when the fruits of the seeds you sow come in the form of a major atrocity against innocent humans who are happen to be Muslims. I for one am only left with a heavy heart to see what this country is coming to, and I dread what the future holds for myself and my coreligionists.
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- MJT
- San Diego,Ca
So sad, there are forces dedicated to destroying our freedoms and i am not talking about Muslims.
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- Nassir Hussein
- NJ
How outrageous and vile.
And to see Sheldon Adelson the Las Vegas Sands casino magnate (benefactor of Gingrich) funding the Clarion Fund which is in turn made up of supporters of the most militant Jewish settler movement in Israel is certainly food for thought.
Which begs the question why these people are so bent on dehumanizing Muslims?
Imagine the outrage if a Muslim group created a well-funded movie about Jewish Americans with the threat of Judaism taking over US gov't? And then that movie being shown to the very people entrusted with the job to protecting that minority in the NYPD. If anyone can show any hate film to "educate" the Police Dept., then where are the safe-guards?
Someone should be fired over this, starting with Commissioner Kelly. Incident after incident, from spying on peaceful Muslim neighborhoods, to infiltraing Muslim owned shops and religious place of worship... shows him to be ignorant and aloof about tolerating such anti-Muslim hate in his Dept. at best or deliberately and actively participating in its propagation at worse.
Its time to show some leadership Mr. Bloomberg, and if you're unable then its time for a new leadership and a new mayor who won't condone such affront to the Constitutional rights of an unpopular religious minority.
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- E. Rodriguez
- New York, NY
The level of ignorance and xenophobia in this country is astounding. The best thing the next mayoral administration can do is remove Raymond Kelly he's a disgraceful undisciplined cowboy that uses the police force to trample our rights rather than protect them.
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- Martha Shelley
- Portland, Ore.
I am Jewish and I am outraged (though alas, not shocked) by this "training film." It is just as vile as anything put out by the Klan or the Nazis. We need some kind of educational program to counter the evil effects of this propaganda, it should be made available to every police officer who was forced to view that film.
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- Mark
- South Florida
So a hard-core supporter of the Israel lobby is behind propaganda films demonizing Muslims?
Shocking, isn't it?
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- workerbee
- Florida
It's pretty obvious that a 9-11 reactionary anti-Muslim inquisition has been in progress since the Bush-Cheney era. Most terrorist attacks in this country are committed by Christians, such as Timothy McVeigh and the anti-abortionists, but there is never any intention of organizing an anti-Christian reaction.
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- Eric
- New York
Kelly ought to be forced to resign over this. It's disgusting and made more so by the fact they NYPD tried to cover it up and has made no statements to recant the content of the film.
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- Dave Scott
- Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut
- Trusted
The problem is not Islam, but rather some religious zealots. (The Pennsylvania Dutch are certainly religious zealots, but if they demonize the outside world they do not try to defeat these demons but rather just live among them while preserving their faith.) Believing Christians can be every bit as nasty as believing Muslims, although fortunately they do not at present control any nations (except perhaps Serbia, although the Serbian sickness is not primarily religious), while the Muslims have Saudi Arabia.
There is certainly a Christian plot to take over the United States, and it is quite strong in some states and in parts of our government (including the infamous Congressional frat house) and military (including the US Air Force Academy). Its members often hide their real views to get elected to such venues as school boards (when you are fighting for God, the end justifies the means), and are then bewildered when they are not reelected after coming out of their closets. They are a much greater threat to our way of life than Islamic jihadists.
The job of containing or fixing religious extremists should be done mainly by non-extremists of the same religion. But these non-extremists routinely shirk their duty.
C
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- rabbit
- nyc
Not only has Mr Browne lied to the public but both Commissioner Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg have continued to maintain the film was shown "once" or a few times.
The Third Jihad is not just un-PC; it is incendiary, adding fuel to fire at a time of anti Muslim hysteria. Of course some officers are too smart for this but not all. The failure of NYPD to take responsiblity is repeated in their lack of willingness to retrain or indeed submit to any meaningful oversight.
It is not just about the film but who has been allowed to serve as consultants. That lack of proper standards are an issue in homeland security related trainings across the nation. There is a market for this paranoid but all too often sloppy and inaccurate message; but lack of professinalism does not make us safer.
Mr Bloomberg should stop enabling the Commissioner. His legacy is at stake. Even more important, this sort of high handed approach to policing tears at our social bonds while seting a bad example for PDs in the rest of the country. This is the right wing ideology that has nested in our midst like a viper.
And as we know, many of the presidential and congressional candidates are hosting this same poisonous serpent.
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- some guy
- Brooklyn
NYT Pick"One of their primary tactics is deception."
Huh. Seems like you could say that about Ray Kelley, Paul Browne, and the NYPD. When are we going to get a department that isn't constantly making up stories to cover its actions?
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- ordinary person
- America
Now be honest. Run an article about the profound anti-Semitic and anti-Christian bigotry that pervades the Islamic world. Presenting Muslims as constant victims when Islamic societies are deeply emeshed in hatred against non-Muslims is neither convincing nor accurate.
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- Retired Cop
- New York
NYT PickThis is nothing new. Ray Kelly only cares about his political career. He wants to be mayor and has been since day one in the police academy some 50 years ago. He will step on anyone- Muslims, blacks, catholics, Irish, Latinos, Wall Street- ANYONE- even his own officers in order to gain this goal. End of story. OF COURSE he approved this video. It was shown at unit training sessions throughout the city at roll calls. Paul Browne releases a press statement to the Times and it's all good- a few officers disciplined, a new Operations or Interim Order and it's on with the show, business as usual: illegal summons quotas, illegal stop and frisks, fudging of crime stats- yep, this is Ray Kelly's NYPD. A joke. If the people in this City had a collective iota of intelligence he should be arrested and thrown into jail, instead he's throwing parties at Harvard Club on the Police Foundation's dime and hanging out with Ron Lauder and Jay Z.....
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- abravo
- NY
Once a country becomes muslim, ALL other religion believers become second and third class citizens, in Saudi Arabia even the building of churches is not allowed, so tell me you want to live in that world.
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- TPierre Changstien
- bk,nyc
Excellent. Let the moral preening of self-righteous Progressives begin...
For the record, this stuff happens every day in the world...
"Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs explode, executed children lie covered by sheets"
And, although you may want to ignore it, islam is an expansionist and totalitarian ideology that seeks to dominate the world, making this warning singularly un-exceptional:
"and a doctored photograph shows an Islamic flag flying over the White House".
You folks need to wake up to reality. No one saying every muslim is a terrorist and wants to impose sharia on the world. But a lot of them are and ignoring that is going to get more people killed.
Thank goodness someone in NYPD has the good sense to transmit this knowledge to the excellent rank and file that have kept NYC safe since 9/11/01 and foiled countless terrorist attacks.
We need more frank and honest discussion such as this.
Right now we are still living in the bubble of security produced by the extraordinary measures put in place after 9/11/01. But those advantages are ebbing over time, as radical Progressives seek to dismantle all the progress we've made attempting to stay ahead of people who want to kill us. So, when more people die in the next mega attack, the blood will be on your hands Progressives.
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- princeknyc
- New York
NYT Pickthe country has been gripped by xenophobia! if this is what is being shown to police officers of New York, the most liberal of all cities in this country, wonder what's being shown to the rest of the police forces? It's no longer the land of the free...its the land of the persecuted.
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- Chris
- New York
I am no Islamophobic, but there are lot of truth in the video, Islam is a total way of life. It knows no separation of church and state, of sacred and secular.
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- Steve
- Chicago
So the NYPD in effect delegated a piece of its training to an outfit that "shares an office" with a hard-line Israeli outfit? NY has a police department whose leaders did not recognize the massive unprofessionalism of what they have allowed to happen. If they are incapable of recognizing that, they are too stupid to be in their jobs. Ask for their resignations.
If I were a lawyer, I'd be quite curious to know more, whether my Muslim client was facing a criminal charge or suing the City and a cop for having helped him to trip and lose a few teeth while he was unluckily breaking his nose on the hood of a car. I hope someone figures out a way to make this cost the city millions. Try sending the bill to the Clarion Fund!
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- Citixen
- NYC
Sad. Typical knee-jerk response by security know-nothings who think Muslims have a lock on religious fanaticism. You want to see Christian on Christian, or Christian on Muslim atrocities? Talk to anyone from the former Yugoslav republics. It was happening on our TV's for 10 years (if you cared to pay attention) before 9-11. They all have their fanatics. To scapegoat an entire religion and/or ethnic group because some fanatics happen to come from the same faith would be (and is) denounced as 'intolerable' and 'unfair' when the fanatic(s) are Christian. But when they're Muslim, well then that's just fine and dandy. But to show such a biased and unbalanced to our police force? That's just asking for trouble. And that kind of trouble the NYPD doesn't need. They are already under-paid, over-stressed, and prone to over-reacting because of our nation's insane patchwork of gun laws. Now we're using propaganda videos to target a city minority, and then we put guns in the hands of the viewers? Are we expecting good things from this? Wouldn't cooperation from the vast majority of peaceful Muslims be a better source of information than from hoping for the best by having to dig it out from a threatened and fearful community? When are we going to be smarter than our enemies on this stuff? Geez.
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- pdurk
- Chicago
Sounds like a truthful video. Christians are slaughtered. That's the truth. It could happen here. That's the truth. Actually they already have slaughtered Americans haven't they??? Not every Muslim is a terrorist. But a lot of them are. Deal with it.
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- Salam
- Texas
really? did you research all 1.4 billions of them? what about Tim Mcveigh, a christian, who slaughtered innocents including women and children, or the by Norwegian self-described christian crusader, driven by his xenophobia to massacre in cold blood dozens of his own countrymen, or the zealous violent Christian anti-abortionists who kill doctors and bomb clinics, or the christian Nazis who exterminated jews, or the crusaders who in the middle-ages slaughtered in the name of Jesus tens of thousands of Muslim and Jews, or imperial colonialism practiced by Christian Europeans to pillage and occupy Arab & muslim lands in the 20th century? shouldn't we by your own logic then condemn Christianity and label Christians as terrorists?
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- Rev. Jim Bridges
- Arlington, WA
NYT PickWhy is not the leadership of the police department held accountable for the showing of this piece of propaganda? Likewise, why were not officers who used violence against non-violent demonstrators in the Occupy movement prosecuted for assault? When police behavior is unacceptable, there needs to be serious negative consequences, not some mere reprimand.
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- KingCranky
- El Paso, TX
Unfortunately, fear sells very well for The Clarion Fund, especially if it can paint most Muslims as "the enemy".
So, to play devil's advocate, what assurances can anyone from the Clarion Fund give that the narrator for "The Third Jihad", Zuhdi Jasser a Muslim himself, isn't part of that "Jihad", and isn't playing the organization for the bunch of xenophobic fools they are?
The Clarion Fund owes an apology to the family and friends of the Muslim first responders killed on 9-11, and those Muslims killed while serving in our armed forces over in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If those running the Clarion Fund had any integrity, it would release its donor list and sources of funding, ASAP.
