The New York Police Department has revised a highly touted report on the threat of homegrown terrorism in response to complaints that it was an insult to law-abiding, observant Muslims. A coalition of Muslim groups yesterday applauded the two-page clarification tucked into “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat” — a study first circulated in law enforcement circles and on the Internet in 2007. The new wording says the NYPD “understands that it is a tiny minority of Muslims who subscribe to al-Qaida’s ideology of war and terror.”
The clarification also calls the city’s Muslim community “our ally,” and “as such, the NYPD report should not be read to characterize Muslims as intrinsically dangerous or intrinsically linked to terrorism, and that it cannot be a license for racial, religious, or ethnic profiling.”
Despite welcoming the changes, the New York-based Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition accused the NYPD of not doing enough to publicize them. Also, the study still has passages that “criminalize religious behaviors,” said Aliya Latif of the New York office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a coalition member.
Police officials have denied the report stereotypes Muslims, even in its original form. The changes merely “make explicit what was already implicit” regarding the departments’ respect for the community, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said.
The study was based on an analysis of a series of domestic plots thwarted since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It was prepared by senior analysts with the NYPD Intelligence Division who traveled to Hamburg, Germany; Madrid and other overseas spots to confer with authorities about similar cases.
The report concluded that homegrown terrorists often were indoctrinated in local “radicalization incubators,” including cafes and bookstores, that are “rife with extremist rhetoric.”
The report warns that potential terrorists “are not on the law enforcement radar.” They “look, act, talk and walk like everyone around them,” it adds.
{1010WINS/Noam Amdurski-Matzav.com Newscenter}
