On Monday, the New York Post reported on a website where would-be jihadists have been “meticulously dissecting” convicted terrorist Faisal Shahzad’s failure to detonate a car bomb in Times Square in 2010. The purpose of this dissection is to improve the chances of the next bomber’s ability to carry out a mission of destruction. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), who has distributed these analyses to law enforcement officials, consider them critical in understanding violent jihad. Thus, it is a little more than ironic that the New York City Police Department (NYPD) has been brow-beaten by the American left and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to stop showing the anti-extremist film, The Third Jihad to police personnel. Thankfully, some Muslims have seen through the political intimidation. Enter Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD).
Dr. Jasser, a devout Muslim, refuses to buy into the conventional “wisdom” embraced by both the New York Times and CAIR, both of whom see any attempt to inform police personnel (or anyone else) about the aspirations of violent jihadism as tantamount to Islamophobia. “Last week’s controversy over the NYPD’s showing of the documentary ‘The Third Jihad,’ which I narrated, has brought horrendous distortion of the film and my body of work against radical Islam,” writes Jasser. “It seems obvious that The New York Times, and in its wake the NYPD and Mayor Bloomberg, is buying into blatant inaccuracies peddled by the Council on American-Islamic Relations–a group named in federal testimony as linked to the terrorist organization Hamas and one to which the FBI has broken off all ties.”
Times reporter Michael Powell’s latest article, “In Police Training, a Dark Film on Muslims,” is hardly news. It is essentially the re-telling of a story published by the uber-leftist Village Voice newspaper over a year ago, describing the film as “a full-length color feature, with more explosions than a Transformers sequel and more blood-splattered victims than an HBO World War II series.” The Voice contends the film is a “spectacularly offensive smear of American Muslims.” Powell augments that theme. “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,” he writes.
If Mr. Powell has bothered to do anything resembling honest reporting, he might have informed his readers that the flag in question can be found in a picture of a poster held by Muslim radical themselves, demonstrating at the site of the 9/11 terror attack in New York during an anti-jihadist rally on February 1st–2006. Powell further notes that the film was shown even as the NYPD “wrestles with its relationship with the city’s large Muslim community” and, as a result of the film’s dissemination, “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.”
-read on at link-
