Here is a post from the Commonweal blog site today.
Religious liberty and NYPD spying on Muslims
February 24, 2012, 11:34 am
Posted by Paul Moses
The Associated Press has continued to expose the broad sweep of the New York Police Department’s spying on Muslims – not only in New York City but, as The AP now reports, elsewhere in the Northeast. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly have said police are just following leads. “We don’t stop to think about the religion,” Bloomberg said in August. ” We stop to think about the threats and focus our efforts there.” But, as the excellent investigative news Web site ProPublica notes, newly disclosed documents show that’s not the case.
One can understand why the NYPD sees a need to go beyond the surveillance local police typically do; federal authorities shamefully failed to protect the city against terrorism in the past, so Kelly has tried to fill the void. Before you draw a conclusion one way or the other, I suggest that you peruse a 60-page internal NYPD report that the AP uncovered. In it, intelligence officers catalog just about anything remotely Muslim in the city of Newark, N.J.
Are you comfortable with this? There has been much discussion on dotCommonweal and elsewhere about freedom of religion for Catholics. Is religious liberty an issue here? Or should we say this is to be expected and focus solely on our own liberties?
Just asking.
This deeply troubles me. I like to think myself a constitutionalist, and firstly singling a group out on the basis of their religious affiliation and their extending of their police force violate the first, fourth, eighth, eleventh, and fourteenth amendments. It is their right to worship freely or have their worship prohibited and keeping surveillance on Muslims simply because they are Muslims violates that right as well as begins down the road to an oppressively Christian system. There is also the idea of the fourth amendment, if they aren't involved in violating the first they are violating this one because outside of being Muslim there is no crime being committed and that qualifies it as not a justifiable action by the police of the state of New York. Then there's the question of the eighth amendment; being the subject of surveillance is an excessive punishment for worshiping your God, and it would seem unusual when put like this: the state of New York is watching me because I am a member of a religion. Accounting for my inclusion of the eleventh amendment, it seems clear that New York is going outside of it's state to preform these operations. Then there's the fourteenth amendment which New York would be violating multiple provisions of the first section of it: denying due process, state is making moving to break people's rights, and jurisdiction comes up again.
ReplyDeleteSo, yes, religious liberty is at stake here. I also don't think it's just about Muslim or Christian and definitely not about our personal liberty. but everybody's liberty. On one side you have the people who fear sharia and things like this http://exm.nr/xwEwtB, where a man was assaulted for dressing up like a zombie Muhammad and then assaulted and then the case was thrown out due to religious offense. on the other side we have people like Rick Santourm trying to force women to conform to his narrow christian beliefs of no contraception. Discrimination is on all sides and it would take everybody to keep our liberties together.
I have to say, as the daughter of an FBI agent, the niece of a policeman, the goddaughter as an FBI agent, and a Cadet myself, I see the need for the extra security. If you think about the fact that we are at war, this reaction is tame compared to the past. At least we aren't setting up "War Relocation Camps" again, right? I'm not saying this extra surveillance is 100% ok, but I do recognize the need to sacrifice certain rights for the safety of the people. NYPD isn't closing down Mosques, they aren't beating or killing Muslims, they're just being extra careful. This won't last forever, but while we're at war, I think it's to be expected.
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