OnIslam.net

NEW YORK – Venting anger at policies of the New York City Police Department, hundreds of American Muslims staged a rally and a public Friday’s prayers to protest a decade of ethnic and religious profiling of their neighborhoods.

“We are unapologetically Muslim and uncompromisingly American," Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid, who led Friday’s prayers, told the gathering Muslims, Voice of America reported on Saturday, November 19.

“Our American identity is based on ideals, and principals and affirmation of truth.

“We affirm the American dream,” he added.

Hundreds of Muslims gathered on Friday in New York’s Foley Square.

Chanting against NYPD surveillance, they held signs condemning the department for infiltrating mosques, spying on Muslim student groups, cataloguing Middle Eastern restaurants and compiling data on Arab cab drivers.

“The police watch us. Who’s watching the police?” reads one of the signs.

Another sign said "NYPD/CIA: Hands Off Our People."

The case erupted last month after the Associated Press revealed that the New York Police sent out undercover officers into ethnic communities to track daily life and monitor mosques as well as Muslim student organizations.

The report also revealed that NYPD intelligence, titled the most aggressive domestic intelligence agency in the US, had established so-called Demographics Unit using plainclothes police officers to monitor ethnic groups in the metropolitan region.

The uproar caused the City Council to grill New York Police Commissioner, Ray Kelly, in a hearing last October 2011 about the surveillance.

The questioning revolved around NYPD surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods and mosque areas identified by police as “hot spots”. The hearing was made before an audience of Muslim organizers, civil liberties lawyers and others.

Violation

A team from the National Lawyers Guild, a non-profit federation of lawyers, legal workers, and law students, came to the rally to observe interaction between the protesters and police.

“We all have the right to be free and equal citizens, have the right to free speech, to be free of a police state," Bina Ahmad, a Guild member, said.

Ahmad said government surveillance without probable cause violates the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.

She added there is no valid reason for infiltrating the Muslim community.

"We have the Fourth Amendment, your right against unreasonable search and seizure. And we’re all law-abiding citizens,” she added.

The accusations to the NYPD were not the first.

Last September, the CIA launched an investigation into cooperation with NYPD to spy on American Muslims.

The investigation was to focus on the work of a CIA adviser at the New York Police Department (NYPD) helping counter-terrorism efforts.

On that issue, Kelly said that a CIA employee “works with us” as an adviser, “he doesn’t have access to our investigative files.”

Earlier this year, the New York University's Center for Human Rights and Global Justice issues a report criticizing the tactic of US law enforcement agencies in sending paid informants into mosques to instigate and trap Muslims into terror plots.

The report, themed “Targeted and Entrapped: Manufacturing the ‘Homegrown Threat’, cited three high-profile domestic terrorism prosecutions which raised question marks about the role of the FBI and the New York City Police Department (NYPD) in creating the perception of “homegrown” terrorism.

New York is home to some 800,000 Muslims, about 10 percent of the city's population.

There are about 100 mosques throughout New York’s five boroughs.

The United States is home to an estimated Muslim minority of six to eight million.