Appeals Court Condescends <br>To Muslims and Jews <br>And New York’s Police

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What an obnoxious opinion from the Third United States Circuit Court of Appeals. The court reopened the lawsuit against New York City for keeping an eye out for terrorist plots in the Muslim community. The judges’ opinion insults just about everyone — Jews, Muslims and the NYPD.

This is the case that arose from New Jersey. It was filed against New York by six Muslims, two groups that run mosques, two Muslim-owned businesses and a Muslim students association at Rutgers.

They claim their rights were infringed when the NYPD set up an intelligence program that kept an eye out for danger within Muslim communities in the city and beyond, after 9/11. The lawsuit was levied by the same law firm that brought the stop-question-and-frisk case, the Center for Constitutional Rights.

There’s a difference, though. Mayor de Blasio refused to defend the police in the stop-question-and-frisk case. In this case, his administration, like Mayor Bloomberg’s, has been defending the cops.

And for good reason. More than 2,600 persons were killed in New York City alone by Islamist fanatics who attacked the country on 9/11. The NYPD’s surveillance effort, a modest program known as the Demographics Unit, was set up the following year. Mr. de Blasio has since ended it.

The surveillance included such things as cameras to watch mosques, the collection of license-plate numbers and infiltration of organizations. The plaintiffs insist the cops “monitored sermons, meetings, conversations and religious practices.”

This cut no mustard with United States District Judge William J. Martini. He tossed out the case early last year, saying the plaintiffs hadn’t “alleged facts from which it can be plausibly inferred that they were targeted solely because of their religion.”

“The more likely explanation for the surveillance was a desire to locate budding terrorist conspiracies,” he wrote, adding: “The most obvious reason for so concluding is that surveillance of the Muslim community began just after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”

At the time, I said the judge deserved a Pulitzer Prize for common sense. He suggested the Muslims’ real beef ought to be with the Associated Press, since its exposure of the NYPD’s monitoring of in the Muslim community is what brought any stress on them.

What makes the Third Circuit’s opinion so obnoxious isn’t its reversal of Judge Martini. The appellate panel, after all, didn’t rule on the merits. It simply said that the claims had met the various tests that required them to be given a full hearing.

That’s a whole rigmarole, but fair enough. Just spare New York the suggestion that the actions of a police department run by Commissioner Raymond Kelly in an administration headed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg should be viewed alongside the most notorious cases of bigotry.

The Third Circuit did this toward the end of its opinion, where it asserted that “we have been down similar roads before.” It cited “Jewish-Americans during the Red Scare, African-Americans during the Civil Rights Movement, and Japanese-Americans during World War II.”

“Outrageous” is how Mr. Kelly describes that. The fact is, there were, just to pick one example, some — by no means all or even most — Jews who did side with the Soviet Union. The most courageous Jewish leaders, such as those in the Jewish labor movement, worked with authorities to root them out.

Yet the court sneers, “We are left to wonder why we cannot see with foresight what we see so clearly with hindsight — that ‘[l]oyalty is a matter of the heart and mind[,] not race, creed, or color.’ ” Neither Messrs. Bloomberg nor Kelly nor New York’s Finest nor the Muslim community deserve this kind of condescension.

The court also rattles on, as the plaintiffs did, about the First Amendment’s prohibition on the government abridging the free exercise of religion. Well, if the Center for Constitutional Rights or its clients give so much as a fig for religious freedom, it’s not in the newspapers.

They don’t seem to have lifted a finger for any of the recent newsworthy religious-freedom plaintiffs — neither for the Little Sisters of the Poor nor the family that owns Hobby Lobby nor the religious Jews who were fighting against the regulation of circumcision.

Nah, Judge Martini had it right when he dismissed these claims. No doubt the district will obey the higher court and give the case a full hearing. The best move for New York City would be to defend the cops all the way, for once, to the Supreme Court.

This column originally appeared in the New York Post.


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