Patrol Muslim Neighborhoods or Jewish ones, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, March 29, 2016
When I go to the synagogue on Passover, there will be a police officer at the door. There will be an NYPD officer in front of every synagogue. Police brass will make the rounds of each synagogue to check security and alertness. Local precincts will be on alert anticipating a Muslim terrorist attack.
As they are on every Jewish holiday.
In France, there are heavily armed soldiers outside synagogues. In Israel, the soldiers are more likely to be found inside the synagogues. That is what Jewish life is like under the shadow of Muslim terrorism.
The ADL, which was not outraged when Bernie Sanders posed with members of anti-Semitic hate groups such as SJP and CAIR, put out a press release denouncing Ted Cruz for calling for heightened police scrutiny of Muslim neighborhoods. But the alternative to a police presence in Muslim areas is a police presence in Jewish areas. If you can’t stop Muslim terrorism at the source, then you have to try and secure all the potential targets. That means police officers in front of synagogues and TSA agents checking your shoes. It means police forces that look like armies and soldiers in the streets.
The ADL denounced Cruz for calling for a return to the NYPD’s old tactics for breaking up Muslim terror plots. One of those “controversial” methods led to the breakup of a Muslim terror plot to blow up a synagogue in Manhattan. Ahmed Ferhani had been interfaith enough to also consider blowing up a church, but he settled on plotting to plant a bomb and then open fire inside a synagogue.
The same left that is now outraged by Cruz’s statement fought for Ferhani. They fought for a Muslim terrorist who boasted at his sentencing, “I intended to create chaos and send a message of intimidation and coercion to the Jewish population of New York City.” In the zero sum game of civil rights, the left fights for the civil rights of Muslim terrorists and against the civil rights of their Jewish victims.
Muslim civil rights is not a matter between the government and Muslims. It is a zero sum game in which protecting the “rights” of Muslims to plan terror attacks takes away the right of their victims to live. It’s a choice between having police informants in a mosque or police officers in front of synagogues. Both send a chilling message. But the former sends a chilling message to terrorists. The latter to their targets.
Liberal groups protesting the idea of Muslim surveillance are offering a false and dishonest choice.
The choice is not whether there will be government surveillance and a police presence. The choice is where will it be? Will it be at a mosque run by the Muslim Brotherhood that terror preachers visit to spread their hate? Or will it be at every church and synagogue that Muslim terrorists might target.
None of the above is not an option. It stops being an option after the first, second and third terror attacks. France tried to ignore Muslim violence against Jews for as long as it could. But even a left-wing government was forced to station armed soldiers in front of Jewish schools and synagogues.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s new boss, whines that “special patrols of Muslim neighborhoods” will make Muslims “more vulnerable, more frightened”. What exactly does he think that police patrols of Jewish neighborhoods do? What message does it send to Jewish children going to synagogue that there is a cop at the door because a Muslim terrorist might try to kill them?
Why isn’t Greenblatt more concerned about how those children feel than how their killers do?
Muslim terrorism is not a matter between Muslims and an abstract state. The victims of Muslim terror are not abstractions. They are real people who suffer and bleed. After every Muslim terror attack, the media rushes the victims off the stage to make way for Muslims whining about an imaginary backlash after someone gave them a dirty look on the bus, because it wants us to forget who the real victims are.
The real victims are not in the mosque. They are in the church, the synagogue and the Hindu temple. They are in a New York office building shuffling their papers at 8:45 AM on a Tuesday morning. They are at a Christmas party in California. They are near the finish line in Boston watching the runners pass.
Muslim civil rights violate their civil rights. Muslim civil rights violate their bodies. Muslim civil rights drive nails and ball bearings into their arms and legs. Muslim civil rights lead them to stagger through the smoke and then plummet one hundred stories headfirst into the New York cement. Muslim civil rights force non-Muslims to walk in fear to their own houses of worship waiting for the next attack.
Muslim terrorism forces us to choose between the civil rights of Muslims and those of everyone else.
How we handle Muslim terrorism will define who we are as a people. Will we side with the victims or the perpetrators? Anyone who speaks of the civil rights of the perpetrators instead of those of the victims has chosen the side of the perpetrators. The ADL, like Obama and the media, stands with the perpetrators. It would rather see police in front of synagogues than in front of mosques.
That is a choice. And it is a choice that says a great deal about what the ADL’s real values are.
Liberals used to pride themselves on standing with the oppressed, not with the oppressors. Today, they stand unambiguously with the oppressors. They stand with hate groups and synagogue bombers.
Dutch journalist Elma Drayer complained about Muslims throwing stones at Jews leaving the synagogue after September 11. The police told her not to talk about it because the Muslims were “already being stigmatized”. It wasn’t the stigmatism of the Jewish victims being stoned that the police were concerned with, but the stigmatism of the Muslims who were throwing the stones at them.
This is Muslim civil rights.
We can be concerned about the “stigmatism” of the Muslims whose mosques are being used to plot attacks. Or the stigmatism of their victims. We can worry about how “vulnerable” and “frightened” Muslims feel at the extra police scrutiny or how vulnerable and frightened non-Muslims are because instead of proactively fighting terrorism, they have to reactively hope to stop the next terrorist attack.
The NYPD brass that attacked Ted Cruz’s proposal is reactively deploying police officers to potential targets because it has been prevented from fighting Islamic terrorism proactively by investigating mosques and other Jihadist coordinating hubs. And so there are police officers in front of synagogues and heavily armed ESU tactical teams hanging around high traffic areas hoping that will be enough.
Under Bill de Blasio, New York made a choice between proactively targeting Muslim neighborhoods and reactively deploying everywhere that Muslim terrorists might strike. It was the wrong choice.
In Europe, those same choices were also made. Synagogues were turned into fortresses with bulletproof windows and armored doors. Jews were told not to wear religious clothing outside. Worshipers travel in fear to prayer, passing armed soldiers outside, entering one at a time to avoid becoming bigger targets.
While politicians wrung their hands over Muslim feelings, their victims were left frightened, vulnerable and stigmatized. And now the same pattern is repeating itself in the United States all over again.
The fundamental moral question of every crime, every atrocity and every act of violence against the innocent is do we concern ourselves with the pain of the victims or do we make excuses for the killers. The answer to that question defines who we are, individually and as a people. It also determines whether we will defend ourselves or go on making excuses for the killers even as they are killing us.
When we choose the killers over their victims, we not only betray them, but we betray ourselves.
The University of California-Santa Barbara. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
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