Political correctness might get you killed

I note with displeasure that a very accurate study of radical Islamic influence in the USA - specifically, in New York City - has become yet another victim of political correctness.

The NYPD has ... censored an anti-terror handbook to appease offended Muslims, even though it has accurately predicted radicalization patterns in recent “homegrown” terror cases. Rank-and-file NYPD officers, detectives and even intelligence and counterterrorism units are officially barred now from referring to the handbook or the scientific study on which it was based.

Former law-enforcement officials fear its removal as a training tool may be hurting efforts to prevent terrorist activity, such as the vehicle-ramming attacks plaguing European cities.

“The report was extremely accurate on how the radicalization process works and what indicators to look for,” said Patrick Dunleavy, former deputy inspector general of the New York state prisons’ criminal-intelligence division, who also worked with the NYPD’s intelligence division for several years.

Mayor de Blasio agreed in January 2016 to purge the remarkably prescient police training guide “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat” to help settle a federal lawsuit filed by the ACLU and Muslim groups who claimed the NYPD’s anti-terror training discriminated against Muslims.

Written 10 years ago, the seminal NYPD report detailing the religious steps homegrown terrorists take toward radicalization is now more relevant than ever, with recent terror suspects closely following those steps. But in 2007, the same year the study was released, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) organized a protest against it, complaining it “casts suspicion on all US Muslims.” Even though federal law enforcement has long-shunned CAIR as a suspected terrorist front organization, “groups like CAIR were insistent on having it removed, and de Blasio caved into them,” Dunleavy said.

Under the city’s unusual settlement agreement, the NYPD as well as New York state agencies were forced to remove its 90-page anti-terror study — described by plaintiffs as “deeply flawed” and “inflammatory” — from databases and no longer rely on it “to open or extend investigations” into terrorist activities. Also, police must now commit to “mitigating the potential impact” of any counterterrorism investigation on the Muslim community.

. . .

“The bad guys know if police don’t know this stuff at the ground level, they win,” added [former FBI Agent John] Guandolo.

There's more at the link.

The report is still available online from various sources - for example, here, or here, or here.  If you haven't read it, I urge you to download a copy and do so.  It's very informative.

I can confirm many of the report's findings from my own experience, which is extensive.  It ranges from encounters (some of them armed) with mujahedin returning from Afghanistan, to organizations they founded or radicalized in South Africa such as Qibla and PAGAD, to contact with fundamentalist Islamists in US prisons when I served as a chaplain.  You can take the report as gospel.  It's that good.  (In my opinion, it says a great deal about CAIR that it vehemently opposed the report from the start.  Draw your own conclusions.)

When police departments and sheriffs' offices can't train their people about how Islamic fundamentalist terrorism obtains and radicalizes its recruits, those agencies can't function effectively in their communities to combat terrorism.  This politically correct nonsense can - and probably will - get people killed in due course.




Peter