Sean Rocha

What the New York police are taught about Islam

It is scarcely conceivable that propaganda as idiotic as this gets through the great sieve of American life, but here it is: the New York Times reports that almost 1,500 NYPD officers have been shown the film The Third Jihad as if it had something meaningful to tell them about how best to perform their duties.  The subhed is ‘Radical Islam’s vision for America’ and the slogan — catchy, in its way — is: ‘We all know about terrorism.  This is the war you don’t know about.’  Rudy Giuliani appears (inevitably) to say, “It’s an entire movement and the idea of it is hatred for our way of life.”  Here is the trailer:

OK, it is a shame that the NYPD and New York City’s former mayor still need to be schooled as to the strategy behind terrorism ten years after 9/11 and more than fifteen years after Islamist groups like Gamaat al-Islamiyya fought a ground war against Arab dictatorships such as the Mubarak regime, but here goes.  There is a war.  That war has little to do with America.  It is a war within the Islamic community between a few extremists and the great mass of apolitical moderates — who are ‘asleep’ in jihadi parlance and must be awoken — mostly for power within Arab states.  The US was provoked to intervene in the region in order to radicalize the sleeping Arab population, forcing them to choose sides.  We jumped to the bait by invading Iraq.  This was stupid, but we learned that eventually.  Mercifully, most Arabs resisted this Manichean division of the world.  True, as stated in the video, there are no doubt some Muslims who dream the US will be an Islamic state by 2050.  Get real: this isn’t going to happen, so don’t sweat it.

I wish there were Communists today so that all this energy had somewhere else to go.

Update (25 Jan): The plot thickens, as the New York Times reports today. When the screening of The Third Jihad to NYPD officers was first revealed, Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne described the video as ‘wacky’ and said that it had been shown ‘a few times,’ implying that these were rogue screenings that were in no way NYPD policy. Then it came out that the current Police Commissioner, Raymond Kelly, appears in the film, which Browne then dismissed as being drawn from old interviews not done in connection with The Third Jihad. The producers of the video challenged that, saying that they interviewed Kelly at Police Headquarters on 19 March 2007 and that he was well aware it was for a film about radical Islam. Now Browne has had a surge of fresh memories about the whole experience and says, yes, in fact he recommended to Kelly that he participate in the film. Naturally, one wonders now whether all this obfuscation was not designed to hide the Police Commissioner’s even deeper and more active role in the making of this asinine film.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2012 at 12:17 am. It is filed under Close Reader and tagged with Islam, New York, police, terrorism, video, war. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.