A U.S. judge ruled in dismissing a lawsuit. Bloomberg News reported that New York City did not violate the rights of Muslims by conducting police surveillance of New Jersey mosques and businesses after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The September 11 attacks were a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks launched by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda upon the United States in New York City and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.
In New Jersey Federal court a Rutgers University student group, several Muslims, along with mosques, Muslim-owned businesses, sued the city alleging that the police department had singled them out for their religious beliefs. U.S. District Judge William J. Martini dismissed the suit, stating that the plaintiffs did not show they were targeted “solely because of their religion.”
U.S. District Judge William J. Martini wrote, “The police could not have monitored New Jersey for Muslim terrorist activities without monitoring the Muslim community itself. The motive for the program was not solely to discriminate against Muslims, but rather to find Muslim terrorists hiding among ordinary, law-abiding Muslims.”
In a statement, Baher Azmy, legal director for The Center for Constitutional Rights, said that the ruling “gives legal sanction to the targeted discrimination of Muslims anywhere and everywhere in this country, without limitation, for no other reason than their religion.”
New York City lawyers did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had defended the police department’s right to go anywhere in the country in search of terrorists without telling local police. Huffington Post reports that Civil rights lawyers have asked a federal judge to decide whether spying violates federal rules that were set up to prevent a repeat of NYPD abuses of the 1950s, when police Red Squads spied on student groups and activists in search of communists.
Image Credit: www.masslive.com