Being Muslim is apparently the new probable cause. The New York Police Department's monitoring of Islamic student groups has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with bureaucratic jockeying, paranoia and Islamophobia.
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Listing and surveilling students based solely on their religion is unacceptable and would struggle to pass the legal muster of a civil rights lawsuit. It recalls the paranoia of McCarthyism and the blacklisting of AIDS activists during the 1980s. Anyone who is a member of a minority group — ethnic, religious or sexual — should recoil in horror at the NYPD's extension of its mandate outside the bounds of the city and state of New York.
Given the NYPD's financial struggles, it is hard to believe that the budget for this kind of outrageous infringement on civil rights has taken priority over the kinds of community-based policing and
common-sense measures that the NYPD claims it does not have the budget for. The creation of a quasi-military police department is a deliberate policy move that should alarm New Yorkers who value their freedom from watchful eyes.
This practice also lies beyond the bounds of what we expected from the NYPD. Federal agencies including the National Security Agency and the FBI, not the NYPD, should be responsible for gathering counter-terrorism intelligence.
History has not been kind to those who make sweeping generalizations about nonviolent groups. The department is only able to get away with it because these groups are already socially ostracized and the general public seems to lend its approval without hesitation when policies do not have an immediate negative impact on them. The direction in which the NYPD seems to be moving provokes a negative reaction from Muslim students.
Were this practice to make us safer — an assumption that cannot be verified because of the inherent lack of transparency in investigations and intelligence gathering — the cost of our safety would be our civil liberties. It was founding father Benjamin Franklin who famously said, "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Our rights are nonnegotiable.
The least we can ask of the university administrators who just spent millions of tuition money on a Global Center for Academic and Spiritual Life (including an Islamic Center) is to issue a strong public denunciation of this policy. With the close personal ties between NYU President John Sexton and Mayor Bloomberg, students should be able to expect that Sexton has the ear of those who could change this policy.
