Washington (Onislam.net) – US Muslim groups have called for the protection of rights of Muslim students following revelations that New York Police spied on students organizations without warrants.
"University officials may be the last line of defense for Muslim students whose rights were apparently violated by the clearly unconstitutional –- and possibly illegal -- tactics used by the NYPD," Ibrahim Hooper, National Communications Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said in a press release obtained by OnIslam.net on Monday, February 20.
"The NYPD continues to act as if it is somehow above the law that governs all other individuals and institutions."
The call followed new revelations by The Associated Press (AP) that the NYPD "monitored Muslim college students far more broadly than previously known, at schools far beyond the city limits.
According to AP, the police talked with local authorities about professors 300 miles away in Buffalo and even sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip, where he recorded students' names and how many times they prayed.
Police detectives also trawled Muslim student websites every day and though professors and students had not been accused of any wrongdoing.
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne acknowledged that the websites of several school Muslim organizations were legally monitored in 2006 and 2007.
“The fact that we were specifically targeted is upsetting,” Salim Patel, a founding board member of the school’s Muslim Alumni Association, told The Record.
Patel, a 2002 Rutgers graduate and a city of Passaic Board of Education member, said universities should be safe.
“They weren’t just spying on students, they were spying on faculty as well,” he said.
Musim civil rights groups denounced the police surveillance on Muslim students a violation of civil and religious rights.
The involvement of universities “only strengthens our case that a full investigation of the spying activities of the NYPD must be taken, not only by the New York attorney general, but also by the New Jersey attorney general and at the federal level, the United States aAttorney,” Aref Assaf, president of the Paterson-based Arab American Forum, told The Record.
The Muslim Alumni Association in Rutgers also started an online petition asking Rutgers administrators to outline their opposition to on-campus surveillance, to detail their knowledge or involvement and to demand that the NYPD let people know they were investigated and why.
New York is home to some 800,000 Muslims, about 10 percent of the city's population.
There are about 100 mosques throughout New York’s five boroughs.
The United States is home to an estimated Muslim minority of seven to eight million.
