Levin responds to monitoring of Muslim students
Photo by YDN.
In a Monday night email to the Yale community, University President Richard Levin responded to reports that surfaced on Saturday that the New York Police Department monitored Muslim students at Yale and at least 14 colleges around the Northeast.
Levin said the Yale Police Department did not participate in the NYPD's surveillance, which included trawling the websites, forums and blogs of Muslim student associations at colleges including Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania in 2006 and 2007. He said the University was "entirely unaware" of NYPD activities until the Associated Press first reported the monitoring Saturday.
"The Yale Muslim Students Association has been an important source of support for Yale students during a period when Muslims and Islam itself have too often been the target of thoughtless stereotyping, misplaced fear, and bigotry," Levin wrote. "Now, in the wake of these disturbing news reports, I want to assure the members of the Yale Muslim Students Association that they can count on the full support of Yale University."
The NYPD recorded the names of students and professors involved in Muslim student associations and related events in reports prepared for New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, though none were charged with a crime. In a Nov. 22, 2006 NYPD secret document titled “Weekly MSA Report," an NYPD officer reported that he visited the websites and forums of Muslim student associations at Yale, Columbia, Penn and eight other colleges and "did not find significant information."
In response to those activities, Levin stressed that police surveillance based on religion, national or "peacefully expressed political opinions" is "antithetical" to the values of Yale and the United States.
The Associated Press documented NYPD undercover monitoring of Muslim student associations as recently as 2009, when police set up a safe house in New Brunswick, N.J., to follow the Muslim student group at Rutgers University.
Comments
Yalie14 3 months ago
Major props to Levin for standing up for the civil liberties of his students.
JE14 3 months ago
It is not infringing on civil liberties to look at online websites of a group that has at some point been involved with people who were involved in terrorist activities. (The MSA's were founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/misc/31.pdf)
On the other hand I feel like censoring the "Mohamed Caricatures" was an infringement of civil liberties. President Levin, be CONSISTENT when you take a position.
yale_senior 3 months ago
Rick levin - good man
JE 14 - I think it's about time the police start investigating you for possible hate crimes against muslims. Your inability to see the ludicrous nature of these investigations certainly fits the profile of someone who might have.
JE14 3 months ago
Do I think the investigation is useful? Nope not really, I think it's a bit of a waste of time. That doesn't mean I don't think it's legal. I see no hate crime. All I see is you crying about a non-issue.
yale_senior 3 months ago
I'm sorry where in Rick Levin's email did he mention legality. No one denies here that an officer in the NYPD is legally allowed to go onto any website he chooses. The issue here is all about appropriateness, something you seem to imply when you tie the MSA with the Muslim Brotherhood and terrorist activities.
I also never said I thought this was a hate crime. My point was simply that it's about as likely that a student in the MSA is plotting a terrorist activity that your have or will commit a hate crime on the basis of your post.
JE14 3 months ago
"Your inability to see the ludicrous nature of these investigations certainly fits the profile of someone who might have."
Nice.
River_Tam 3 months ago
Better call the thought police.
connman250 3 months ago
Let me get this right!!!!!!! So you are for profiling????
eli2015 3 months ago
I'm sorry. Privacy is a civil liberty, but there have been homegrown American terrorists before, and it is incumbent on the government to conduct surveillance on it's own citizens. I am sure that the members of the Yale MSA are as patriotic as any of us and I would shudder to allege that any of them is a potential terrorist. But the fact remains that they belong to a religion that produces a disproportionate amount of the individuals currently hostile to the United States. Surveillance on college Muslim groups is highly unfortunate and alienating, but a prudent security measure.
yale_senior 3 months ago
Eli2015, I am really not being politically correct when I say that is totally off base. It is off base statistically. Of course, 9/11, was a huge event that is present in our minds, but if you are talking about where the attacks come from you are totally wrong. Look at this satistic from the FBI (terror attacks on US soil since 1980's):
http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terrorism-2002-2005/terror02_05
The vast vast majority of these attacks are actually from latino groups. And, in a quick count the number of Jewish terror attacks since 1980 is roughly equal to the number of attacks by muslims. Now am I saying, should we monitor La Casa and Slifka - of course not! That would be ridiculous and discriminatory! But you have to concede that the idea of a Muslim attack as a real threat against the United States is hugely overblown because of the prevalence of 9/11 in our mind, and that the NYPD has no more business monitoring the MSA than they do any other cultural group on campus.
River_Tam 3 months ago
Death toll from terrorism in the US from 1980 to 1994:
Islamic extremists: 10
Cubans: 1
Puerto Ricans Separatists: 6
Armenians: 2
Hippies: 1
White Supremacists: 2
Jews: 3
Death toll from terrorism in the US, 1995 to 2000:
Anti-government lone wolves: 171
White Supremacists: 3
Death toll from terrorism 2001-present:
Islamic extremists: 2979
Yup, that's correct. According to your own statistics, since the attacks of 9/11, there hasn't been another deadly terrorist attack on American soil other than the ones carried out by Islamic extremists, and there hasn't been a deadly terrorist attack from a source other than White Supremacists, Timothy McVeigh, or Islamic radicals since 1994.
connman250 3 months ago
How many near misses did we have with Muslim extremists, just in the past few months, that were stopped by the FBI? Many!!!! You also forgot about the Fort Hood massacre. The fact that Isreal retaliates to Muslim terror, is not a terrorist act. It is a defensive act.
connman250 3 months ago
President Obama and the Justice Department already have deemed that on-line posts or conversations are open to the public and can be monitored by the government, so what's the big deal !!!
connman250 3 months ago
You should have your doctor look at your medications!!
bcrosby 3 months ago
Thank you, President Levin!
Boogs 3 months ago
I'm sure students and faculty at Yale-NUS will never be so monitored...
Sam 3 months ago
The MSA contains some great individuals, and although I've only interacted with a couple members of the group, I'm glad to have gotten to know them.
That said, I have some sympathy for the NYPD. Various MSA organizations around the country have a lot of questionable ties (ie, to the Muslim Brotherhood) and have been caught engaging in rather questionable practices.
I have no reason to believe that the Yale MSA is at all radical. Even so, the fact that Dick Levin decided to let in the former propaganda minister for the Taliban a few years back probably has something to do with why Yale is getting scrutiny now.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2011/02/16/video-muslim-student-association-pledges-allegiance-to-the-muslim-brotherhood/
RexMottram08 3 months ago
A Montreal couple and their son were convicted of a multiple "honor killing." Immigrants from Afghanistan, the Shafias had coolly plotted around the kitchen table the murder of all three of their daughters (plus one of the father's wives), and then carried it out, by drowning them in the Rideau Canal near Kingston, Ontario — for the crime of wishing to live as North American teenage girls. The father was caught on tape saying, "May the devil s**t on their graves!" — which he gamely attempted on the witness stand to pass off as some sort of traditional greeting in Dari.
joey00 3 months ago
Actually i heard that Yale went along with this investigation as well as it could.I don't know how reliable the source is but after watching and reading about how indelved the Feds are at Yale,then we agree they had a knowledge of this looking into.Anybody who walks through campus is deemed an Anti Semite,a threat,an undesirable, i talked with the Palestinian Christian named Mazin Qumsiyah and was branded,maybe temporarily as some viewed Mazin as a threat to Zionism and Yale..
JE14 3 months ago
Can someone translate this? I honestly do not understand what joey is trying to say..
River_Tam 3 months ago
No one does.
JE14 3 months ago
... but it's provocative, it gets people going.
connman250 3 months ago
These students are only guests in the US and must be monitored for our own protection. Nobody is taking their rights away. They can do anything that anybody else does, except to plot terrorism, using their student status as a cover.
alalusim 3 months ago
what? the MSA is predominantly made up of Americans. it's misconceptions like this that show how truly ridiculous this whole situation is.
connman250 3 months ago
President Obama and the Justice Department already have deemed that on-line posts or conversations are open to the public and can be monitored by the government, so what's the big deal !!!
theantiyale 3 months ago
Kelly and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg have said repeatedly that the NYPD only follows legitmate leads about suspected criminal activity. The reports obtained by the Associated Press do not document any criminal activity.
So Levin is CORRECT.
If the triggering mechanism for police surveillance is one's membership in a belief-system ( i.e. 'religion') which criticizes national or political policies, then the triggering mechanism ITSELF is discriminatory (not the reading by police of publicly available digitized information).
It is the deciding criterion (you are a student Muslim group, therefore you need to be monitored) which is blighted by bias, not the subsequent police behavior of sitting quietly in a room and reading public documents and recording and listing again the publically published names of those associated with the documents.
The SEED itself is poisoned, not the vine which grows from it.
Yet.
PK
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