An ‘explosive’ film containing clips of extremists shooting Christians in the head and an Islamic flag flying over the White House has been shown to NYPD officers as part of their training, raising concerns over relationship between police and the Muslim community.
The 72-minute film titled The Third Jihad has been seen by at least 1,489 police officers, including lieutenants, detectives and patrol officers in the New York Police Department (NYPD), the New York Times reported.
The revelation that city police officials have been shown a film that ‘casts a broad shadow over American Muslims’ comes as law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, are grappling with allegations that they spied and infiltrated Muslim communities in the city to seek information about individuals in the post 9/11 years.
The NYT report said the video shows Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs exploding, executed children lying covered by sheets and a doctored photograph showing an Islamic flag flying over the White House.
All the while, an ominous music plays in the background and a narrator says: "This is the true agenda of much of Islam in America. A strategy to infiltrate and dominate America... This is the war you don't know about."
The film is narrated by Zuhdi Jasser, a Muslim doctor and former American military officer in Arizona and its message is that few Muslim leaders can be trusted. It includes scenes of violence by Muslims and states that there were ‘three jihads: One at the time of Muhammad, a second in the Middle Ages and a third that is under way covertly throughout the West today. This is the 1,400-year war,’ the film claims.
The film was financed by the Clarion Fund, a nonprofit group whose board includes a former Central Intelligence Agency official and a deputy defence secretary for President Ronald Reagan.
Civil rights advocates and Muslim leaders have expressed concern about the film being shown to police officials saying the police department has ‘trampled on civil rights, blurred lines between foreign and domestic spying and sown fear among Muslims.’
"The police have shown an explosive documentary to its officers and simply stonewalled us," director at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School Faiza Patel said in the New York Times report.
Patel had obtained the release of the documents through a Freedom of Information request. Patel said the police department is not discussing how and why the film was shown.
"It suggests a broader problem that they refuse to divulge this information much less to discuss it. The training of the world's largest city police force is an important question."
The film also includes interview with city Police Commissioner Ramond Kelly and has been shown ‘on a continuous loop’ for between three months and one year of training. Word had first gotten out in January 2011 that the department had used the film in training. It is not known how the film came to be used in police training.
However, a few police officers blew the whistle after watching the film, with some saying they felt uneasy watching it and another officer said he was completely offended by it as a Muslim.
"It defiled our faith and misrepresented everything we stood for," he had said.
The Police Department's chief spokesman Paul Browne says the Department has no plans to correct any false impressions the movie might have left behind.
"There’s no plan to contact officers who saw it," he said, or to "add other programming as a result."