Free Republic

The Masjid Omar Mosque was probed by a program that drew criticism from civil liberties advocates and was the subject of two federal lawsuits. The Paterson mosque that some neighbors said the suspect in Tuesday's deadly terror attack in New York City attended was among several in New Jersey that the New York Police Department targeted as part of a broad surveillance program that was intended to identify "budding terrorist conspiracies." The Masjid Omar Mosque is on Getty Avenue, around the corner from the apartment where the suspect, Sayfullo Saipov, lived with his family. Wednesday morning, the mosque was within...

The NYPD had suspected New Jersey’s Masjid Omar Mosque, where jihadist Sayfullo Saipov reportedly worshipped, of having radical ties for over 10 years, allegedly keeping all its worshippers under watch. Moreover, the FBI, which claims it had nothing to do with monitoring the mosque, interviewed Saipov as a potential Islamic terrorist in 2015, but ultimately let him go. On Tuesday, Uzbek national Saipov killed eight people and injured at least 11 in a vehicle attack on the West Side of Manhattan on Tuesday. “The New York Police Department has secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorist organizations, a designation that allows...

Responsibility for the attack? Sayfullo Saipov, the 29-year-old Uzbekistan-born ISIS operative who killed eight people after driving a truck down a crowded bicycle path in New York City, worshipped at a mosque around the corner from his and his family’s Paterson, New Jersey residence, Masjid Omar bin al-Khattab. The mosque has been associated with a website that advocates committing violence against others. Because of this fact, the mosque itself should be considered a party to Saipov’s horrific crime. On October 31st, Halloween, Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, an Uber driver with known residences in Tampa, Florida and Paterson, New Jersey, drove a...

Back in 2014 the New York Police Department dropped a program that monitored potential suspects of Islamic extremism. Created in 2005, the program was pretty cut and dry: plain clothed detectives were sent out to mosques and gathering places for Muslims to see if anyone was pushing extremist rhetoric on the community. While it might seem a bit intrusive, this happened in a city of 8.5 million people with as many as 800,000 Muslim residents in the greater metro area, many of whom are foreign born nationals. It's also the same geographic location as the biggest Islamic terror attack in...