A movie about radical Islam was shown to nearly 1,500 NYPD recruits for up to a year of their training. Police chiefs originally said the film, called The Third Jihad and promoting an image of American Muslims as radicalized, had been mistakenly screened “a couple of times.” Click below to see the video and find out more.
But documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Law show it had been shown “on a continuous loop” for up to a year of training.
The revelation has raised questions about how the police force will repair its already strained relations with New York’s large Muslim community.
Among its assertions, The Third Jihad claims that most American Muslims are involved, at least tangentially, in promoting terror, according to Tom Robbins of the Village Voice who initially discovered that recruits were being forced to watch the film in January of 2011.
“After it was over, I was thinking, ‘What was that?’ ” an officer who saw the movie told Robbins for his 2011 article. “It was so ridiculously one-sided. It just made Muslims look like the enemy. It was straight propaganda.”
At that time, police said that the film, which features an interview with Police Comissioner Ray Kelly, had only been screened for a few officers.
