Nation’s largest police department caves to Muslim activists, will let suspects take mugshots in hijab

New York City has been ordered by a court to pay out $180,000 to three Muslim women after requiring them to take off their hijabs for mugshots, thanks to a lawsuit filed by a lawyer affiliated with radical Sharia-activist Linda Sarsour.

Three lawsuits were settled Monday in Brooklyn federal court stemming from the NYPD policy of photographing people wearing religious head scarves, the New York Daily News reported. The three women settled for $60,000 each.

Some cases date to 2012, when a high school girl – identified as “G.E.” – was arrested after fighting with two other girls whom she thought spread gossip about her, the Daily News reports.

G.E. was initially brought to a local police station and was told to take off her hijab. G.E. refused and was taken to a secluded room where a female police officer took her photo outside the presence of any men, according to the Daily News.

But at Brooklyn Central Booking the police could not accommodate the girl’s religious needs, telling her that no female officers were available and the camera was in a fixed spot, so the mugshot could not be taken in a private room.

The girl alleged that a male officer then took her photo without a hijab, making her feel “exposed, violated and distraught” as she was forced to have her head uncovered for 20 minutes while male officers and prisoners looked at her.

G.E.’s lawyer, Tahanie Aboushi, has filed at least two other similar cases, in 2015 and 2016 — and has single-handedly changed the policies of the NYPD with regard to female Muslim suspects.

On Tuesday, Aboushi told the Daily News the police department sent out additional directives in December 2017 on religious headwear. She credited the city and police, saying the end result was a “collaborative” effort and a “great first step.”

One wonders what the next step will be. Allowing female Muslim suspects to wear the full burqa or nijab? This extremist Islamic garb covers even more than the hijab, leaving only the woman’s eyes to be seen in public.

“We did our best to establish good precedent,” Aboushi boasted. She said Islam is not the only religion that has women cover their heads. That is a true statement, but Islam is the only religion that systematically uses lawfare – a form of legal intimidation – against non-Muslim nations in the West.

One long-time friend of the Aboushi family is Linda Sarsour, a rabid anti-Israel activist who has Hamas-related family serving prison sentences in Israel and has herself been questioned by U.S. authorities, according to Front Page Magazine. In 2012, Sarsour posted on her Twitter account, “Nothing is creepier than Zionism.” In a May 2012 tweet, she claimed that the al-Qaeda “Underwear Bomber,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who plotted to blow up a civilian aircraft, was actually a CIA operative.

Aboushi also uses her Twitter account to bash Israel and support things like the Black Panthers and NFL players kneeling during the national anthem.

Sarsour is executive director of the Arab-American Association of New York, the same organization for which Tahanie Aboushi works as a lawyer. Together with the Executive Director of CAIR-NY, Muneer Awad, Aboushi condemned ads speaking out against Islamic jihad – ads which would soon be placed throughout New York City’s subway stations.

Pamela Geller, editor in chief of the Geller Report and an anti-Sharia activist, blames the transformation of the NYPD on Mayor Bill De Blasio.

“One of the first things Bill de Blasio did when he became mayor was dismantle a surveillance program in Muslim communities that was perfectly legal, but came under fire from the likes of Linda Sarsour,” Geller said. “Sarsour and her ilk now have full influence over the way New York City conducts counterterror operations. This insane court decision is in line with that perspective, and represents still more submission to Sharia.”

Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, said the NYPD has gone from one of the most skilled and advanced police departments in the world in terms of anti-terror operations, to one of the most submissive.

“This is insane,” he said. “This is a matter of being able to identify the perpetrator. This is more of de Blasio working directly against the interests of his people.”