During the 2016 Republican presidential primary, one of the worst things then-candidate Donald Trump announced was his support for an all-out ban on Muslims entering the country. (Thankfully, he hasn’t fully gone through with it as president.) His competitor, Sen. Ted Cruz, wasn’t much better in terms of respecting the civil liberties of Muslim Americans, supporting on the campaign trail a plan to “empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.”
Elected Democrats and liberal media outlets rightly attacked both proposals as discriminatory and bigoted. Now, lest they fully collapse into partisan hypocrisy, Democrats must offer the same unequivocal condemnation of 2020 presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg’s long-standing support for discriminatory, anti-Muslim policies.
So far, they’ve been eerily quiet. While attacks on Bloomberg were plentiful at Wednesday night’s Democratic debate, the subject of his Islamophobia never came up. But there’s a lot there.
In the years after 9/11, while Bloomberg was mayor, the New York City Police Department engaged in a disturbing practice in which officers regularly monitored the online activity of Muslim student groups at 16 different universities. The police arbitrarily sought out and monitored citizens on the basis of their religion, without evidence linking them to criminal activity. Then the mayor of New York City, Bloomberg defended the Islamophobic practice.
The police abuses under Bloomberg went far beyond mere digital monitoring, too.
According to the Associated Press, “the NYPD placed informants or undercover officers in the Muslim Student Associations at City College, Brooklyn College, Baruch College, Hunter College, City College of New York, Queens College, La Guardia Community College and St. John’s University.” The news organization also noted that the police department “documents mention no wrongdoing by any students” that could justify such an invasion of their civil liberties and privacy.
There’s so much more. The Intercept summarized New York City’s anti-Islam practices well:
The NYPD, added the New York Times, “eavesdropped on thousands of conversations between Muslims in restaurants and stores in New York City and New Jersey and on Long Island.” Paid informants were “under orders to ‘bait’ Muslims into saying inflammatory things.”
Bloomberg has defended many of these practices, which happened under his watch as mayor. And unlike his now-recanted support for the racist policing tactic of “stop and frisk,” he has not apologized for supporting blatantly Islamophobic policies.
So far, it seems like most of the media and Democratic establishment are letting Bloomberg get away with his decadeslong record of support for anti-Muslim policies. Why the silence?
Perhaps it has something to do with the hundreds of millions of dollars Bloomberg has donated to liberal causes and Democratic campaigns. When you fund Democrats, apparently you get held to different standards — and get to play by different rules.
