NY Times: The counterman at the Jordan Halal Restaurant, a greasy spoon of a greasy spoon on South Orange Avenue, tossed up his hands as I pulled out my press card. No, no, he doesn’t want to speak, please no.
Behind him, his cook, a short block of a man in white apron, whipped up a “pastromi and eggs,” as the menu would have it.
“I love here, so I leave this alone,” the counterman tells me. “Say I love this place, please.”
The counterman and his cook, as the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division describes them in a secret report on Newark, are “persons of Jordanian descent.” There is another way to describe them: they are American citizens in the throes of a rather un-American fear of speaking.
“I talk, they keep coming,” the counterman says, wagging his head, apologetic. Our conversation has finished.
“They” are undercover New York City officers. Last week, The Associated Press broke the news that the Intelligence Division of the New York police had extended its writ hundreds of square miles east and west, carefully detailing mosques, dollar stores and restaurants, from Konak’s Turkish Cuisine in Farmingville, on Long Island, to this luncheonette on the western edge of Newark. They carefully recorded names, license plates and nationalities.
Categories: Americas, Human Rights, ISLAMOPHOBIA, United States