This is just tragic. It’s the worst violation of religious freedom since the NYPD prevented a voodoo cult from practicing human sacrifice. I’m still waiting for the ACLU to sue over the imprisonment of a Christian filmmaker for uploading a trailer to YouTube. I imagine I’ll be waiting for a very long time.

In a lawsuit being filed Tuesday, the lawyers say the spying has hindered residents from freely practicing their religion. It is the third significant legal action filed against the NYPD Muslim surveillance program since details of the spy program were revealed in a series of Associated Press reports in 2011 and 2012. The lawsuit says Muslim religious leaders in New York have modified their sermons and other behavior to not draw additional police attention.

If your sermons have content that you don’t want police listening to, there might just be something wrong with your sermons or your religion. This isn’t like reading someone’s private mail. This is a message that a religious leader gives to his congregation. If there’s something in the message that makes the police think “KABOOM” then that’s an admission of something wrong in the entire system of that religion. According to the ACLU press release, “The NYPD is routinely violating the civil rights of Muslims across New York City by operating an unconstitutional religious profiling and suspicionless surveillance program, according to a federal lawsuit filed today by New York City residents represented by the New York Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project of Main Street Legal Services, Inc. at CUNY School of Law.” CUNY is a black hole funded by city and state taxpayers. And they’re being forced to fund a pro-terrorist lawsuit by a CUNY affiliate against them. It’s yet another argument for defunding CUNY and letting its horde of bigoted faculty and illiterate students rely on donors.

The landmark lawsuit charges that the NYPD’s Muslim Surveillance Program has imposed an unjustified badge of suspicion and stigma on hundreds of thousands of innocent New Yorkers.

Unjustified? Really? How many terror plots and corpses do we need before it’s justified?

“When a police department turns law-abiding people into suspects because they go to a mosque and not a church or a synagogue, it violates our Constitution’s guarantees of equality and religious freedom,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project. “No one questions that the NYPD has a job to do, but spying on innocent New Yorkers because of their religion is a wrong and ineffective way to do it.”

Considering the number of terror plots the NYPD has broken up through such methods, it’s obviously effective. Oh and a number of those plots targeted synagogues. So thank you NYPD and keep up the good work.

Imam Hamid Hassan Raza, spiritual leader of Brooklyn’s Masjid Al-Ansar mosque, has been taping his sermons for years because he is afraid an undercover officer or NYPD spy will misquote him or take a portion of a sermon out of context, subjecting him and his mosque to even more law enforcement scrutiny. After plainclothes officers visited him repeatedly for no reason, he has also stopped mentioning topics that the NYPD might consider controversial, and urges congregants to do the same. Raza has seen a steep decline in mosque attendance as a result of the Muslim Surveillance Program. “I don’t talk to my congregants about current affairs or religious subjects the NYPD may find objectionable because I’m afraid of further police attention. The surveillance program has prevented me from fulfilling my duty as an imam,” Raza said.

Oddly Raza does not seem interested in elaborating on these subjects that he will not discuss.