NYPD Training, a Dark Film on U.S. Muslims

An Islamic flag atop the White House in “The Third Jihad.”

NEW YORK — Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday that New York police used “terrible judgment” in showing officers undergoing counterterrorism training a graphic, hard-hitting film that says Muslim extremists are bent on establishing a worldwide Islamic regime.

Bloomberg said police have stopped showing “The Third Jihad,” a 72-minute documentary-style movie that has been branded inflammatory by some Muslim groups and was bankrolled, according to The New York Times, by a conservative group called the Clarion Fund.

“Somebody exercised some terrible judgment,” Bloomberg said in Albany. “As soon as they found out about it, they stopped it.”

The criticism was unusual for Bloomberg, who in recent months has vigorously defended the police department’s counterterrorism efforts after an Associated Press investigation exposed a secret program to gather intelligence on Muslim neighborhoods.

Bloomberg said neither he nor Police Commissioner Ray Kelly knew about the film being shown.

“The Third Jihad” shows TV images of Hezbollah rocket attacks, children being held hostage by Muslim militants and a woman it says was arrested in Iran for wearing immodest clothing. It shows images it says were taken from Islamic videos and websites, including a doctored picture of an Islamic flag flying over the White House.

It accuses Muslim extremists of posing as moderates and charges several Muslim organizations with being soft on terrorism. It accuses Middle Eastern studies departments at some American universities of supporting hard-line religious governments.

The film is narrated by M. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Foundation for Democracy, based in Phoenix. Jasser rejected Bloomberg’s criticism.

“I could not disagree more,” Jasser said. “For him to say that without contradicting any of the facts that are presented in the movie is, I think, careless.”

The movie was shown on a continuous loop while officers were signing in for counterterrorism training sessions from October to December 2010, according to police documents obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank at New York University. As many as 1,489 officers who underwent training, including 68 lieutenants, may have seen it, the documents say.

Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne said that the police brass did not approve the use of the movie for training and that the decision to play it was made by a sergeant, who has since been reprimanded.

“This was never used in training, period. It was never authorized for use in training, period,” Browne said.

The screening of the film inside the 36,000-member police department has been known for months, but police previously said only a few officers had seen it. They stopped showing the film after a trainee complained.

The film was used as “intermission filler” and to “provide information for students during breaks to keep their attention focused on counterterrorism issues,” Assistant Chief George W. Anderson wrote in one of the documents obtained by the Brennan Center.

Anderson said he believed the video was given to police by someone in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. But the department said it did not authorize distribution of the movie.