Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has made city safer with NYPD's surveillance of Muslims

You start to wonder if this current war against Ray Kelly from all those opposed to his surveillance of Muslims is even about the war on terrorism any longer, as if somehow the subject has been changed from what is the main event, only for the rest of our lives. As much as anything, hand-wringing Jersey politicians and hand-wringing editorial writers from The Times and the ACLU have tried mightily to turn this into some kind of turf war. They do this as Kelly continues to do everything he can — and within the law, despite the coverage — to keep the city safe at the most dangerous period in his history. The Times even asserts that the kind of surveillance employed by Kelly and the NYPD produces no “obvious payoff for public safety.” RAY KELLY DEFENDS NYPD SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM It is only dumber than Rush Limbaugh still having a job after calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” and then acting surprised that Fluke didn’t get the joke on that. You want to protest something? Protest Limbaugh saying what he said about Sandra Fluke and not being fired, not the best police commissioner New York has had. Kelly is absolutely right about something: Anyone who intimates that it is unlawful for his department to search online, or visit public places, or map neighborhoods has either not read, or just doesn’t care about, the Handschu guidelines for the NYPD. If these people really want to do something that provides a continuing payoff for public safety, they ought to get off Ray Kelly’s back. “Criticism comes with the territory,” Kelly said Sunday. “But it just won’t deter us from doing everything within the law to stop terrorists from killing more New Yorkers.” Let Kelly continue to use NYPD surveillance of conversations inside an Islamic bookstore in Bay Ridge, one attached to a mosque, that helps New York cops keep a Herald Square subway station from being blown sky high. The names you want to know about on that one, guys who certainly were a threat to public safety, were Shahawar Matin Siraj and James Elshafay, eventually arrested and tried and convicted in federal court. Siraj, who worked in that bookstore, ended up getting 30 years. And there is the “spying” that last year resulted in the arrests of Ahmed Ferhani and Mohammed Mamdouh and a plan from radical Islam to bomb a Manhattan synagogue. This is just the start of a much longer list of how the countersurveillance blueprint Kelly has given his city and all big cities in a Sept. 11 world has worked. But now Kelly gets this kind of blowback, from the media and outraged Muslims, from Chris Christie, who looks like a political hustler on this and nothing more, and Cory Booker and even the Jersey attorney general, who keeps the door open on an investigation of the NYPD. Wonderful. Kelly is made out to be some kind of bad guy now, when he is the opposite. At a time when you look around at what passes for political leaders in a presidential election year from both parties, watch them blow with the wind, you have actual leadership from Kelly, who stands his ground and tells the truth about the city in which he works and the world in which he lives. You don’t go to war against Ray Kelly on something as important as this; you stand with him. Sometimes you wonder if Kelly’s loudest critics, the ones from politics or the newspapers or the protesters in the street Saturday yelling about him, have forgotten what year it is. “The notion that the Police Department should close our eyes to what takes place outside the five boroughs is folly, and defies the lessons of history,” Kelly said on Saturday, making it clear he would send his guys to the moon if he thought he had a good read on bad guys. You want to know where some of the terrorists came from to blow up London’s subway? They came from London Metropolitan University, and the University of Hertfordshire, and Brunel University, and from Brunel University’s Islamic Society. Maybe the London cops could have used better surveillance in those places. This isn’t water-boarding or gratuitous harassment of college kids, or about turning New Jersey and Connecticut into police states. It is about gathering of intelligence and being a realist about how to do that in the modern world, where the government didn’t protect us before Sept. 11 and the airports didn’t protect us because nobody did. The idea that the counterterrorist methods of this police commissioner don’t work, produce no results, do not help keep the city safer, isn’t just something for point-missers. It is a lie. Get off his back. Or at least out of his way.