Muslims upset by NYPD to boycott mayor’s breakfast
Muslim leaders intent on showing Mayor Michael Bloomberg that they have no appetite for his support of the police department’s efforts to gather intelligence on their neighborhoods are poised to make an impression by their absence at his annual interfaith breakfast Friday.
A letter they composed made a controversy out of a normally sedate end-of-the-year meeting. In all, 15 Muslim clerics and community figures say they won’t show up to protest the surveillance program first revealed in a series of Associated Press articles.
But one man who signed the letter, Rabbi Michael Weisser, said he will attend the breakfast after friends in the Muslim community urged him to attend and engage the mayor in conversation about the dispute.
The breakfast is traditionally held at the historic New York Public Library building on 42nd Street and has long served to showcase the city’s diversity during overlapping winter holidays.