There’s a reason New York City has not been hit by radical Muslim terrorists since Sept. 11, 2001, and its name is the New York City Police Department.

Closely watching wannabe jihadis not only at home but across the country and around the world, the NYPD has foiled countless terror operations, including plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, the subway system, the Stock Exchange, the trans-Hudson tunnels and JFK Airport, among others.

But try to tell that to the Associated Press, which for months now has been waging a journalistic jihad against the NYPD and its counterterrorism tactics in the name of “civil rights.”

The latest salvo, “NYPD Monitored Muslim Students All Over Northeast,” discloses that undercover officers kept tabs on various Muslim student organizations — often viewed as breeding grounds for freelance jihadism — across New York state and New England and patrolled their Web sites.

The NYPD “monitored Muslim college students far more broadly than previously known, at schools far beyond the city limits, including the Ivy League colleges of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania,” writes Chris Hawley. “Police . . . recorded students’ names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed . . . names were recorded in reports prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.”

The AP story also breathlessly notes that “the latest documents mention no wrongdoing by any students,” even though “Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg repeatedly have said that the police only follow legitimate leads about suspected criminal activity.”

Was the AP born yesterday?

There’s always a gap between what public officials say to the “gotcha” media and what they actually must do — especially when it comes to terrorism. If officials could candidly talk about the daily reports they get about possible lethal jihadist activity, the country would be in a state of permanent panic.

So — like the Pentagon calling Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s murder of 13 defenseless service members at Fort Hood, Tex., in 2009 “workplace violence” — they publicly downplay localized, spontaneous jihad, even as they seek to combat it behind the scenes.

But in some quarters, the “civil rights” meme trumps everything, including self-preservation. It’s hardly “racist” to prudently note that Islamic religiosity characterized the 9/11 hijackers, Maj. Hasan and others and is used as a motivational tool by jihadis.

Nor is it “racist” to note that, too often across the Islamic world, believers pour out of mosques on Friday nights whipped into a frenzy by their imams and shouting “Death to America.”

What the NYPD is doing is simply good — and entirely legal — police work. The events of 9/11 obliged the department to transform itself from a municipal police force into a combination cop shop, intelligence service and paramilitary organization that can and does operate globally, not just locally.

But the modern left is dubious at best about the moral legitimacy of pro-active self-defense — thus the smugly selfrighteous AP series.

Most Americans — including Muslim Americans — get it.

The AP reports one monitored student saying of the cops: “I can’t blame them for doing their job. There’s lots of Muslims doing some bad things and it gives a bad name to all of us.”

That’s a voice of common sense and good will. There should be more like it.

On 9/11, America was shot in the back by 19 devout, praying Muslims, some of whom had infiltrated our nation posing as “students.” What the politically correct AP apparently sees as an “oppressed minority” is correctly viewed by the NYPD as a possible “suspect pool” for the next attempted terrorist attack.

Attempt they will. Al Qaeda may be operationally damaged, but the failed Times Square bombing serves as a potent reminder that eternal vigilance in the war against radical Islam is a price that even pacifist New Yorkers must pay for the right not to get blown up at Macy’s.

And if that offends the AP, tough. (Copyright 2012 NYP Holdings, Inc. 02/20/12)