'Fox & Friends': Why would NYPD end 'mature and respectful' Muslim spying program?

The hosts of Fox & Friends on Wednesday lashed out at New York Mayor Bill de Blasio after the NYPD announced it was ending a program that effectively spied on Muslim residents in the city.

The New York Timesfirst reported this week that the decade-long program of tracking Muslims without their knowledge was being disbanded, in part because it had never generated a single lead about terrorist activity.

Linda Sarsour, of the Arab American Association of New York, told the paper that the tactics had "created psychological warfare in our community."

But on Wednesday, the white Christian Fox News morning show hosts were outraged that the NYPD was nixing a program that they said was designed to protect Muslims from themselves.

"We have a program here that was able to go infiltrate -- in a very mature, respectful way -- to find out what is happening in the mosques and different Muslim communities in New York City," host Brian Kilmeade opined. "Because this is the number one terror target, and the Muslim community gets infiltrated by extremists, and we wanted to know who they are before they hit."

"Respectfully!" co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck added.

"I just hope, next time there is an attack that may have originated with some people that might have met in one of these radical mosques somewhere in the New York City area, we go back and we wonder, now if that program were still there, would we have caught it?" co-host Steve Doocy remarked.

Kilmeade noted that he was on the side former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, "who said that we wanted to do this because we wanted to protect the Muslim community."

Watch the video below from Fox News' Fox & Friends, broadcast April 16, 2014.