MAYOR MIKE BETTER SCRAP THE JIHAD/FRIENDLY CHAPLAINCY PROGRAM IN JAILS
Updated: Fri., Feb. 5, 2010, 4:02 AM
Another chaplain outrage
Posted: 1:10 AM, February 5, 2010
It’s time for City Hall to take the chap laincy program at the Department of Correction and shake it like the dirty rug it has become.
Wednesday, Imam Zulqarnain Abdu-Shahid was arrested as he entered the Tombs in lower Manhattan. The Muslim prison chaplain said he “forgot” that he had utility blades and scissors in his carrying bag.
Abdu-Shahid was immediately suspended as chaplain, and for good reason. Quite apart from the contraband charges, it turns out he’s a convicted murderer — having been found guilty in 1979 of murder and robbery involving a Harlem supermarket hold-up.
And it appears that the department was wholly unaware of Abdu-Shahid’s record.
This is hardly Correction’s first embarrassment involving chaplains:
* In 2006, The Post discovered that head chaplain Umar Abdul-Jalil was preaching against “Zionists in the media” and calling President Bush a “terrorist.”
* Three years earlier, Imam Warith Deen Umar, the man previously in charge of hiring Muslim chaplains for state prisons, declared that the 9/11 hijackers should be considered martyrs.
* Last year, The Post revealed that Abdul-Jalil gave a green light as Rabbi Leib Glanz bizarrely allowed an inmate to throw his son’s bar mitzvah in the jail.
Clearly, a lack of oversight with respect to clerics infests DOC.
We can’t imagine Mayor Bloomberg tolerating similar breakdowns in any other city department. So how does the Department of Correction, of all places, get a pass?
Mayor Mike needs to direct Correction Commissioner Dora Schiro to straighten out this program — post-haste.
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