JAIL TIME AND CONVERSION TO TERROR
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Converts to terror
By PATRICK DUNLEAVY
Reporting on the terrorism trial now under way in fed eral district court in Man hattan is focusing on defense attorneys’ “entrapment” claim. But to me, the more interesting question is how the four accused were radicalized to the point where they’d even consider plotting to bomb synagogues in The Bronx and shoot down aircraft with missiles.
What stands out is the prison connection.
All four defendants were former inmates. More important, all three imams at the mosque in Newburgh that the defendants attended after being released from prison had a connection with the prison system.
Imams Salahuddin Muhammad, Hamin Rashada and Melody Rashada worked for the Department of Correctional Services. All had been hired by Warith Deen Umar — who for years headed ministerial services for the New York state prison system.
Umar stated in a 2003 Wall Street Journal interview that prisons were a prime place to recruit homegrown terrorists. As recently as last year, at an Islamic Society of North American convention, he made disparaging remarks about Israel and Jews in 2009. He’s an an avowed Salafist.
The Wahabbi/Salafist sect of Islam adheres to a strict interpretation of the Koran and aims to restore the caliphate form of government, functioning under Sharia law. It views Jews and other groups of nonbelievers as infidels and enemies of Islam.
And it has been the dominant Islamic theology in the prison Muslim community for decades — thanks to generous Saudi funding for literature and training for the chaplains. It’s been so dominant that Shia Muslim inmates in New York filed a class-action lawsuit against the prison administrators, claiming religious persecution, threats and overt acts of intimidation by other Muslim inmates at the behest of the civil-service chaplains.
Several years ago, authorities recorded conversations of convicts in Imam Salahuddin Muhammad’s congregation. One claimed that both the governor and the president of the United States were “Zionist puppets.” Another called Jews “pigs and dogs.”
Is it any wonder that one of the defendants, alleged ringleader James Cromitie, was recorded making anti-Semitic remarks and stating that he wanted to destroy the Jews, seeing them as enemies of Islam.
Where and when were these seeds of hatred planted — and where was the prison chaplain when all this was going on?
In an interview with The New York Times after the arrest of the four suspects in May 2009, Imam Salahuddin Muhammad insisted he’d seen little evidence of radicalization in prison, claiming, “I don’t hear any of that wild stuff,” he said, “and if I did hear it, I would stomp it out. It’s totally un-Islamic.”
Yet, during his time as chaplain in the Fishkill State Prison, he hired several inmates with known radical Islamic ties as clerks in the chaplain’s office. One was a Palestinian Hamas member; another was a Yemeni inmate with ties to the Lackawanna Six — a US-grown terrorist cell that attended al Qaeda training camps in the Middle East. He even allowed the inmates to use his office phone to call the Middle East and North Africa.
One need only look at the amount of money from inmate funds that were sent to the Newburgh mosque over the years to see a well-established connection. Inmates from the chaplains’ prison congregations have also sent thousands of dollars to pseudo-Islamic charities, such as the Holy Land Foundation and others, which in turn provided material support for terrorist organizations.
Radical Islamic recruitment in the prison system is a reality. Years of sowing seeds among a captive audience are bearing fruit.
It was no coincidence that the authorities focused on this particular congregation.
Patrick Dunleavy, a former dep uty inspector general of the state Department of Correctional Serv ices, spent more than 26 years working in law enforcement. As head of the Criminal Intelligence Division, he probed the radical Is lamic-recruitment movement in side and outside prison walls. A version of this article ran at inves tigativeproject.org.
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