An important article written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali on this subject, published as an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on March 31, 2015:
* * * * *
Less than a year after I moved to
the United States in 2006, I was asked to speak at the University of
Pittsburgh. Among those who objected to my appearance was a local imam, Fouad
El Bayly, of the Johnstown Islamic Center. Mr. Bayly was born in Egypt but has
lived in the U.S. since 1976. In his own words, I had “been identified as one
who has defamed the faith.” As he explained at the time: “If you come into the
faith, you must abide by the laws, and when you decide to defame it
deliberately, the sentence is death.”
After a local newspaper reported Mr.
Bayly’s comments, he was forced to resign from the Islamic Center. That was the
last I would hear of him—or so I thought.
Imagine my surprise when I learned
recently that the man who threatened me with death for apostasy is being paid
by the U.S. Justice Department to teach Islam in American jails.
According to records on the federal
site USASpending.gov and first reported by Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller, the
Federal Bureau of Prisons awarded Mr. Bayly a $10,500 contract in February 2014
to provide “religious services, leadership and guidance” to inmates at the
Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Md. Ten months later he
received another federal contract, worth $2,400, to provide “Muslim classes for
inmates” at the same prison.
This isn’t a story about one
problematic imam, or about the misguided administration of a solitary prison.
Several U.S. prison chaplains have been exposed in recent years as sympathetic
to radical Islam, including Warith Deen Umar, who helped run the New York State
Department of Correctional Services’ Islamic prison program for two decades,
until 2000, and who praised the 9/11 hijackers in a 2003 interview with this newspaper.
That same year, the Senate
Subcommittee on Terrorism held hearings on radical Islamic clerics in U.S.
prisons. Committee members voiced serious concerns over the vetting of Muslim
prison chaplains and the extent of radical Islamist influences. Harley Lappin,
director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons at the time, said that “inmates are
particularly vulnerable to recruitment by terrorists,” and that “we must guard
against the spread of terrorism and extremist ideologies.”
Yet it is not clear what measures—if
any—were taken in response to those concerns.
Testifying in 2011 before
the House Committee on Homeland Security, Michael P. Downing, head of the Los
Angeles Police Department’s Counterterrorism and Special Operations Bureau,
said that in 2003 it was estimated that 17%-20% of the U.S. prison population,
some 350,000 inmates, were Muslims, and that “80% of the prisoners who convert
while in prison, convert to Islam.” He estimated that “35,000 inmates convert
to Islam annually.”
Patrick Dunleavy, retired deputy
inspector of the Criminal Intelligence Division at the New York State
Department of Corrections, said in testimony that prison
authorities often rely on groups such as the Islamic Leadership Council or the
Islamic Society of North America for advice about Islamic chaplains. Yet those
groups can and have referred individuals not suited to positions of influence
over prisoners. As Mr. Dunleavy pointedly testified: “There is certainly no
vetting of volunteers who provide religious instruction, and who, although not
paid, wield considerable influence in the prison Muslim communities.”
The problem isn’t limited to radical
clerics infiltrating prisons. Radical inmates proselytize and do their utmost
to recruit others to their cause. Once released, they may seek to take their
radicalization to the next level.
Kevin James formed the Assembly of
Authentic Islam while in New Folsom State Prison in California. In 2004 James
recruited fellow prisoner Levar Washington to his cause. After being released,
James developed a list of possible targets including an Israeli consulate, a
Jewish children’s camp in Malibu, Los Angeles International Airport and a U.S.
military recruiting station in Santa Monica. The two men pleaded guilty to
conspiracy charges; Washington was sentenced to 22 years in 2008, James to 16
years in 2009.
Michael Finton converted and
radicalized in an Illinois state prison while serving time for aggravated
assault. Finton wanted to attack a federal government building and spoke of the
need to attack members of Congress. He pleaded guilty to attempted use of a
weapon of mass destruction and was sentenced to 28 years in prison in 2011.
In 2009 the “Newburgh Four”—James
Cromitie, Laguerre Payen, David Williams and Onta Williams—were arrested for
plotting to bomb synagogues in New York City. The men also intended to shoot
down military aircraft with Stinger missiles. All four had converted to Islam
in prison, where they developed radical sympathies. The men didn’t know each
other while in prison but met after their release while attending a local
mosque connected to a prison ministry. All four were convicted on conspiracy
charges and received 25-year sentences in 2011.
In January 2010 John
Kerry, who was then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, released a report warning that “three dozen U.S. citizens who
converted to Islam while in prison have traveled to Yemen, possibly for al
Qaeda training.”
Europeans have known for some time
that prisons can be breeding grounds for Islamists. The British “shoe bomber,”
Richard Reid, is thought to have been radicalized while in prison for smaller
crimes. Two of the gunmen in the Paris terror attacks in January—Chérif Kouachi
and Amedy Coulibaly—came under the religious influence of Djamel Beghal, a
convicted terrorist and charismatic Islamist, when serving prison sentences.
Mohamed Merah, who killed three soldiers, three small children and a rabbi at a
Jewish school near Toulouse, France, in 2012, apparently became a jihadist
while in jail. The list is depressingly long.
The problem is that experts tend to
be concerned about prison radicalization only to the extent that it ultimately
results in some type of violent attack. Yet there are good reasons to be
concerned about the inmates who come to cherish a radical interpretation of
Islam while refraining—for the time being—from the use of violence. The
boundary between nonviolent and violent extremism is much more porous than
conventional wisdom allows.
. . .
The fact that Fouad El Bayly, an
imam who publicly called for my death, was chosen to provide “religious
services, leadership and guidance” at a federal prison shows that U.S.
authorities haven’t learned the right lessons from a growing list of
prison-convert terrorists.
* * * * *
Further Reading:
My analytical review of the cable drama Oz (in which Muslim prisoners figure in key roles of the ongoing plot).
1 comment:
Well, my iPhone does NOT intend for me to leave comments on your website. Ha!
Let's try my computer....
Post a Comment