Posted on 06/04/2005 11:16:18 AM PDT by Crackingham
It's Friday on Rikers Island, time for weekly worship for nearly a quarter of the city jail's 14,000 inmates. The men, Muslims, file quietly into a classroom of white cinderblock that serves as their mosque. Incense burns to chase away a sour smell from the hall, as the inmates sit quietly on sheets stamped "Department of Corrections" covering the linoleum floor.
Imam Menelik Muhammad is delivering the day's sermon. As he stands beneath a Quranic prayer on the wall facing Mecca, he urges the prisoners to reform. "You will not be considered a Muslim," he admonishes, "unless people are considered safe from your hands and your tongue."
Across the United States, tens of thousands of Muslims are practicing their faith behind bars. Islam is most likely to win American converts there, according to U.S. Muslim leaders, and the religion has for decades been a regular part of prison culture.
But the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have brought new scrutiny to Muslim inmates, many of whom are black men focused on surviving incarceration. While prison chaplains of various denominations argue that Islam offers a spiritual path to rehabilitation, others say it has the potential to turn felons into terrorists. The FBI calls prisons "fertile ground for extremists."
The reality is harder to read: Those on opposing sides have such divergent views they seem irreconcilable. Who's right matters not only for national security, but for the development of American Islam itself, which is struggling to be accepted alongside the major faiths in the United States.
Ever since the 2002 arrest of Jose Padilla, a felon and American Muslim convert who authorities say planned a "dirty bomb" radiological attack after he left jail, law enforcement officials, politicians and even a few evangelical leaders have warned that Muslim inmates are ripe for terrorist recruitment.
Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, has said: "Wahhabi influence is inculcating them with the same kind of militant ideas that drove the 9/11 hijackers to kill thousands of Americans." Wahhabism is a strict form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, which was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers.
Chuck Colson, founder of the evangelical Prison Fellowship Ministries and a Nixon administration official, predicted that "radical Islamists will use prisons, packed with angry and resentful men," to avenge Islam.
"Prisons continue to be fertile ground for extremists who exploit both a prisoner's conversion to Islam while still in prison, as well as their socio-economic status and placement in the community upon their release," FBI director Robert Mueller said Feb. 16 to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee.
Does anyone think nearly a quarter of New York City residents are Mohammedans? There must be a reason so many Muslims are in the prison at Rikers Island. Could it be Muslims break the law more often than non-Mohammedans?
American Islam is struggling to be accepted alongside the major faiths in the United States.
And the American branch of La Cosa Nostra is also struggling for acceptance alongside the major faiths in the United States. If you study history, you will see Mohammedism is much more akin to The Black Hand than it is to a religion. It is little more than an organized criminal activity masquerading as a religion to give it cover to commit murder, rape, pillage, and other crimes against humanity.
Muslims continue to meet their recruiting goals in a variety of places and methods. There are no soccer moms demanding muslim recruiters stay away from their sons who are locked up.
So? Islam is attractive to criminals? The worse of society? The thieves, rapists and murders? The people that have done so much harm to others they had to be confined? Makes sense......
I don't know to what extent this occurs today, but historically a lot of black inmates became moslems after entering prison. The make up of that stat might include a significant number of them.
American prisons--- taxpayers financing of recruitment for future terrorists.
Islam is a man-made religion of empowerment through force as its underlying theme. It is no wonder that people who live by force and lawlessness are drawn to its tenets. Christianity is founded upon God's Grace toward the broken spirit of the sinner acknowledging his or her fallen state. To all but a very few in prisons, this is anathema for survival. Islam appeals to survival by force over others under the specious premise that the God of the Universe must have men to do his bidding. Christianity offers the already settle power of the Universe to those who are of broken and contrite spirit. The pride of humankind in a fallen state meshes with the pride of 'doing it for god' as found in Islam (and all other cults), where is the big lie told even in the Garden --man can be as God by doing his own salvation--which draws the prideful to ultimate destruction of the individual spirit. The same lie, the same appeal to human pride, permeates all of the great evils now infesting this age.
ping
Nostra culpa. What can you expect when most of academia insists on 8 credits of "nonwestern civilization" (an oxymoron by the way) to graduate and ZERO/NADA credits of western civilization?
clean them out.
prevention prevents accidents
Crowded prisons?
Not crowded enough.
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