Posted on 12/30/2001 10:06:48 AM PST by Clive
The man who tried to blow up the aircraft from Paris to Miami by igniting Semtex hidden in his shoe was a British criminal called Richard Reid. Concealment in the soles and heels of shoes is a common way of smuggling drugs and even weapons into prison, so it is possible Reid learned part of his technique in a house of correction. Certainly he converted to Islam there.
Religious conversion in prison is not at all uncommon. Many of the young men in British prisons (and crime, it should always be remembered, is a young man's game) emerge from profoundly unstable backgrounds: a loveless broken home, in which the only other significant influence is the witless nihilism of modern popular culture. Eventually, after several prison sentences, the penny drops that something is missing from their lives, and they are then susceptible to evangelism of all kinds. They need a doctrine that provides all the answers at once.
Islam is not the only religion that makes converts in prison. I have noticed a sub-group of prisoners, for example, who turn to Buddhism while incarcerated. They can almost always be recognized physically: they sport pony tails and have an air of unnatural and studied calm. The pony-tailed Buddhist has usually committed the most terrible and violent offences in his past: and from an utter disregard for human life, he suddenly becomes solicitous even about the life of insects.
I am not sure how long the Buddhist influence lasts after release from prison: for most of the prison Buddhists I have known are serving long sentences. But I suspect that gestalt switches are inherently unstable, and instantaneous changes in one direction can all too easily be reversed.
Evangelical Christians also reap a small harvest in prison. Again, I am uncertain about the depth or duration of the change for the better that conversion produces: and my skepticism increased when I met a pastor of an evangelical church -- imprisoned for having administered sleeping pills to female members of his flock at coffee mornings before taking sexual advantage of them -- who claimed to have realized the error of his ways by further study of the Gospels. He was persuasive, plausible and charming, but presumably he had been persuasive, plausible and charming in the first place: and contact with such a case destroys confidence that one easily can distinguish between a true and a false change of heart.
In the prison where I work, however, by far the most active evangelism is that carried out by the Muslims.
One cannot walk through the jail in which I work without noticing books and pamphlets expounding the principles and precepts of Islam that are left lying about on tables and chairs. They outnumber Christian literature by a factor of 10 or 20 to one, if not more.
A visitor would think Britain was an Islamic country.
There are, of course, a lot of Muslims in British jails. Young men of Pakistani origin look set to overtake those of Jamaican origin in the over-representation-in-prison stakes (by contrast, the Sikhs and Hindus are under-represented, thus refuting police and judicial racial prejudice as the explanation of the phenomenon). But the presence of so many Muslims does not explain the comparative success of Islam in making converts among whites and blacks, for the young Muslim criminals are neither admired nor liked by other groups. The explanation lies elsewhere.
Most of the criminals I meet in prison are convinced that they are themselves the victims of injustice: not in the particular sense of having been falsely accused (the majority will admit to me that they have done what they were accused of doing, and generally very much more besides), but in a global, existential sense. Unable or unwilling to distinguish between the unfairness of human life and the injustice of society, they bear a grudge against a hated society that they believe has deliberately and maliciously loaded the dice against them. The only society they know, of course, is the one they live in: They are too ignorant and ill- educated to compare it with any other, either in geography or history. They thus have no standards of comparison by which to judge and put into perspective the alleged wrongs done to them by the society they hate.
In the circumstances, conversion to Islam kills two birds with one stone. It fulfils a personal need, but it is also an act of revenge upon society: for official multiculturalism notwithstanding, everyone knows that Western societies are profoundly uneasy about their infiltration by an increasingly confident and militant Islam that uses Western liberal principles to spread itself in the way communism once did.
Conversion to Islam is thus the prisoner's expression of Malvolio's last sentiment in Twelfth Night, after he has been so thoroughly humiliated: "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you." And it is salutary always to remember that in most people the thirst for revenge is much stronger than the quest for truth.
Theodore Dalrymple is a British physician and contributing editor to City Journal.
When you think of the appeal islam has to the typical incarcerated man in the U.S. it gives him a structured way to:
1. Shift blame for their own actions by explaining it as a response to injustice.
2. Engage in a practice that is offensive to the majority of Americans.
3. Hide behind a religion to explain their own anti-White racism.
Throw in the added bonus of a new, hard to pronounce name and a cool hat, and it’s just too much for an ill educated, poorly reasoning black youth to decline.
This same statement would apply to why inner city kids join gangs. Broken homes, low self-esteem, it all seems very similar to the classic Cryps and Bloods syndrome. A gang gives the young guy a feeling of belonging, people to look up to, rules to follow, all the things they may not have had at home.
I think we need to see Islamic fanatacism as a huge, international "gang" from which the members derive a sense of purpose. This is certainly not to say that I have any sympathy for any of them, but rather, maybe it's time to go after the gangs that terrorize us in our inner cities with the same amount of energy. Clean up ALL the losers.
Just a thought.
Before September 11, I often found myself, (a Christian, BTW), defending Islam as misunderstood, particularly in context of the way that the term "jihad" had been misused by fanatics.
I had explained many times that "jihad" was a personal and moral struggle, not an excuse for bloodshed, and that Islam did not condone the killing of non-combatants in war.
My perception of Islam began to degrade around about September 19, when it became apparent that there would be no public outrage emanating from the mullahs and the imams.
Their almost deafening silence on the perversion of "jihad", the corruption of "fatwah" and the commission of mass murder in the name of Allah has virtually screamed a refutation of the oft repeated claim that Islam is a peaceful religion.
I have now come reluctantly to the conclusion that "jihad" has lost its original meaning and that it now has exactly the meaning given to it by the fanatics.
Salaam aleichem.
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Just remember that it's the U.S. media's job to fire you up and keep you buying magazines and watching the crappy nightly news. So of course they're going to show the worst Muslims from time to time to make your blood boil. But there are plenty of good ones out there as well, and I have seen dozens of Muslim religious leaders on the boob tube condemning the attacks.
There are an awful lot of Christians who aren't worth knowing, who treat their families like crap and commit crimes against our society, but by no means does that excuse us writing off all Christians as such. Why should we write off all Muslims in that fashion?
The visitor would be wrong. Britain is a pagan country where most of the population believe in nothing except the "values" of socialism.
And how could it be otherwise? Muhammad himself was an outlaw, a brigand, a highwayman, a bandit who lived by attacking and murdering merchant caravans crossing the desert.
For him money was booty, and to work for a living contemptible and unnecessary--something only infidels ought to do, so that Muslims could live by fleecing them, ...by violence and the threat of violence.
It will be hard to convince Muslims that this is wrong, as long as it is working so well. How much did we give Egypt and the others to buy them off last year? And how much does the EU and Norway give? And what is the source of Yasser Arafat's $120 million fortune in Swiss banks?
"Rich booty shall be yours, yea, you shall have it," said Muhammad.
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