American Prisons now hothouses for Islam

CNN reports that more than 25% of the Muslims in America are converts who have embraced Islam in the wake of 9/11.

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The report conveys the impression that Islam now attracts adherents from all religious, social, economic and racial backgrounds through interviews with recent converts – - both white women – - Allison Poole, formerly a Southern Baptist, and Barbara Cartokuke, a lapsed Roman Catholic. Ms. Poole claims that Islam has heightened her religious awareness since she now prays five times a day, and Barbara Cartokuke says that Islam has brought her a “one-on-one relationship with God” that she was unable to establish by reciting Hail Marys. While it is true that Islam is the fastest growing religion in America with over 1.5 million new converts, the development is far from multicultural or multiracial. The CNN news clip fails to point out that 90% of the 1.5 million new converts are African Americans, and that 60% become Muslims while serving time in prison. Prison – - not the college campus, the workplace, or the neighborhood mosque – - has become the breeding ground for wholesale conversions of blacks. The appeal of Islam to inmates is not difficult to explain. Muslim prisoners demand and receive the right to observe congregational salat not only in the mosque but also the exercise yard, to a separate kitchen for the preparation of separate halal meals, to separate hours for showers and toilets to ensure their privacy, and to sadaqa (financial autonomy for their prison business endeavors, including the sale of incense, aromatic oils, and personal toiletries).1 They refuse to submit to strip-searching and frisking, claiming that such practices violated the Islamic code of wuduzu. These concessions grant Muslims the ability to corner the drug trade within the prison system. As a privileged class within the system, Muslims also offer new black inmates offer protection to other black inmates from Hispanic street gangs and white supremacists. By 2005, approximately 350,000 Muslims occupied prison cells, and 80% of inmates who found faith in prison converted to Islam.2 By 2008, such conversions were taking place at the astonishing clip of 40,000 a year.3 African Americans were being converted by the cellblock, causing FBI officials to speculate that this segment of the population represents the force from which the next 9/11 will originate.4 The Muslim prison ministry is funded by the Saudi government through the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an influential front for the promotion of the Wahhabi political, ideological, and theological infrastructure in the United States and Canada. This finding is supported by Abdel al-Jubeir, foreign policy spokesman for Saudi King Abdullah, who told the Wall Street Journal: “The Saudi government pays for prison chaplains, along with many other American Muslims, to travel to Saudi Arabia for worship and study during the hajj. . . The trips typically cost $3,000 a person and last several weeks.”5 Warith Deen Umar, founder of the National Association of Muslim Chaplains, serves as a prototype for his fellow clerics. In one of his sermons at the Otisville Federal Facility, Umar informed his prison flock that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were justified, and that the 19 hijackers should be remembered as Allah’s “martyrs.”6 The situation within the prison system cries out for attention. Edward Caden, a retired prison administrator in California, recently told ABC News: “Prisons are a prime, prime target for terror recruiting. It is a ripe population.”7 Proof of the problem with the new converts comes from the following incidents in the wake of 9/11:

• A group of black Muslim converts in Miami who allegedly conspired to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago (some had rap sheets)
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• A Chicago black Muslim, Derrick Shareef, who allegedly plotted to blow up a local shopping mall.
• A black U.S. soldier, Hassan Abujihaad, who allegedly fed terrorists classified information about U.S. battleship movements in the Strait of Hormuz.
• Jose Padilla (a.k.a. Abdullah al-Muhajir), who planned to set off a dirty bomb in midtown Manhattan, became an Islamist during one of his many stints in the slammer.
• Aqil Collins converted to Islam while serving time in a California detention facility. He went on to an Afghan training camp with one of the jihadis accused of killing Wall Street correspondent Daniel Pearl.
• Black ex-con Muslims at the New Folson State Prison, a maximum security facility near Sacramento, California, who planned to attack military recruiting stations, the Israeli consulate, and several synagogues in the state on the fourth anniversary of 9/11. The plot was hatched on the cellblock.
• In February 2009, Rasheed Scrugs (a.k.a. Rasheed Abdulahaffer) murdered Philadelphia Police Officer John Pawloski, 25, with a .367 Magnum. Scrugs had converted to Islam while serving time for armed robbery.

In May 2009, four Muslim prison converts were collared while plotting to bomb synagogues to shoot down a military transport. Pakistani religious leaders Sami ul-Haq and Fazrul Rehman predict that “in the next 10 years, Americans will wake up to the existence of an Islamic army in their midst—an army of jihadis who will force America to abandon imperialism and listen to the voice of Allah.” That army is being formed within the prison system.