Thomas: Radical recruiting in America's prisons

The mail brings a letter from a self-identified African-American prison inmate (several of the same type have arrived since Sept. 11). He predicts Islam will take over the world and America's days are numbered.

This man is one of many converts to radical Islam under a program indirectly funded by Saudi Arabian money through the National Islamic Prison Foundation, which underwrites a "prison outreach" program. This program is likely to be discussed at the fifth annual Islam in American Prisons Conference, scheduled for July 5-7 at the Holiday Inn O'Hare International in Rosemont, Ill. (www.ISNA.net, click on "Islam in American Prisons").

One of the co-sponsors of the gathering is the Islamic Society of North America, which has ties to other Muslim groups in the U.S., some of which are up to no good. Let us hope that under the new Justice Department guidelines, the FBI will be attending and taking notes.

Prison Fellowship Chairman Charles Colson, who heads a Christian ministry to prisoners, believes radical Islamic clerics, trained in Saudi Arabia, are converting large numbers of African-American inmates not only to their religion, but to their political objectives, including virulent anti-Americanism. Colson thinks such inmates could serve the radicals as terrorists once they are released, murdering their own countrymen in a kind of "payback" for perceived injustices done to them by white America.

Last Oct. 20, The New York Times quoted Faheem Shuaibe, imam at a large, predominately black mosque in Oakland, Calif., as saying that more than 200 African-American imams have been trained so far in Saudi Arabia. Shuaibe told the newspaper:

"There was a very deliberate recruitment process by the Saudis, trying to find black Muslims who had a real potential for Islamic learning and also for submission to their agenda. They taught Islam with the intent to expand their influence. A principal target was to stop the indigenous Muslim leadership in America from tinkering with their religion."

According to the Times story, the brand of Islam being taught and exported was the most extreme sect, known as Wahhabism.

"These are bad guys," says Colson, who contrasts his Christian ministry, which uses volunteers to visit inmates, with the "extreme agenda" of the Wahhabbi Muslims, who do not utilize volunteers, but rely on imams. Colson says he has been in 600 prisons (counting the one in which he served time for Watergate crimes). He calls some of the anger of black inmates "legitimate" because of sentence disparity and the anger they feel at themselves. These angry men are being shaped by radical clerics in a way that will threaten America's interests when they get out.

There are 2 million people in American prisons. Most are men and only 30 percent are white. "If only 5 percent of the African-American population is disaffected," says Colson, "that is an enormous pool from which the radicals can draw."

Inmates of whatever faith, or of no faith, are entitled to visits by lay or professional ministers. But Supreme Court rulings grant the prison system the right to determine who might undermine order and who best preserves it. Wardens in state prisons and officials in the Federal Bureau of Prisons should issue new guidelines and bar radical Islamists.

While the government is at it, a serious investigation should be conducted into the proliferation of Islamic front groups in this country. Influential American political activists are rumored to be taking money from Islamic states and seeking to shape U.S. foreign and domestic policies that may not be in the best interests of their own country. They should also be the focus of journalistic concern.

This is war, after all. German spies were hunted down and exposed during the Second World War, as were spies and other threats to American freedoms during the Cold War. We should be doing the same with this greater contemporary threat.

Alleged 'Dirty Bomber' and I Would Have Been Prison Buddies
Joe Loya, Pacific News Service, June 13, 2002

For PNS contributor and ex-con Joe Loya, "dirty bomb" suspect Abdullah al Muhajir -- a Latino who converted to Islam after release from prison -- is familiar. Loya met and used to sympathize with many Latino Muslims during his incarceration, and he explains what a Brooklyn-born former gang member might see in al Qaeda.

Oakland, Calif.--I watched with interest the recent announcement of the arrest of Abdullah al Muhajir -- born Jose Padilla -- a U.S. citizen and former Chicago gang member who converted to Islam and is accused of plotting with al Qaeda to explode a "dirty bomb."

He and I could have been good friends in prison.

Seven years ago, from my federal prison cell, I watched on television the destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. My first thought: "Good, the U.S. government needs to suffer some casualties in this war on crime. They need to learn that it ain't no fun when the rabbit's got the gun."

It was easy for me as a federal prisoner to affiliate myself with the enemy of my enemy. I justified McVeigh's murder of innocent people as "collateral damage." People of good conscience, I rationalized, used the same justification to blast the innocent of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Prisons are full of political throwbacks who haven't seen freedom in 20 or 30 years. You see older men in a time warp, wearing widely flared bell-bottom pants that were fashionable when they were last out on the streets. Some prisoners' politics are similarly dated.

In federal custody, I knew a Mexican mafioso named Qeto who fasted for Ramadan as an expression of solidarity with Palestinians. He wasn't Muslim, but in his mind the Palestinians had their homeland stolen and were oppressed in much the same way as Mexicans.

Qeto fancied himself a Marxist revolutionary of the Che Guevara stripe. He was committed to a reconquest of the U.S. Southwest -- the mythical birthplace of the state of "Aztlan." He passed out Chicano scholar Rudolfo Acuna's book "Occupied America" to semi-illiterate Mexican gang members.

Acuna espouses the separatist gospel that "Anglo control of Mexico's Northwest territory [the U.S. Southwest] is an occupation." In Qeto's imagination, he and the Palestinians had a similar "stolen lands" quarrel with all imperialist governments of the world.

Once, when I was locked in my cell during the Gulf War, I heard an excited inmate named Toro yell out to Qeto that he'd seen the war footage and that "we" were blowing the Iraqis away. "Who is the "we" you are talking about?" Qeto shot back. "You have solidarity with a government that has you locked in handcuffs right now?"

It would have been easy for Jose Padilla, doing time in Illinois, to become politicized by a radical leftist like Qeto. No doubt he was preached to by some aging supporter of the Chicago-based FALN, a Puerto Rican group that planted bombs against "the imperialist state" in the 1970s.

Latino Muslims were common in prison. My friend "Panama" was one of them. He spoke in broken English, wore a traditional Muslim cap and prayed five times a day.

There resides in the Latino consciousness at least three historical grudges, three subsidiary selves: the Muslim Moor, the Catholic Spanish and the indigenous root. You see the internal antagonism manifested when the light-skinned, middle-class, Catholic Mexican-American girl from Reseda goes to Stanford and goes indigenous, adopting a new Aztec princess name, Xochi.

The old Latin American revolutionaries converted to atheism, but the new faux-revolutionary Latino-American prisoner can just as easily convert to Islam. In the end, both choices resemble an adolescent's rebellion against a parent's authority.

I understand that rebellion, the desire to highlight my indigenous roots over the Conquistador in me. There was a time in prison when I contemplated getting out and fund-raising for Mexico's revolutionary Zapatistas by robbing American banks. I was a thief, but I wanted to be a criminal soldier with a cause, like Zapata and Pancho Villa.

U.S. law enforcement is partially to blame for the phenomenon of the street gang member dreaming of becoming such a warrior. Law enforcement has employed the metaphors and language of warfare to fight drug addicts and petty thieves. It was only a matter of time before simple thugs like me and Qeto began to see ourselves at war with the U.S. government.

Although I was Mexican-American, the FBI named me "The Beirut Bandit" when they were chasing me, because tellers said I looked Lebanese, or Iranian, or Pakistani. Like Jose Padilla, once upon a time I could have entertained the thought of lending criminal support to the Palestinians or other Arab groups, whom I resembled in appearance and shared grudges against the United States.

Today, Jose Padilla and I could no longer be friends. On television -- free from prison walls -- I saw the World Trade Center attack and was repulsed. My heart doesn't celebrate mayhem like it once did. I'm no longer at war with the government, or with myself.

Loya (BuddhaLobo@aol.com) has written a memoir on his time in prison, due to be published by HarperCollins in the fall of 2003.

Source

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.