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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D. Long who wrote (85566)	11/11/2004 12:43:24 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793790

Interesting report, thanks. American prisons are said to be a source of fodder for militant Islamism. Here's an article that touches on the subject by an honest-to-God authority on the subject, Jessica Stern. Though the article is worth reading in its entirety, I have only quoted the parts that deal with Islamism in US prisons: 216.239.39.104 Still another set of unlikely links has sprung up in American prisons, where Saudi charities now fund organizations that preach radical Islam. According to Warith Deen Umar, who hired most of the Muslim chaplains currently active in New York State prisons, prisoners who are recent Muslim converts are natural recruits for Islamist organizations. Umar, incidentally, told The Wall Street Journal that the September 11 hijackers should be honored as martyrs, and he traveled to Saudi Arabia twice as part of an outreach program designed to spread Salafism (a radical Muslim movement) in U.S. prisons. Another organization now active in U.S. prisons is Jamaat ul-Fuqra, a terrorist group committed to purifying Islam through violence. (Daniel Pearl was abducted and murdered in Pakistan while attempting to interview the group's leader, Sheikh Gilani, to investigate the claim that Richard Reid -- who attempted to blow up an international flight with explosives hidden in his shoes -- was acting under Gilani's orders.) The group functions much like a cult in the United States; members live in poverty in compounds, some of which are heavily armed. Its members have been convicted of fraud, murder, and several bombings, but so far, most of their crimes have been relatively small scale. Clement Rodney Hampton-El, however, convicted of participating with Omar Abdel Rahman in a 1993 plot to blow up New York City landmarks, was linked to the group, and U.S. law enforcement authorities worry that the Fuqra has since come under the influence of al Qaeda.