North American Muslims left in a quandary

Tarek Fatah

As if we North American Muslims have not had enough scrutiny of our community due to the actions and words of the Islamists amongst us, a new group of jihadis has emerged, this time from inside the US prison system, a product of the extremist teaching of Islam by some Islamic chaplains.

Yesterday, New York Police arrested four ex-convicts, all African Americans who converted to Islam inside prison, and charged them with a plot to bomb up a Jewish synagogue, blow up planes and in general wage jihad against the USA. When the politically correct media simply reported the names of the accused-James Cromitie, 44; David Williams, 28; Onta Williams, 32 and Laguerre Payen, 27 — I heaved a sigh of relief. Phew! For once a group accused of terrorism was not Muslim--at least judging from their names, f

However, my relief was short-lived. It turned out the four were 'brothers' who had embraced my faith at the hands of prison chaplains. Could these men be the first jihadis who owe their existence to the American tax payer?

At a news conference outside the Bronx temple Thursday, NY Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly quoted one of the men as saying, "If Jews were killed in this attack ... that would be all right." 

The four Muslim converts face charges of plotting to bomb Jewish sites and shoot down military planes were arrested after planting what they thought were explosive devices near a synagogue and community center, authorities say. Three of the defendants are US citizens and one is of Haitian descent, officials said.

The men had planned to detonate a car with plastic explosives outside a temple in the Bronx neighbourhood of Riverdale and to shoot military planes at the New York Air National Guard base at Stewart Airport in Newburgh with Stinger surface-to-air guided missiles, authorities said. The defendants planned to "destroy a synagogue and a Jewish community center with C-4 plastic explosives," Acting US Attorney Lev Dassin said.

While apologists for America's well organized Islamist network immediately rolled out the predicted press releases condemning the four accused and asking Americans to not judge Islam by the actions of these jihadis, they missed one more opportunity to distance themselves from the Islamic doctrine of Jihad. No where in the statement by CAIR, an Islamic organization labelled as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Texas Terror Trial by the US Justice Department, was there any inkling of a message that said 'jihad is a medieval doctrine that is ill-suited and inapplicable in the world of the 21st century.'

The usual gobbledygook of 'inter-faith dialogue' was dished out without acknowledging the fact that anti-Jewish and anti-Christian rhetoric is part of the vocabulary of most clerics and chaplains who serve the Muslim community, both inside and outside prisons.

What is interesting is that most of America's prison chaplains that serve the Muslim inmate population are trained in varying degrees at the Islamic Chaplaincy Program of the Hartford Seminary. Guess who has been the leading force behind this program, including its curriculum? None other than Ms. Ingrid Mattson who today heads the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) another group labelled as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Texas Terror Trial.

The question is often asked: What should be done?

To answer this question requires that we first agree that this is a battle of ideas and values before it becomes a war of weapons and terror. To fight the ideology of jihad and Islamism, we need to challenge it as a medieval construct and expose Islamism and its supporters as a threat to the separation of religion and state, which has been a corner stone of Western democracy and liberalism and for which countless people have toiled for nearly 400 years.

Not until we stand up to the carriers of both soft-jihad will we succeed and stopping the suicide bombers and terrorists who take the ideology of Islamism to its logical extreme.

More stories on the Bronx bomb suspects:

1. 1.New York Times on the steps and missteps of the alleged terrorists
   

2. 2.NYC Police: Terror suspects wanted to commit jihad
   

3. 3.State prisons are major breeding ground for Islamic radicalization