America's Academies for Jihad

From Ayaan Hirsi Ali, at the Wall Street Journal, "A radical imam threatened me with death—and was later hired to preach in U.S. prisons. I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been":

Less than a year after I moved to the United States in 2006, I was asked to speak at the University of Pittsburgh. Among those who objected to my appearance was a local imam, Fouad El Bayly, of the Johnstown Islamic Center. Mr. Bayly was born in Egypt but has lived in the U.S. since 1976. In his own words, I had “been identified as one who has defamed the faith.” As he explained at the time: “If you come into the faith, you must abide by the laws, and when you decide to defame it deliberately, the sentence is death.”

After a local newspaper reported Mr. Bayly’s comments, he was forced to resign from the Islamic Center. That was the last I would hear of him—or so I thought.

Imagine my surprise when I learned recently that the man who threatened me with death for apostasy is being paid by the U.S. Justice Department to teach Islam in American jails.

According to records on the federal site USASpending.gov and first reported by Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller, the Federal Bureau of Prisons awarded Mr. Bayly a $10,500 contract in February 2014 to provide “religious services, leadership and guidance” to inmates at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Md. Ten months later he received another federal contract, worth $2,400, to provide “Muslim classes for inmates” at the same prison.

This isn’t a story about one problematic imam, or about the misguided administration of a solitary prison. Several U.S. prison chaplains have been exposed in recent years as sympathetic to radical Islam, including Warith Deen Umar, who helped run the New York State Department of Correctional Services’ Islamic prison program for two decades, until 2000, and who praised the 9/11 hijackers in a 2003 interview with this newspaper.

That same year, the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism held hearings on radical Islamic clerics in U.S. prisons. Committee members voiced serious concerns over the vetting of Muslim prison chaplains and the extent of radical Islamist influences. Harley Lappin, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons at the time, said that “inmates are particularly vulnerable to recruitment by terrorists,” and that “we must guard against the spread of terrorism and extremist ideologies.”

Yet it is not clear what measures—if any—were taken in response to those concerns.

Testifying in 2011 before the House Committee on Homeland Security, Michael P. Downing, head of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Counterterrorism and Special Operations Bureau, said that in 2003 it was estimated that 17%-20% of the U.S. prison population, some 350,000 inmates, were Muslims, and that “80% of the prisoners who convert while in prison, convert to Islam.” He estimated that “35,000 inmates convert to Islam annually.”

Patrick Dunleavy, retired deputy inspector of the Criminal Intelligence Division at the New York State Department of Corrections, said in testimony that prison authorities often rely on groups such as the Islamic Leadership Council or the Islamic Society of North America for advice about Islamic chaplains. Yet those groups can and have referred individuals not suited to positions of influence over prisoners. As Mr. Dunleavy pointedly testified: “There is certainly no vetting of volunteers who provide religious instruction, and who, although not paid, wield considerable influence in the prison Muslim communities.”

The problem isn’t limited to radical clerics infiltrating prisons. Radical inmates proselytize and do their utmost to recruit others to their cause. Once released, they may seek to take their radicalization to the next level...

More.