When convicted terrorist bomber Richard Reid attempted to explode a shoe-bomb on American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami, the first reaction was Why?—for he did not fit the stereotype. Only as investigators followed the trail from Reid’s birthplace in Bromley, England, to the plane over the Atlantic did answers slowly emerge.
One of the most puzzling of the many questions was why would an English-born man of Jamaican descent become a terrorist? The answer to that question is found in a surprising place: the Feltham Young Offenders’ Institution—a prison for youths aged 15 to 21. Reid was an inmate of this and other UK prisons. At Feltham he converted to Islam.
On his release he attended the Brixton mosque, also frequented by Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called ‘twentieth 9/11 hijacker,’ before moving on to the more radical mosque at Finsbury Park, home to the extremist cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri. Other al-Qaeda operatives also met there. Through these associations Reid became “radicalized,” and as a zealot eager to prove his devotion, trained in camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
His suicide mission aboard Flight 63—the “other” airplane plot of 2001—was the end of this process that transmuted a petty criminal into an international terrorist.
J
ose Padilla, a U.S. citizen of Puerto Rican parents, is still in custody, an alleged al-Qaeda terrorist, accused of planning “dirty bomb” attacks. Like Reid, he does not fit the stereotype. Like Reid, he converted to Islam through contacts with Muslims while in jail. And like Reid, he traveled overseas—to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Pakistan, and is alleged to have attended a jihadist training camp in Afghanistan.
Are these two narratives isolated instances, or part of a growing—and from the anti-terrorist viewpoint—insidious threat of Islamic proselytism in the jail system? Are we breeding the new generation of terrorists at government expense? Should this threat be tackled immediately and all forms of such proselytism stamped out?
In a surprisingly open press interview, Pascal Maihlos, the director of France’s domestic intelligence agency, Renseignements Généraux (RG), identified the threat and the process in French prisons: “It is there, in prison, that a minority of radical Islamist terrorists (about 100) hook up with petty criminals who find their way back to religion under its most radical form.”
In a 2005 study that attempted to quantify the threat, the RG identified 175 acts they describe as actions of proselytism in 68 prisons. Such acts included pressure on other inmates to observe religious rules and ceremonies. One unidentified RG representative is quoted as saying that “we observe a steady increase of Salafism [a strict and rigorous form of Islam], with two particularities: a strong rejection of Western values and the legitimacy of violence.” This form of Islam is now found in almost all prisons in France, according to the RG, in a prison population estimated at 60-70 percent Muslim.
Pointing to a very real, and not just a potential threat, the RG cites the issue of released prisoners, in particular the case of Algerian Safé Bourada, who had been imprisoned for his role in the 1995 Paris metro attacks. After investigation by the DST, the French counterintelligence agency, Bourada is now detained again, accused of setting up a terrorist cell together with those he met while in jail, and of planning further terrorist attacks within France.
Media coverage of the September release of a “prisoner radicalization report” and testimony before the U.S. House and Senate by members of the Homeland Security Policy Institute (George Washington University) and the Critical Incident Analysis Group (University of Virginia School of Medicine) reveal a collective wringing of hands—“What’s to do?”
“Prisons used to recruit terrorists,” ran one headline. “Islamist radicals in prison: How many?” ran another. “Jailed Islamic extremists with violent interpretations of the Quran are taking advantage of scarce religious monitoring programs to breed terrorists in U.S. prisons, a study released Tuesday shows,” begins an AP story on the report. “Prisons have long been considered recruiting stations for gangs and, more recently, terrorists, but little has been done throughout government to combat them. The Senate hearing came as law enforcement and intelligence officials focus on finding out how and why extremist homegrown sympathizers cross a line to become operational terrorists,” the story continued.
As the actual report indicates, “The potential for radicalization of prison inmates in the United States poses a threat of unknown magnitude to the national security of the U.S. Prisons have long been places where extremist ideology and calls to violence could find a willing ear, and conditions are often conducive to radicalization. With the world’s largest prison population (over 2 million—93 percent of whom are in state and local prisons and jails) and highest incarceration rate (701 out of every 100,000), America faces what could be an enormous challenge—every radicalized prisoner becomes a potential terrorist recruit.”
All point to the problem but are deficient on solutions. The knee-jerk reaction is to “stop the conversions” by preventing Islamic proselytism in jails. The threat of “prison Islam” or a “terrorist university” is seen as sufficient reason to deny or at least restrict religious expression—especially the attempt to convert another to Islam. This is, in the words of one commentator, “evangelism for evil.”
The prison population is susceptible to a philosophy that both exalts the prisoner’s belief in themselves as the oppressed and provides a perpetrator of this injustice (the West and the justice system under which they currently suffer). The factors are clear—but the response is not.
Is it valid that because someone may become a terrorist, to deny freedom of expression and the right to share and change one’s religion (as guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example)? How could such a policy be implemented and policed? What of charges of discrimination between religions? How do you differentiate between strongly held beliefs and consequent actions? Who defines which interpretation is acceptable and which is not? Can governments determine “appropriate” and “nonappropriate” beliefs? Which faction gets the green light; which one gets the red light?
Some answers, then. What of religious rights in such a controversial climate?
“What’s the answer?” asks Chuck Colson. “In the short term, prison officials have ample legal authority to deny radical imams access to inmates. No civilized nation would allow the preachers of violence access to places packed with angry, alienated men. Inmates are easy targets…. But the long-term answer lies in what ministries like Prison Fellowship do: bringing the Gospel into the prisons and telling inmates about the love of Christ.”
Of course this can all too easily become government-determined proselytism—only those we approve of will have access to “evangelize.” And what of the freedom to have or change religion?—certainly the possibility of restraint on free expression of religion is likely.
“Prison systems should keep track of where Islamist prisoners are kept so they can spread them out as is done at times with those prisoners involved in organized crime,” states Zohar Neuman. “It may be necessary to maintain surveillance on prisoners known to be senior figures in Islamist organizations. Some Islamist prisoners should have limitations on their visitation rights and other restrictions. Also, Islamists who are released from prison should be subject to travel restrictions. More must be done in order to ensure that when a violent Islamist is incarcerated for the protection of society—society is really being protected.”
Tracking and surveillance may be seen by many to be the least required by the situation. Of greater concern is the statement made regarding limitations on their visitation rights “and other restrictions.” If these unspecified restrictions relate to the violation of religious liberty and freedom of conscience, then this would be an alarming direction to take. Security is already used as the modern watchword, the card that trumps every other aspect of human life. Recognizing such a danger, derogation from the observance of religious freedom provisions is explicitly denied by international human rights instruments.
“Even if the views and doctrines of the chaplains can be controlled, how can those of the inmates be controlled?” asks Austin Kline. “How can prisons stop inmates from espousing a different form of Islam? Islamic extremism isn’t a simplistic advocacy of violence—it depends upon slight, subtle alterations to a variety of basic doctrines which, when taken together, make violence in the name of Islam easier and more likely. A prison can stop an inmate from saying ‘kill the infidels,’ but can a prison stop an inmate from advocating ideas which might make the aforementioned idea easier to adopt? I doubt it.”
Most would agree that any program seeking to shut down religious dialogue in the prison system is not consistent with wider societal commitments to religious freedom. While overt speech and behavior that applauds terrorism or violence could be identified and punished, the danger of government agents attempting to enter the realm of defining acceptable religious belief is fraught with danger. In the United States the implications for First Amendment freedoms and the wider concepts of religious liberty elsewhere cannot be missed. In trying to do something laudable in terms of preventing terrorist violence, it would be tragic if the very freedoms being protected were destroyed in the process.
The fourth president of the U.S., James Madison wrote, “There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
These threats to religious expression, and the right to convert, should not be ignored simply because they relate to the incarcerated. The freedom to believe and to change one’s religious faith is a fundamental human right that applies to all human beings.
Interestingly, proselytism is already defined as an “unauthorized practice” by the Bureau of Prisons. Yet a recent news report spoke in glowing terms of “faith-based programs” (read certain Christian evangelism) that “hope to make California prisons a sanctuary for sinners turned believers.”
On the basis of the statement banning proselytism, any kind of religious prison ministry that seeks to change the faith of the inmates should be banned. Or does this apply only to those whose proselytizing we disapprove? Maybe people have religious rights only when we think they’re right. Who gets to decide?
Jonathan Gallagher is an internationalist by English birthright and by vocation in his function as the Seventh-day Adventist Church liaison for religious liberty at the United Nations.
1 Top Chrétien, November 25, 2005, cited in Terrorism Monitor, vol. 5, issue 15 at: www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2370082.
2 Ibid.
3 www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/09/19/national/w080327
D52.DTL.
4 “Out of the Shadows: Getting Ahead of Prisoner Radicalization” at: www.homelandsecurity.gwu.edu/reports/rad/Out%20of%20the%20shadows.pdf.
5 www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/index.jsp?section=static&page=colson624.
6 www.jinsa.org/articles/articles.html/function/view/categoryid/165/
documentid/27 53/history/3,2360,655,165,2753.
7 http://atheism.about.com/b/a/083989.htm.
8 Bureau of Prisons policy statement P5360.09 dated 12/31/2004.
9 San Bernadino Press-Enterprise, November 19, 2006.
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