Storm Track Disinformation: Whistling in the Dark?

From The Gathering Storm

In an article in the Moderate Voice, “Radical Islam Finds Few Takers in the US”, the writer dolts on how Muslims in the US are so well-assimilated that radical Islam can not find roots here.

The writer, unfortunately, is another apologist just whistling in the dark. If the writer would take time to read the many news articles like this, this and this, I think he would have to change his tune.

Colbert King in the Washington Post wrote and excellent article on the subject.

Shortly after the London bombings, it became fashionable for some American commentators to cite the alienation of British Muslims as an example of a massive failure of assimilation -- a state of affairs, they asserted, that is inconceivable in the United States. Americanization, went their argument, has virtually eliminated teeming groups of disaffected Islamic immigrants within our shores. Well, that may be true but it's not the whole truth concerning American Muslims. the group within the African American Muslim community that is experiencing the most explosive growth is probably the least assimilated: black inmates. Good statistics are hard to come by, but one estimate places the number of Muslim converts in prison above 250,000. What brings them to Islam? Survival? Acceptance? Rejection of Christianity? Spiritual transformation? One thing for sure: It's not Americanization.

Enter the FBI.

FBI director Robert S. Mueller III recently told Congress that one area of the war on terrorism that causes him great concern is the potential for extremist groups such as al Qaeda to recruit radicalized American Muslim converts. Mueller drew a bead on the American prison system, which he described in written testimony as "fertile ground for extremists who exploit both a prisoner's conversion to Islam while still in prison, as well as their socioeconomic status and placement in the community upon their release."

That concern is no longer theoretical.

Three California men are currently being investigated as part of a possible plot to launch assaults against National Guard facilities this Sept. 11 and against Jewish targets on Yom Kippur. One of them, 25-year-old Levar Haney Washington, had served time at the California State Prison in Folsom and, during his incarceration, converted to a radical Islamic group known as Jamiyyat Ul Islam Is Saheeh. Gregory Vernon Patterson, 21, arrested with Washington on unrelated robbery charges, recently converted to Islam. The third man in custody, Hammad Riaz Samana, 21, is a Los Angeles resident. Washington and Patterson are African American; Samana is a Pakistani national.

Time to change our tune?