It should come as no surprise that up to three dozen American Islamists re vealed this week to have skipped off to terror training camps in Yemen were radicalized in US prisons.
The surprise would be if corrections officials did anything about it.
According to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, intelligence indicates that some 36 Americans who converted to Islam in prison have departed for the al Qaeda hotbed in the past year, claiming to want to study Arabic.
Intelligence officials told the committee that they’d lost track of some of the men, who they believe have slipped away to al Qaeda training camps.
This is a big problem, the report says, “because of the potential threat from extremists carrying American passports and the related challenges involved in detecting and stopping homegrown operatives.”
No kidding.
Indeed, such study-abroad programs for homegrown jihadists seem to be all the rage these days. Last month, five Muslim students from Virginia were arrested in Pakistan as they tried to rendezvous with al Qaeda.
But what’s especially outrageous about the Yemen 36 is the very real possibility that they were fed their poison by folks collecting government paychecks as Muslim chaplains.
In 2003, Imam Warith Deen Umar, who until 2000 was essentially in charge of hiring Muslim chaplains for New York’s state prisons, told The Wall Street Journal that the 9/11 hijackers should be honored as martyrs.
In 2006, Imam Umar Abdul-Jalil, the city’s head Muslim prison chaplain, was caught by The Post preaching against “Zionists in the media” and the “terrorist” President Bush — and kept his job.
Sure, Warith Deen Umar was dismissed, and the state Correction Department says that, 10 years on, most of the chaplains he hired have left, too.
Still, as the Senate report suggests, the radical factory in America’s prisons keeps rolling along.
It’s time to put a stick in the spokes.