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Steven Emerson,
Executive Director
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January 14, 2019
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How
a Bigoted Organization Finagled Taxpayer Funds
by Patrick Dunleavy
IPT News
January 14, 2019
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first of your friends to like this.
 Ask average U.S.
taxpayers if they would give money to an organization that is openly racist
and anti-Semitic and you would get a resounding "No" in response.
And yet that is exactly what has happened for more than 20 years, with
the Nation of Islam receiving federal funds to operate within the U.S.
prison system. A recent report by the Washington Examiner's Alana
Goodman revealed that the Nation had received $364,500 dollars
from the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) since 2008 to provide inmates with
religious services.
The Nation's news outlet, The Final Call, called the Examiner story "a vicious
flourish of lies," and said the prison ministry "is a great
benefit and blessing to the American Penal System."
The Nation's work with the Bureau of Prisons dates back far earlier than
2008. NOI and its officials have been paid to work in prisons since the 1980s. A 1986 Christian Science Monitor article
described critics who worried that "Farrakhan's
teachings - more about politics than theology - threaten to radicalize
prisoners. They blame him for militant indoctrination of black youth who
feel abandoned by American society. Farrakhan's is a racist, separatist
movement, they say, whose message has particular appeal for a group that
feels disenfranchised."
This despite the fact that the organization and its leader Louis
Farrakhan have a consistent record of anti-Semitism dating back decades.
He called Jews "bloodsuckers" just before his 1995 "Million
Man March." In just the past year, he has said, "Satanic Jews are my enemy," and compared
them to termites.
"White folks are going down," he said during his Saviour's Day speech last February.
"And Satan is going down. And Farrakhan, by God's grace, has pulled
the cover off of that Satanic Jew and I'm here to say your time is up, your
world is through."
According to BOP regulations cited in a 2004 Inspector General's report on Muslim chaplains,
regarding the vetting of contract workers, "...a contractor or
volunteer will be dismissed based on any credible evidence that the person
has potential ties to any terrorist-affiliated organizations or
individuals; advocates racism or violence."
What more does the BOP need before determining that the Nation of Islam
crossed this line?
The Nation also published "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks
and Jews," which falsely
claims that Jews dominated the slave trade. After a second volume was
issued in 2010, the Simon Wiesenthal Center published a 16-page paper refuting its false history.
The Wiesenthal Center paper said
that in addition to blaming Jews for slavery, it the NOI book offers
"conspiracy theories that Rothschilds ran the American economy, Jewish
merchants learned to exploit black sharecroppers from the Talmud, Jewish
pimps monopolized organized prostitution, and the KKK and Freemasons were
both fronts for the Jews."
What possible rehabilitative value could this type of hate speech or ideology
have for an individual in prison? It only gives him another group to hate
or blame for his misfortune.
How were proponents of this type of ideology able to gain access to the
U.S. prison system? Who in the Department of Justice, the agency responsible
for vetting religious clergy and volunteer workers in the Bureau of
Prisons, approved the NOI to receive taxpayer dollars?
It isn't difficult to imagine what would happen if a prison contracted
with a Christian clergyman who disparaged Muslims in any way. The national
advocacy groups would immediately demand the cleric's termination and
removal of any instructional material provided. Why should such naked
bigotry be tolerated in this case?
The Bureau of Prisons, citing regulations, gives each facility's Chaplain
Services office the authority to contract for religious services that it
cannot provide.
Federal records show the Nation of Islam has been paid more than
$420,000 just since 2005 both for services and for purchases, likely books
and recorded materials produced by the Nation. Payments for services can
range between $200 and $800.
An individual prison could have paid up to $25,000 for the Nation of
Islam to perform weekly Jummah services for one year. These services would
not include literature which the BOP also purchased from the Nation of
Islam. Among the literature the NOI supplied was "The Final Call"
which promotes conspiracy theories depicting the Jews as the
source of all society's problems.
That type of hate speech could easily incite violence, particularly in
the prison environment where Jewish inmates are a minority.
Somewhere in the Bureau of Prisons central office there should be a list
of all the Nation of Islam personnel who did business with the BOP and a
security assessment by either the FBI or the National Joint Terrorism Task
Force (NJTTF) of any ties to terrorist or racist organizations.
U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla., has issued a statement last Monday asking the Department of
Justice to stop future payments to the Nation of Islam. "The federal
government should not use taxpayer dollars to subsidize one of the most
infamous hate groups in the United States," Buchanan said.
That's a good start.
Congress should follow up and shut off the spigot that lets taxpayer
dollars flow so freely to this hate group. It should also have the DOJ's
Inspector General investigate the failure of the Bureau of Prisons to
properly vet religious workers and contractors.
Research Analyst Teri Blumenfeld and Senior Research Analyst Abha
Shankar contributed to this report.
IPT Senior Fellow Patrick Dunleavy is the former Deputy Inspector
General for New York State Department of Corrections and author of The Fertile Soil of Jihad. He currently
teaches a class on terrorism for the United States Military Special
Operations School.
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