Daily Alert Archives

Prison Jihad? How Radical Islamic Charities Exploit Their Access to the Prison System

[Weekly Standard] Daveed Gartenstein-Ross - Islamic extremist literature often finds its way into the U.S. prison system and thus influences inmates' religious education. The International Al Haramain organization was formed as a private charity in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 1992 to foster Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia's austere brand of Islam. When I worked for the group, it had offices in more than 50 countries and an annual budget of $40-50 million. Today, Al Haramain has been merged into the Saudi National Commission for Relief and Charity Work Abroad. Al Haramain had a prison dawa program that was ideally structured for terrorist recruitment. Prisoners would initiate contact with the U.S. branch of Al Haramain by writing to request Islamic literature. Afterwards, they were sent a number of pamphlets and a questionnaire. All of the information - the inmates' names, prisoner numbers, the facilities where they were held, their release date, the address they would be released to - was entered into a massive database that contained over 15,000 names.
2006-10-13 01:00:00
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