Homegrown Islamic Jihad in the Bronx: Now We Are All Israelis

From the Chesler Chronicles:

Riverdale, in the Bronx, is a gloriously leafy, hilly, and peaceful suburb. I have visited its extraordinary gardens and gracious homes which overlook the Hudson river. More often, I’ve visited a close friend and her family who live there. I have studied, dined, and prayed with them. I have attended lectures at Riverdale synagogues. Riverdale is as close to me, both personally, psychologically, and geographically, as was the World Trade Center.

In response to a gruesome series of Islamic-Palestinian synagogue bombings in Europe, police officers guarded Europe’s synagogues and Jewish Centers. Now, synagogues all over New York City, tend to have barricades or some kind of police presence outside. We are now all Israelis: Not just the Jews, but the world’s civilians.

And thus, four African-American converts to Islam, all of whom converted to Islam in prison, have been arrested by the FBI just as they attempted to bomb two Riverdale synagogues, (the Riverdale Jewish Center and the Riverdale Temple), in the Bronx and a New York National Guard air base in Newburgh, New York where they lived and attended a mosque.

Click on the title to read the rest of the article by Phyllis Chesler.
------------

This is pretty ominous. African-Americans who converted to Islam in prison plotted to bomb synagogues in New York. Most media reports of this incident did not include the race or religion of the suspects. The article goes on to quote statistics of prison conversions to Islam, to note that the funding for this recruitment comes from the Saudis, and to suggest that we "reform our prison system, including a reform of our drug laws, so that we jail fewer inmates and do not provide such a fertile breeding ground for anti-American and anti-Jewish Islamic terrorism."

One item I found interesting is that Islam is possibly presented to inmates as a "religion of many colors, as especially friendly to men of African descent with jihad presented as a way to overcome oppression." It is probably not presented that Islamic leaders were instrumentally involved in the African slave trade to America and even today keep slaves and persecute black Africans (Christians and Animists?) in Darfur.

Quite an informative article.

---Katie