In March, 2003 Senator Charles Schumer asked the Justice Department to investigate how the federal prisons selected Muslim chaplains. Schumer noted that the two Islamic groups which “endorsed” chaplain candidates promoted Wahhabism, a form of Islam especially hospitable to terrorism. At least 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers, for example, are believed to have been Wahhabis. (this may be the only good thing "Schmucker" has done in a while! - Tiger)
Within a year the Justice Department’s inspector general produced a list of defects in how “Muslim Religious Services Providers” were recruited. The most alarming was this: the doctrinal beliefs of Muslim applicants were not examined to see if they were consistent with prison security practices. Among the recommended changes was one to check prison-chapel libraries for literature inconsistent with institutional security.
... Prison authorities removed several hundred books without even claiming they were a security threat. According to a recent lawsuit by some Otisville inmates, that prison threw out “hundreds” of Jewish books, among them When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Rabbi Harold Kushner. Hundreds more Christian titles got the heave-ho. Too, including Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life. Maimonides’s Code of Jewish Law got tossed, too, as did the Zohar, a leading text of Jewish mysticism.
In other prisons thousands of non-Islamic books above suspicion were removed. According to Bureau of Prisons guidelines now in place, works by such giants of Christian theology as Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth are not permitted into chapel libraries. Neither are such seditious books as Living Positively One Day at a Time and You Can Become the Person You Want to Be, both by the popular pastor Robert Schuller.
... But why did the Bureau of Prisons purge thousands of perfectly peaceful Christian and Jewish (for example) books when the problem was a handful of Islamic texts? A Bureau spokeswoman offered this brow-scratcher: “We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups”. In what sense, though, are the Koran, The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, and The Chronicles of Narnia — apparently all still permitted — “consistent”? Besides, Senator Schumer never asked for “consistency” across religions. He asked about sources of Muslim extremism. No one imagined a total redo of prison libraries nationwide.
... this comes under the; "Cutting our own Throat" category!
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