Salahuddin Mustafa Muhammad, the imam at the Masjid al-Ikhlas, a mosque in Newburgh, N.Y., has spent more than two decades ministering to the Muslim faithful in prisons, serving as a chaplain at the nearby Fishkill Correctional Facility. There, he leads prayers and offers counseling.
“Most people are searching,” he said of the men he encounters in prison. “So they decide on Islam and that becomes their life.”
Update:
Muslims in New York Synagogue/U.S. Plane Plot had Imam Who is Prison Chaplain
By Debbie Schlussel
As I noted yesterday and many times in the past, the four Muslims caught trying to blow up New York synagogues and U.S. planes converted to Islam in prison, where the Muslim chaplaincy is controlled by CAIR, ISNA, and an alphabet soup of extremists and jihadists.
Today, Bill Warner points out that the men met at Masjid Al-Ikhlas, a Newburgh, New York mosque, whose imam is Salahuddin Muhammad, a New York prison chaplain. Hello . . .?
Yet, authorities refuse to do anything to this guy. And they continue to refuse to overhaul the Muslim prison chaplain system and who controls it. Instead, we continue to hear that these men were “not tied to any terrorist group” or that they were “lone crazy men.” Uh, sorry, no, they were Muslims. That’s the one thing that ties them and so many others who try to foment these kinds of attacks. And they converted to Islam in prison. More>>
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Warith Deen Umar: “Strike Terror into Their Hearts    Â
Excerpt from a 2004 speech Warith Deen Umar, former Chaplain for the State of New York Department of Corrections. Umar urges confrontation and threatens those who cooperate with law enforcement |

But last week, Mr. Muhammad found himself an accidental actor of sorts in the latest case of what the authorities call a homegrown terror plot, one in which four ex-convicts were accused of trying to blow up two Bronx synagogues and attack military aircraft. The plot, the authorities say, began when one of the men met a government informant at Mr. Muhammad’s mosque roughly a year ago.With at least two of the men appearing to be prison converts to Islam, the case has in certain circles evoked an old debate about the role prison might play as an incubator of extremist ideas among Muslims, and it put Mr. Muhammad in the position of confronting that debate in a very personal way.
Mr. Muhammad said his years working with Muslims in prison had turned up little actual evidence that many or any of them became radicalized behind bars.
“I don’t hear any of that wild stuff,” he said. “And if I did hear it, I would stomp it out. It is totally un-Islamic.”
* Trust me, sez the crocodile…
Continue reading The New York Times Paints a Rosy Picture of Prison Da'awa