ACLU, Norman Siegel and the Radical Imam Umar Abdul-Jalil

Posted on March 13, 2006

Hat tip and huge thank you to Atlass Shrugs

While the Virginia ACLU are investigating jails for hiring Chaplains with a Christian message, civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel is defending a message from a radical Imam in a NY Prison. This seems to be a message the former executive director of the ACLU seems taxpayers should pay for.

Via Atlass Shrugs

Mr. Abdul-Jalil declared in a speech that the White House is run by terrorists and that Muslims were tortured in Manhattan prisons after the World Trade Center attacks.

He also reportedly urged Muslims in America to stop letting “the Zionists of the media to dictate what Islam is to us.” The Investigative Project on Terrorism obtained a recording of his speech, a senior researcher with the organization, Tamar Tesler, confirmed yesterday (from day reported Mar 10th).

The imam, who has been with the department since 1993 and has been overseeing all clergy members at the agency since 2004.

An editorial in the NY Sun notices irony.

What tickled our sense of irony was that Mr. Siegel, the former executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union and a representative of the American civil liberties mindset that sees a violation of the Establishment Clause riding on the back of every reindeer, is ready to defend the proposition that the city’s taxpayers should employ an imam at $76,602 a year to minister to the city’s prison population.

We have a feeling that if Mr. Siegel really sat down and reasoned it out, he’d see that, at least by the standards of the civil libertarian movement in which he serves, the 21 full-time and 19 part-time priests, rabbis, imams, and other members of the clergy employed by the city of New York to work in the city’s jails ought amount to a violation of the federal First Amendment and the New York State Constitution. We can see various defenses of the idea of the public employing these clergymen, but it’s hard to see how such arguments might fit into the ACLU, NYCLU ideology. And even from our own policy perspective, it seems a wasteful expenditure.

Don’t doubt that the irony stems from hypocrisy and that what is important here is the message being protected. With the current relationship of the ACLU and CAIR don’t doubt seeing many more cases like this. It isn’t shocking or suprising at all anymore. If it is anti-American, the ACLU types will be there to protect it. And in the meantime they will also be fighting every effort the government employs to fight this kind of radicalism.