This, of course, follows a pattern we have also seen in prisons in the U.S., Britain, and Australia.
Eurabia Alert. "French prisons, recruiting ground for Islamists," from Reuters, September 11:
PARIS, Sept 11 (Reuters) - France has arrested 55 militant Islamists this year and the country's prisons have become a favourite recruiting ground for such groups, Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said in an interview published on Thursday.
While some Islamists are still travelling to Iraq, Pakistani and Afghan networks have strengthened, and "training and indoctrination sites" are now concentrated in that area, Alliot-Marie said in an interview with French daily Le Figaro.
"I can reveal that 89 Islamist activists were arrested in France in 2007, and that 55 others have been arrested on our soil since the start of the year," she said.
Prisons and some poor suburban neighbourhoods, many of which house large numbers of families of African and North African origin, were among recruiting networks' favoured targets.
"French prisons are a favoured recruiting ground for radical Islamists. That is one of my concerns," Alliot-Marie said.
"I have just suggested to my European colleagues that we create a manual on Islamism in prisons, to better inform security professionals on how to detect and prevent this kind of recruitment."
The organisation of al Qaeda has evolved from a centralised structure to a loose web of cells, and the nature of their attacks has also changed, the interior minister said.
"The terrorists have changed tactics. Several leaders of Gulf countries have told me that attacks organised long in advance are giving way to unplanned attacks of opportunity committed by individuals indoctrinated via the Internet," Alliot-Marie said.
"Sometimes they are not even part of a network. This new danger is therefore much harder to detect and follow."
She also called for wider screening of air passengers.
Currently, on flights from five countries including Pakistan and Yemen, the names and travel details of passengers who have been flagged as "dangerous" are sent to the French authorities in agreement with airlines, Alliot-Marie said.
"We want to extend this measure to other countries and to flights with a stopover, which would prevent for example travelling via Switzerland when coming from Pakistan to cover your tracks." She said she also wanted to include information on whether passengers were accompanied.
Campaigns of Da'wa all over the Western world, well-financed (by Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Muslim states and individuals), naturally target the economically marginal, and the psychically marginal. Both kinds of people are heavily represented in prisons. And if those prisoners are already lost and in some cases eager for structure, and happy to find not only a Total Belief-System but one that tells them at every moment what to do, and furthermore justifies their behavior, including their crimes, if those crimes are seen as merely taking from Infidels what, in a Muslim-dominated society, they would be able to take legally, in the form of Jizyah, and now that they are Muslims, fighting the Jihad, they can take booty (and Infidel women too) and be proud of themselves for whatever mayhem they cause.
What does the Western world do about these campaigns of Da'wa? So far, it has done nothing. It does not prevent the Saudis from spending or sending tens of billions to the Western world to pay for mosques, madrasas, and these campaigns of Da'wa. It does not vigilantly watch to make sure no prisons or parts of prisons are taken over by Muslims, who can then intimidate non-Muslims, in order to get along, to becoming Muslims. It does not prevent Muslim chaplains from busily beavering away.
Nor is much help, including advice on how to make Islam less attractive, given to Christian chaplains. For example, how many have at hand pamphlets on the history of the Arab slave trade, on the fact that it began much earlier, and ended much later (where it did end), and ended where it did end not because of any effort by Arabs and Muslims, because in Islam slavery is perfectly legitimate, practiced by Muhammad, the Perfect Man, but because of Western powers and Western pressure. Should there not be an effort to get out the word about the Arab slave trade, which caused far more deaths -- the Arabs specialized in seizing black boys, castrating them in the jungle, and then bringing them by slave coffle and dhow to the slave markets of Islam. The mortality rate, one scholar has estimated (see "This Hideous Trade"), was 90%; that is, only 10% of those seized and enslaved survived the journey to the Arab and Turkish slave markets.
Similarly, should there not be much more attention given, by Christian chaplains who need every weapon they can have to make sure that Islam does not capture the minds and hearts of those who are a captive audience, to make much of the mass murders of black Africans by those who think of themselves as Arabs, in Darfur, and to explain exactly how Islam is and always has been and will be a vehicle of Arab supremacism? And the continuing enslavement of blacks by Arabs, in the Sudan, in Mali, and even in, it is rumored, in deepest Saudi Arabia, where no Infidels can penetrate and report, should be known.
In other words, this is no longer a situation where things can be left to the Christian chaplains alone. Others must help. And the same thing goes for extra-prison attempts at Da'wa. When the Bostom Muslim Society smilingly "agrees" to supply, out of the kindness of its heart, by way of paying back the city of Boston for its below-market sale of land for a gigantic mosque, what does Mayor Menino find acceptable? Sets of books on Islam, and a series of lectures on Islam, all to be given at a mainly-black school, Roxbury Community College -- that is, the very place that is likely to provide the most vulnerable of students, the precise targets sought, for the "message of Islam."
And another line of conceivable defense against Da'wa is to note all the ways in which the Total Belief-System of Islam limits artistic expression to a handful of possibilities, and sculpture, painting, and music are all discouraged, and in the most extreme and fanatical Muslim societies, banned altogether. Imagine making clear that music is forbidden in Islam, and that while a few exceptions are made because it has been impoossible to entirely prevent the making of, and listening to, music, the Taliban smashes records and tapes and forces the closure of music stores, and kills wedding-singers; the FNL kills Rai singers in Algeria; in no mosque is any music allowed (think of the amazement of those used, for example, to all kinds of church and gospel music, when they grasp this bit of information).
Then, too, the inshallah-fatalism of Islam discourages economic activity, and without oil revenues, there would be no Muslim "wealth." For centuries the Muslim states existed mostly on the Jizyah; where there were no Infidels to exploit, as in Arabia, there was extreme poverty.
Finally, Islam stunts mental growth. Its rote memorization of texts, its punishment of any questioning of those texts or of their received meaning, the ferocity of the punishments meted out to those who would dare to question anything about Islam or to leave it -- all this needs to be known. Who would willingly embrace a Total System that helps guarantee economic stasis and mental paralysis?
Lines of attack. Lines of self-defense.
Who, in the Pentagon, is even thinking about Da'wa within this country, and elsewhere in the Western world, as what it so obviously is: a national security question, a security threat, that must be checked. The belief that this is merely a matter of what individuals choose, when Muslims, especially rich Arabs, are spending tens of billions of dollars to turn people within the West into Muslims, that is to make them become supporters of Jihad, determined to wage war, by qitaal or by other means, against the legal and political institutions of that very West, and managing to do this without a finger being lifted to stop it -- would we have permitted the Communist Party members to work unhindered in American prisons during the Cold War? Or allowed Nazi agents to do the same, during World War II? Of course not. But we keep being mesmerized, and fooled, and intimidated, by that word "religion."
Clearly Islam is far more than a religion. It is a politics. It is a geopolitics. Its adherents are taught that the world belongs to Allah, and to his people. They are taught that they have a duty to support or engage directly in Jihad, that is the "struggle" to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then to the dominance, of Islam. That is the primary meaning, the central meaning, the meaning that has animated Muslims for 1350 years, and that has only fallen, where it has fallen, into desuetude either because Muslims felt they had already conquered the known world (it was easy to think that if one lived deep within Dar al-Islam), or because they were conducting Jihad as best they could against a strong enemy, in ways other than conventional combat on a battlefield. Thus, with the forces of Islam repelled in the West of Europe near Poitiers, in the mid-eighth century, and in the East of Europe in two sieges -- the second and last was in 1683 --by the Ottoman Turks, Muslims nonetheless continued for centuries to raid the coasts of Western Christendom, to seize men, women, and children, and booty, and to destroy what they could not seize, as part of their continuing and neverending war against non-Muslims, and especially against the historic enemy,Christians. And these raids were conducted up and down the coasts, as far north as Ireland and, in one famous case, Iceland. And they were conducted, too, in the East, against the Slavs, and against Geogians and Circassians, whose women were prized for their beauty.
This needs to be better known. Christain chaplains and others conducting missionary work need to know exactly what Islam is all about, and what things about it are likely, if made known, to help immunize would-be targets of Da'wa against it.
This can be done. And the government, or those in the FBI and CIA and the Pentagon who have by now come to their senses, whatever the official line continues to be, should be talking among themselves, and trying to get others to come to their senses too, before there are five or ten or twenty million Muslims in this country, with all that that implies for the continued existence of our legal and political institutions, and the physical safety of Americans, non-Muslims, and of the non-Muslim nation-state.
"She also called for wider screening of air passengers"
hmmmmm..profiling?..
Currently, on flights from five countries including Pakistan and Yemen, the names and travel details of passengers who have been flagged as "dangerous" are sent to the French authorities in agreement with airlines, Alliot-Marie said.
If they have already been flagged as "dangerous" then why are they allowed even to ENTER France? This is suicidal behavior, by France and by all of us.