Dealing with the challenge posed by a hostile ideology that comes clad in religious clothing is not going to come easy in a country that has tended to see religion as an almost automatically benign presence. The visa rules for ‘religious workers’ provide one example of a program that may need closer examination in the light of the threat posed by extremist Islam. The same is true of prison chaplains – in a disturbing, and fascinating, piece (link requires subscription) last Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported on the views of Saudi-trained Warith Deen Umar, one of those responsible (until his retirement in 2000) for running New York’s Islamic prison mission.

According to the Journal, Umar believes that the 9/11 hijackers “should be honored as martyrs”. The US, he was quoted as saying, risks further attacks, and African-Americans who embraced Islam in prison would be “natural candidates to help press such [an] attack.”

There’s more of the same elsewhere in the article, but almost as troubling was its writer’s comment that prison chaplains “have operated with little supervision from state prison officials, who say that the constitutional protection of religious freedom prevents them from closely monitoring religious services”.

That, clearly, now has to change, but will it?

In a follow-up piece the Journal noted that Senator Chuck Schumer has suggested that NY State should remove all Muslim prison chaplains hired under Umar’s supervision. That looks far too hasty (Schumer cannot possibly know what each of these chaplains have been preaching) but the response by the chief spokesman for the NY prison system (that there were no plans to remove any of them) seems a little complacent, at least in the absence of assurances that these hires are being reviewed.

Are they?