Teflon Iman

Writing on the City Journal's blog Stefan Kanfer wonders why the city of New York is paying clergy to minister to the prison population. Kanfer's musings mirror the concerns of the NY Sun. Both sources are perplexed why the mayor can't understand that, in a war against terror, you simply don't subsidize the terror team's culture corps.

It really isn't, as the mayor would like us to believe, about free speech. Certainly, as Kanfer points out, you wouldn't approve some radical Christian fundamentalist to minister to the like-minded in our jails. So why does the city seem to go out of its way to get the most extreme Muslim to do so?

This gets us back to the issue of government subsidized religious leaders. Stormin' Norman Siegal jumps in to defend Umar the Magnificent while he wouldn't be caught dead defending the rights of, let's say, Catholic school students. We wonder what Siegal would have done if the chaplin in question had ties to the old Jewish Defense League? As long as the Iman was bashing US everything's OK.