It’s scant comfort that the four men ar rested Wednesday night as they car ried out what they thought was their own private jihad — attempting to car-bomb two Riverdale synagogues and shoot down military planes in upstate Newburgh — were not trained terrorists.
Don’t be misled by the amateurish nature of their misadventure. What the four lacked in brains, they more than made up for in malign intent.
And the fact that their plot went as far as it did — the men actually had planted what they thought were deadly bombs before the feds moved in — dramatically underscores, as Police Commissioner Ray Kelly noted, the very real threat of homegrown terror cells.
The imitators, in other words, are potentially as dangerous as those sent from abroad by the likes of al Qaeda.
New York is lucky that these four were nabbed as part of an elaborate sting in which an informant supplied them with inert explosives and an inoperable Stinger surface-to-air missile.
Who’s to say their dreams of unleashing death and destruction couldn’t have been realized — had they approached someone who was tied to Islamist terrorists instead of working with the feds?
The plot also raises anew questions about how America’s prison system has become a breeding ground for aspiring terrorists.
All four of those arrested were Muslim, three of whom converted while doing time. As the sister of ringleader James Cromitie said: “They do a little time in jail, and they don’t eat pork no more.”
Three years ago, The Post broke the story of a vitriolic anti-American diatribe delivered by Imam Umar Abdul-Jalil, a Rikers Island chaplain.
“We know that the greatest terrorists in the world occupy the White House, without a doubt,” he said — later urging that American Muslims stop allowing “the Zionists of the media to dictate what Islam is to us.” Muslims, he said, must be “compassionate with each other” and “hard against the kufr [unbeliever].”
Abdul-Jalil, shockingly, remains on the municipal payroll.
Then there’s Warith Deem Umar, who long had a key post overseeing Islamic programs in New York’s prison system, including the recruitment and training of numerous chaplains.
Umar actually boasted to The Wall Street Journal that “prison is the perfect recruitment and training ground for radicalism and the Islamic religion.”
As Steven Schwartz has written: “Radical Muslim chaplains . . . acting in coordination to impose an extremist agenda have gained a monopoly over Islamic activities in America’s state, federal and city prisons and jails.”
Thus, it’s likely no accident that the spiritual leader of the four men arrested Wednesday, the imam of a mosque in Newburgh, has worked for the state prison system since 1985.
Who knows how many potential terrorists have been inspired by the preachers of poison in our nation’s prisons?
Well, at least four.
Maybe it is impossible to keep Islamist propaganda out of the prisons, but the fact that it is directly subsidized by tax dollars is simply insane.
It’s time that this boil was lanced.