Obama bowing to the king of Islamic Saudi Arabia
Lisa Rein reports for The Washington Post, Oct. 9, 2015, that U.S. pork producers are in an uproar after the Obama administration abruptly removed bacon, pork chops, pork links, ham and all other pig products from the menu for 206,000 federal prison inmates.
The ban began on October 1, the beginning of a new fiscal year.
The Department of Justice’s Bureau of Prisons, which is responsible for running 122 federal penitentiaries and feeding their inmates three meals a day, insisted that the pork ban was based on a survey of prisoners’ food preferences which allegedly show that prisoners just don’t like the taste of pork.
Bureau of Prisons spokesman Edmond Ross said, “Why keep pushing food that people don’t want to eat? Pork has been the lowest-rated food by inmates for several years.” Ross also claimed that pork became more expensive, but he did not provide specifics.
National Pork Producers Council (NPPC), the Washington-based trade association that represents America’s hog farmers, isn’t buying it. Its spokesman, Dave Warner, said, “I find it hard to believe that a survey would have found a majority of any population saying, ‘No thanks, I don’t want any bacon.’ We’re going to find out how this came about and go from there. We wouldn’t rule out any options to resolve this.” He said the association “is still formulating our strategy” to reverse the prison decision.
NPPC first learned about the ban 5 days after it began, on October 5, when the Fort Worth Star-Telegram called for comment.
The pork industry produces 24 billion pounds a year of pork products, from tenderloin to bacon, its most popular product. About a quarter of that is exported.
Warner said pork is healthy and economical, especially for a big buyer like the federal government because “we cost a lot less than beef.” He said pork is nutritious: “A boneless pork chop or loin is a very healthy alternative to lots of other foods. If you compare a pork tenderloin to a rib eye steak and a boneless chicken breast, we come out pretty well.”
But Ross insisted that annual surveys of inmates’ food preferences show pork to be unpopular, and that the government was “paying more than what we’d like to pay. People are more health conscious these days. Some people choose to be vegetarian or vegan.”
Observant Muslims and Jews are forbidden to eat pork, and the prison system has long made accommodations for them by providing alternatives to pork, as well as halal and kosher foods. Ross declined to say whether there has been an increase in Muslim or Jewish inmates in recent years and whether that may have factored into the survey responses.
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights advocacy group in the U.S., welcomes the change “because it’s facilitating the accommodation of Muslim inmates. He said that anti-Islam groups would spin the decision into a case of the federal government acting under pressure from Muslims as “This is just the kind of thing that drives them crazy. It will stoke the fires of Islamophobia based on the usual conspiracy theories.”
Both Hooper and Bureau of Prison’s Edmond Ross are being disingenuous.
According to Joy Brighton of The Daily Caller, Nov. 21, 2014, as many as one out of three “African-American” inmates in U.S. prisons convert to Islam while incarcerated.
But it’s not just black prison inmates who are converted to Islam. The Huffington Post reported an estimated 35,000 – 40,000 inmates convert to Islam each year, and that 15% of the total U.S. prison population or 350,000 inmates are Muslim. This is more than 18 times the national representation of Muslims in America, reported to be 0.8%. Prisons are churning out converts to Islam who are taught they are righteously entitled to control the religion, speech, and dress of family, co-workers and strangers.
That’s because the federal government has been contracting and paying Muslim Brotherhood front groups, such as GSISS (The Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences) and ISNA (Islamic Society of North America) to screen and assign Muslim prison chaplains for at least 8 years.
While Egypt and Saudi Arabia have banned the Muslim Brotherhood, classifying it as a terror group, the White House, U.S. prisons, and the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security continue to work with Muslim Brotherhood groups.
H/t MomOfIV
See also “38 reasons why Obama is a Muslim”.
~Éowyn