***1130am EDT update: Results! The moonbat has quit…details below***

Just when you think things are getting better in New York City, politically correct insanity rears its monstrous head again. Tom Bevan at Real Clear Politics flags today’s Newsday story about the new Islamist-sympathizing, nutball Muslim chaplain hired by none other than the New York Fire Department:

An imam slated to be sworn in Friday as the second Muslim chaplain in Fire Department history said he questioned whether 19 hijackers were responsible for the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and suggested a broader conspiracy may have brought down the Twin Towers and killed more than 2,700 people.

In a telephone interview Thursday, Imam Intikab Habib, 30, a native of Guyana who studied Islam in Saudi Arabia, said he doubted the United States government’s official story blaming 19 hijackers associated with al-Quaida and Osama bin Laden.

“I as an individual don’t know who did the attacks,” said Habib, 30, a soft-spoken man who immigrated to New York in July 2000 after spending six years in Saudi Arabia getting a degree in Islamic theology and law. “There are so many conflicting reports about it. I don’t believe it was 19 … hijackers who did those attacks.”

Asked to elaborate on his reasons for doubting that story, he talked about video and news reports widely disseminated in the Muslim community.

“I’ve heard professionals say that nowhere ever in history did a steel building come down with fire alone,” he said. “It takes two or three weeks to demolish a building like that. But it was pulled down in a couple of hours. Was it 19 hijackers who brought it down, or was it a conspiracy?

It’s one thing for C-list rappers (see also here) and academic moonbats to peddle such conspiratorial claptrap. But a New York Fire Department chaplain? Have we no respect for the 9/11 dead? Have we no respect for ourselves?

More from the Newsday report:

A spokesman for the Fire Department, Frank Gribbon, said that Habib was recommended by the department’s Islamic Society and was hired “based on his credentials as a religious person. We don’t ask new employees about their political views before we hire them.”

Stephen Cassidy, president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, could not be reached for comment.

Habib’s remarks about the attacks came in response to questions about whether he thought firefighters would accept a chaplain who had been educated in Saudi Arabia.

He said he did not expect that to be an issue because “I come from a country where you’re accustomed to living with people of different ethnic, religious and racial backgrounds.”

When pressed further about whether the hijackers’ backgrounds — 15 of whom were Saudi — might make his training an issue for still-grieving firefighters, he went on to express his own doubts about the hijacker story.

Habib was one of several imams recommended for the chaplain’s job by the Islamic Society for the Fire Department, as a result of his work teaching junior high students at Al-Ihsan Academy in Ozone Park, a private Islamic school, where he worked for about five years.

Government at all levels still refuses to screen out Wahhabist and terror-apologizing influences in our prisons, in the military, at the FBI, and in other prominent positions. (More background here and here and here and here and here.)

Tom Bevan writes: “The craziness never seems to end.” Neither do our suicidal tendencies and limitless tolerance for the enemy within. Homeland security? What homeland security?

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E-mail the New York Fire Department commissioner here.

E-mail NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg here.

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Blogger reax from Jihad Watch.

In related news:

A federal grand jury has handed up new indictments charging two leaders of an area mosque with conspiring to support terrorists, the U.S. Attorney said Thursday.

The superseding indictment returned Thursday also charges Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain with attempting to provide support to Jaish-e-Mohammed, an Islamic extremist group based in Pakistan that is on the State Department’s list of designated foreign terrorist organizations.

Aref also was charged with making a false statement when he answered “none” to an immigration question asking him to list any organizations to which he had belonged. He also was charged with making false statements to the FBI when he was arrested in August 2004 and denied he was a member of the Islamic Movement in Kurdistan. At the time, he also denied knowing Mullah Krekar, believed to be the founder of Ansar-al-Islam, a radical Islamic fundamentalist group.

Aref, 35, who is the imam of the Masjid As-Salam mosque, and 50-year-old Hossain, a founder of the Albany mosque, have been free on $250,000 bond since shortly after their arrest in August 2004. Each originally was charged with money laundering and supporting terrorism. They were arrested after a yearlong FBI sting using an undercover informant.

The initial 19-count indictment accused them of working with an FBI informant who posed as a part-time arms dealer and proposed that Hossain hold money from the sale of a shoulder-fired missile that would be used to kill a Pakistani diplomat in New York City.

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1130am EDT update. Via Bloomberg News:

Imam Who Doubts 9/11 Story Quits as NYC Fire Chaplain, NY1 Says 2005-09-30 11:27 (New York)

By William Goldschlag

Sept. 30 (Bloomberg) — A Muslim cleric who was to be sworn in as a New York Fire Department chaplain today resigned following a newspaper interview in which he said he doubted official accounts that 19 terrorist hijackers carried out the Sept. 11 attacks, the cable news station NY1 reported.

Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said Imam Intikab Habib, 30, had resigned. Habin told NY1 that leaving the post was the best thing for the department, the report said. Habib, 30, a Guyanese who studied theology in Saudi Arabia and taught at a New Jersey Islamic school, suggested that a
broader conspiracy may have brought down the World Trade Center, according to a Newsday interview published today. He said there were “so many conflicting reports” that he questioned whether hijackers associated with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist group were responsible, Newsday said.

Don’t let up on the FDNY commissioner, though. Someone made a boneheaded decision to hire a tinfoil Islamist like Habib in the first place. Make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Carol Eisenberg at Newsday, which broke the story, updates here.

Here’s the FDNY’s official statement.

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