The top chaplain of the city of New York's jail system, Umar Abdul-Jalil, will not lose his job despite incendiary remarks he made at a speech to students in Arizona.
Abdul-Jalil made the remarks at a conference sponsored by the Muslim Students Association in Tucson, Arizona last April. He told the audience, 'We know that the greatest terrorists in the world occupy the White House, without a doubt.'
Abdul-Jalil also said that Muslims had to stop allowing 'the Zionists of the media to dictate what Islam is to us.'
A transcript of the remarks was provided to the Associated Press by the Investigative Project, a counter terrorism group that obtained an audio tape of the speech.
On Tuesday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that Abdul-Jalil would not be fired from his job and cautioned New Yorkers not to forget the First Amendment.
Bloomberg warned that the 'great dangers that we are facing are not people saying things, it is our reaction in this country to when people say something that we don't like.'
'We are forgetting what distinguishes America from every place else and it's something that I have felt very strongly about and get more and more worried about with time,' Bloomberg said.
Bloomberg did announce, however, that Abdul-Jalil would be suspended for two weeks without pay for failing to notify the audience at the Arizona event that he was not speaking in any official capacity for the City of New York when he made his speech.
Abdul-Jalil's lawyer, Norman Siegel, said his client may fight the suspension. 'Any reasonable person would have known he was not there on behalf of the city and was there as an individual,' Siegel told 'Newsday.'
Prior to deciding to suspend Abdul-Jalil and not fire him, Bloomberg interviewed fellow clergy who worked with him in the prison system and inmates he counseled. Abdul-Jalil has a reputation for preaching tolerance.
