By Nancy Peckenham
A woman who is a prison chaplain and teacher at the Masjid Al-Ikhlas Islamic mosque in Newburgh is claiming the New York Post and one of its writers, Patrick Dunleavy, libeled her in a September 2010 article “Converts to Terror,” with the subheadline, “The Prison Chaplain Problem.”
Melody Rashada, who is a chaplain at the Beacon Correctional Facility, filed suit this week in New York County Court charging that she has suffered public humiliation and embarrassment, along with emotional pain, as a result of Dunleavy’s article
The article was published during the trial of four Newburgh men on terrorism-related charges. In it, Dunleavy asks how the four were radicalized and points to a prison connection among all of them. He specifically names Rashada and her husband, Imam Hamin, along with Imam Salahuddin Muhammad of the mosque, as having worked for the prison system.
The lawsuit contends that the article “intended the reasonable reader to believe that the three named imams, including plaintiff, do or did in fact engage in the radicalization of prison inmates, encouraging said inmates to contemplate and undertake acts of terrorism. Said assertion, as regards plaintiff, is patently false.”
Rashada says in her suit that she is politically moderate and abhors terrorism and violence, including that done in the name of Islam.
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