The Convert's Zeal

Slate ^ | Sept. 7, 2007 | Daniel Benjamin

[Lorianne]

Much as this June's failed terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow focused attention on the participation of doctors and other professionals in jihadist terror, the plot disrupted in Germany this week seems certain to put the spotlight on another key group within violent Islamism: converts.

We don't know much thus far about Fritz Gelowicz or Daniel Martin Schneider, the two German converts who were apprehended earlier this week along with Adem Yilmaz, who has been identified as a Turk. Another seven conspirators, about whom very little has been released, are also being hunted. But the hundreds of gallons of concentrated hydrogen peroxide—useful for bomb-building—they acquired, and the fact that, according to German officials, they had managed to train with the pros in Pakistan suggest that these operatives were, as one U.S. official put it, "the real deal."

That may surprise people who have viewed the converts as being the oddest of the oddballs inside al-Qaida's big tent. There have been grounds for such thinking: Among the most famous are Richard Reid, the oafish would-be shoe bomber, and Jose Padilla, the former fast-food chicken flipper whose ability to construct a dirty bomb, as touted by former Attorney General John Ashcroft, was never proved. But to write them all off as misguided dullards would be a mistake. That there are so many of them tells us something important about the movement, because some are highly competent and have real operational advantages compared with other radicals.