Converts to Terrorism

War to Mobilize Democracy ^ | December 6, 2005 | Daniel Pipes

[forty_years]

Converts to Islam are taking over the terrorist operations previously carried out mainly by Muslim-born immigrants and their children.

This was dramatically illustrated when a Belgian convert to Islam, Muriel Degauque, 38, blew herself up near Baghdad on November 9 in a suicide attack on American troops, becoming the first Christian-born Western woman to kill herself for Islamist purposes. And of the fourteen people arrested because of connections to Degauque, half were converts to Islam. In neighboring Holland, a just published government report specifically worries about radicalized converts.

Islamist terror organizations particularly prize converts. They know the local culture and blend in. They cannot be deported. They can hide their religious affiliation by avoiding mosques, lying low, even drinking alcohol and taking drugs to maintain their cover. One guide counsels would-be suicide bombers going to Iraq to "wear jeans, eat doughnuts, and always carry your Walkman."

Converts who either carried out a terrorist operation or were jailed come from many Western countries. Here is a partial listing. (Converts as yet only suspected, arrested, or indicted will be listed in a separate article at my Web site, www.DanielPipes.org.)

• Australia: British-born Jack Roche, nine years in jail for trying to bomb the Israeli embassy in Canberra.

• France: David Courtailler, four years for abetting terrorists. Pierre Richard Robert, life for planning terrorist attacks in Morocco. Ruddy Teranova, three years for physically attacking a moderate Muslim.

• Germany: Steven Smyrek, seven years for planning a suicide mission for Hezbollah.

• Italy: Domenico Quaranta, twenty years for setting fire to a Milan subway station and trying to attack ancient Greek temples in Agrigento, Sicily.

• Netherlands: Jason Walters, the son of a black American father and a Dutch woman, belonged to the Hofstad Network and threw a hand grenade at police; his trial begins this week.

• United Kingdom: Germaine Lindsay, an immigrant from Jamaica, one of the London transport suicide bombers of July 2005, killing 26. Richard Reid, life for the "shoe bomber" who tried to bring down a Paris-to-Miami flight. Andrew Rowe, fifteen years for planning terrorist attacks.

• United States: Ryan Anderson, life for trying to aid Al Qaeda while serving as a National Guardsman. David Belfield, assassinated a former Iranian diplomat outside Washington and fled to Iran. Clement Rodney Hampton-el, 35 years for helping bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. Mark Fidel Kools, death sentence for "fragging" and killing two of his army officers. John Muhammad, death sentence for his role as the lead "Beltway Sniper." Randall Royer, twenty years for weapons and explosives charges "stemming from the investigation into a militant jihadist network in Northern Virginia." Five members of Jamaat ul Fuqra, a Pakistan-based group suspected of at least thirteen murders in America, jailed for up to 69 years.

Lorenzo Vidino reports in Al Qaeda in Europe (Prometheus) that the authorities find that "dozens of European converts have joined terrorist groups." Nor is the problem restricted to Western converts to Islam.

• In the Philippines, for example, one convert confessed to bombing a ferry in February 2004, killing over 100, and others are linked to an attempt to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Manila. More generally, the government charges that Al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah use the Rajah Solaiman Movement, a group of converts, to carry out terror attacks.

• Non-Western converts move to the West and engage in terrorism there. Consider three American cases: Rashid Baz, born a Lebanese Druze, 141 years for murdering a Jewish boy on the Brooklyn Bridge. Wadih el-Hage, born a Lebanese Catholic, life without parole for his work with Osama bin Laden. John Samuel, born an Ethiopian Christian, awaits trial at Guantánamo, accused of entering the United States to terrorize for Al Qaeda.

The growing prominence of converts to terrorism means that such counterterrorism tools as looking for Muslim names or excluding potential terrorists at the border do not suffice. Instead, it is now also critical to know exactly who converts to Islam and to watch converts to see which of them are radicalized.

Even without becoming Muslims, some of the persons named above could have engaged in terrorism. But security in the West, the Philippines, and elsewhere requires coming to terms with a very awkward fact: Conversion to Islam substantially increases the probability of a person's involvement in terrorism.

http://netwmd.com/blog/2005/12/06/207

[Travis McGee]

Islam is an insane murder cult.

[Logical me]

Proves that this insanity is world wide. It's been so all along it is just that the terrorist are getting desperate and trying to step up operations. World, watch out! If we could just get the RATS to admit they are working for the terrorist with their constant tearing down the Administration instead of working to solve the problems, it could be a different and safer America. These RATS including a few RINOs are the force within that is crippling America.

[voletti]

"Civilizational traitors" is the word.
A Danish mainstream party (now labeled ultra-rightist) rightly calls these converts "moral criminals". And also calls islam a terrorist organization since its inception! Man, these danes are gutsy, my respect for them has soared.

[TKDietz]

One scary thing to me is that our prisons are major recruiting grounds for Islam. Black especially are converting to Islam in our prisons, just like others join gangs or white supremacist groups. It's all about protection. Bad things happen to people in prison so it is common for people to join a larger group to protect them while they are in. And today we are putting more people in prison than we ever have in our entire history, several times more than ever before 1980. We've seen a massive, unprecedented explosion in our incarceration rates and overall prison populations since 1980 and blacks are now going at an astounding rate. At today's incarceration rates, about one in three black males will go to prison in his lifetime. On December 31, 2004, about 8.4% of all black males 25 to 29 were in state or federal prisons, and overall black males comprised over 41% of all males incarcerated in state or federal prisons. Black females comprised a little over a third of the female prison population. That's a big deal considering blacks comprise less than 13% of our overall population in this country.

I have no idea just how many of these people are converting to Islam, but a lot are. I see it happening in my work as a public defender and know the Muslim groups are big in our state prisons even down here in the south from talking to people who have been in. These people are going back to their communities as Muslims, and no doubt converting others to Islam among those who have not gone to prison. I don't know that there is much militant fundamentalism among all these new Muslims in the U.S., but I think it's only a matter of time before we start seeing it. Some groups of these new Muslims and their children raised as Muslims are bound to start gravitating to more militant forms of Islam and committing terrorist acts and/or aiding in the commission of these acts by our enemies from other parts of the world.

Maybe I'm being a little of an over-imaginative alarmist here, but these trends are a little frightening to me. It's something to think about.

The numbers I used came from the US Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice, and can be found here: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/p04.pdf

[Khankrumthebulgar]

Today two female Suicide bombers killed 43 Iraqis at a Police Academy. The fact is that Islam is recruiting Women and Westerners who are converts for Jihad against the West. The New face of the Next attack may be Asian (Indonesian), African (Algeria or Niger), or a Westerner from Europe like the French recruits who were Caucasian captured in Iraq.

There was the Husband and Wife suicide team in Jordan in Aman recently that killed Moslems at a Wedding.

[GOP_1900AD]

The transition, for a secular Westerners who used to throw molotov cocktails and plot revolution for the "cause" of global Communist upheaval, to becoming an Islamist revolutionary, is quite easy. Same goal different means.

[layman]

Islamist terror organizations particularly prize converts

Good .... this should make it easier to infiltrate these reptile cults.

[SmoothTalker]

Good point.

[jordan8]

The very few (so far) white Euros or Americans who have joined the jihadists should be seen as just another manifestation of the general white-hating beliefs of the establishment left that controls the West, and which goes under the general rubric of multiculturalism. I'm guessing that Pipes has spent a lifetime in support of multiculti-ing the West. Islamic terrorism and the growing threat of Islamic influence in the West is just blow-back from that effort. I'll guarantee the bitch who married a Muslim and blew herself up spent her earlier life spouting about racism.

Pipes stretches the point with some of these people. David Belfield was in 1980 and can't really be said to be part of the current wave of terrorism, nor should John Muhammad be included in this list, he was just a nut and criminal.

An extraordinary number of the Western converts are non-white or mixed race. This would seem to point to underlying racial conflict, rather than religion, as a major motive for some of these acts.

[Dajjal]

jihad bump