Free Republic

<p>MONCEAU-SUR-SAMBRE, Belgium, Dec. 5 - Muriel Degauque, believed to be the first European Muslim woman to stage a suicide attack, started out life as a good Roman Catholic girl in this coal mining corner of Belgium known as the black country. She ended it in a grisly blast deep inside Iraq last month.</p>

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 Nov. 9 in a suicide attack on U.S. 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...

With elections imminent, there can be no talk of retreat IT is time for supporters of a democratic Iraq to take the offensive, as US President George W. Bush did last week. Certainly, Mr Bush made noises about bringing troops home as the Iraqis learn to defend themselves. But the President made it plain he will not abandon Iraq. It was the only statement he could have made. To have given any indication he would leave Iraq to a sectarian conflict, unleashed by the American campaign to free the country from the ineffable brutality of Saddam Hussein, would have been...

Lessons of a Belgian Woman’s suicide-attack in Iraq So Murielle Degauque is "the latest European, and the first woman, to join the lengthening list of bombers," in Iraq, according to the (London) Independent. Her bomb attack killed only herself, but her trajectory from working-class Belgian to Islamist suicide-bomber deserves a closer look, partly because what her life portends about Europe’s future and partly because it provides still more evidence that racial profiling ("search all Arab males") will not stop terrorist attacks. Let’s take the last one first. In my new book, Disinformation, I devote a chapter to debunking the idea...

LONDON: The story of Muriel Degauque, a white Belgian convert to Islam and the West's first woman suicide bomber, has shocked and alarmed European capitals and sent much of the Western world into a tailspin. Degauque, whose smiling, quintessentially-European, brown-haired visage, adorns newspaper front pages across the continent (TODAY, FRIDAY), blew herself up in the Iraqi town of Baquba, north of Baghdad early last month. Though tangled and incomplete reports from Iraq variously suggest Degauque managed to kill six others, or perhaps no one apart from herself, the white Belgian Muslim convert has posthumously detonated a devastating bomb that strikes...

MONCEAU-SUR-SAMBRE, Belgium (Dec. 1) - How could a young woman turn from Belgian baker's assistant to Baghdad suicide bomber? Belgium has been shocked by revelations that Muriel Degauque, an unassuming woman who grew up near the rust belt city of Charleroi, had entered Iraq from Syria and detonated explosives strapped to her body in a failed attack against U.S. troops. The 38-year-old woman's mother, Liliane Degauque, told local TV networks that her daughter was "so nice'' - but began to change when she married an Algerian man and turned to Islamic fundamentalism. The case underscored the growing reach of international...

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - Belgians were trying to come to terms Thursday with the news that a working class woman from an industrial southern city had turned from a "nice" shop assistant into a suicide bomber who blew herself up in Iraq. "This is our Belgian kamikaze killed in Iraq," headlined the newspaper La Derniere Heure on Thursday over a picture of a thoroughly normal-looking, smiling girl looking into the camera. When her mother, Liliane Degauque, saw police coming to her doorstep on Wednesday, she immediately knew what it was about. The evening before, she had heard the reports there...

MONCEAU-SUR-SAMBRE, Belgium - Authorities have identified a woman who carried out a suicide attack against a U.S. patrol in Iraq as a 38-year-old Belgian who had two marriages to radical Muslim men. Muriel Degauque, who grew up near the industrial city of Charleroi, entered Iraq from Syria last month and detonated explosives strapped to her body in a failed attack against U.S. troops. Her mother, Liliane Degauque, told Belgian TV networks that her daughter was "so nice" — but began to change when she married an Algerian man and turned to Islamic fundamentalism. The case underscored the growing reach of...