Slate's Bizbox
foreigners: Opinions about events beyond our borders.

The Convert's ZealRadical Islamism has become a magnet for some of the world's angriest people.

By Daniel Benjamin
Posted Friday, Sept. 7, 2007, at 5:15 PM ET
German security leads a suspected terrorist to court Click image to expand.

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.

Their numbers are indeed astonishing. Converts have been involved in jihadist activity since before al-Qaida was fully formed. The "TERRSTOP" conspiracy to blow up landmarks and tunnels in New York City in the mid-1990s included two converts, Clement Hampton-El, an African-American who had been to Afghanistan, and Victor Alvarez, a dimwitted janitor turned gofer for the cell. (Though that conspiracy landed the "Blind Sheikh," Omar Abdel Rahman, in jail, a connection to al-Qaida was never asserted.) In Osama Bin Laden's empire, converts have always been well-represented. Wadih el-Hage, the Saudi's personal assistant and, later, the architect of the East Africa cells that carried out the 1998 embassy bombings, came from a Lebanese Maronite family. The American Taliban, John Walker Lindh, certainly had no problems being accepted in al-Qaida circles. More recently, Californian Adam Gadahn, aka Adam Pearlman, aka Azzam the American, has become a blogosphere celebrity as the English-language voice of al-Qaida.

Well before the German bust, converts were turning up regularly in European terrorist operations. In the 1990s, several French converts, including brothers David and Jerome Courtailler, fought in Bosnia and later turned up in jihadist activities. A German, Christian Ganczarski, became a significant al-Qaida operative and was linked to a 2002 bombing on the Tunisian island of Djerba. The Walters brothers, Jason and Jermaine, sons of a U.S. serviceman and Dutch mother, were members of the Hofstad gang, which included Mohammed Bouyeri, the Dutch-Moroccan assassin of film director Theo van Gogh in 2004. Jamaican-born, English-raised Germaine Lindsay was one of the four members of the cell that carried out the Tube attacks in London in 2005. In November 2005, Muriel Degauque, a 38-year-old Belgian baker's assistant and former Catholic, became the first female Muslim suicide bomber from Europe when she attacked a U.S. patrol in Iraq, wounding one soldier.

VIEW AS SINGLE PAGE
Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
Daniel Benjamin is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. A former director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff, he has co-written The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right.
Photograph of terrorist arrest by Thomas Lohnes/AFP/Getty Images.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Remarks from the Fray:

It wasn't long ago when flying into fits of rage - at least publically - was evidence of someone who hadn't grown up, someone who was not in control of oneself. It was looked down upon. You could not rely upon the hot head. This was applicable to personal as well as political sources of anger.

At some point expressing anger, rage even, particularly in regard to a political viewpoint or cause, became a requirement to show one's authenticity and commitment to the cause. Refer to the bumper sticker, "If You're Not Enraged You're Not Paying Attention!" Anger is a source of pride, often the pre-requisite of many movements. This is as true of enraged upper middle class white kids throwing rocks outside the G-8 Summit as it is Baptist preachers calling for open war on gays all in the name of Christ.

There will always be angry people who wake up angry and go to sleep angry and die angry. These are miserable, destructive people. For the most part anger is almost purely destructive. At some point one has to channel anger into something other than rage to be productive, to actually get any where.

So we need to beware of a new tone to this public anger, which has a lot to do with personal indulgence. Alec Baldwin's perennial flights into righteous rages on prime time television is a perfect example of this.

--EarlyBird

(To reply, click here.)

The question on hasty admissions of non-Muslims to Islam has been an issue often discussed between Muslims in the US. Many zealots become Muslims seeing in it a form of saying "no" to the injustices they see in modern Western society. Some are often poor, unhappy, or feel betrayed by society. Others, the majority of converts, are often attracted by the simple message of Islam. I have once met two at college who have very affluent backgrounds, but loved the simplicity of the message of Islam.

Islam's message, in its simplicity (compared to the complicated and often strange tenets of other religions, such as "original sin"... etc) has always been the reason for conversion. Add to that the angry radicalism of extremist Muslims, it makes it very attractive to the radical in Western societies. Rednecks is one such audience I think.

--BigSky

(To reply, click here.)

(9/8)

Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
Assessing Sarah Palin
| Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, John Podesta and others weigh in.
Colbert King: She's No HillaryEditorial: Is She Ready for This?
PLUS » PostPartisan: Quick Takes from Opinions