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Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

Europe Fears Islamic Converts May Give Cover for Extremism

Jul 19, 2004 9:10 am By Robert Spencer

And with good reason. Look at all the converts who have already made news on the front lines of terror: Lindh, Reid, Padilla, Roche, Gadahn, etc. etc. From the New York Times, with thanks to Filtrat:

ST.-PIERRE-EN-FAUCIGNY, France “” The Courtailler brothers grew up in this medieval Alpine town, children of a butcher who went broke, who divorced his wife and moved to a job in a meatpacking plant far away. Two of the three brothers, David and Jérôme, educated in Catholic schools, foundered in drugs until they found religion: Islam.

Within five years of David’s initial conversion at a mosque in the British seaside resort of Brighton in 1996, the brothers embraced many of the leading lights of Europe’s Islamic terror network. David, 28, is now in jail, and in late June, Jérôme, 29, turned himself in to the police in the Netherlands, days after he was convicted by a court there of belonging to an international terrorist group.

The Courtaillers are part of a growing group of people who found a home in Islam and then veered into extremism, raising concerns among antiterrorism officials on both sides of the Atlantic that the new recruits could provide foreign-born Islamic militants with invisibility and cover, by escaping the scrutiny often reserved for young men of Arab descent.

A handful of Westerners have already been arrested on terrorism charges. Their experiences, the authorities fear, could foreshadow a deepening problem.

“Converts will be used for striking more and more by jihadist circles,” said Jean-Luc Marret, a terrorism expert at the Strategic Research Foundation, in Paris. “They have been used in the past for proselytism, logistics or support, and they are operationally useful now.”

Islam is Europe’s fastest-growing religion, and many experts say that while there are no reliable statistics, they believe that the number of converts has grown since Sept. 11, 2001, in many ways because of the campaign against terrorism.

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