Americans continue converting to Islam and joining ISIS.
Cole James Bridges went to a high school in Clarkesville, Tennessee and worked at a Papa Johns pizza place near Akron, Ohio before joining the United States Army. Mateo Ventura was a high school student in Wakefield, Massachusetts.
Within a week of each other in June 2023, Bridges pled guilty to plotting to help ISIS kill American soldiers, while Ventura was arrested for trying to provide aid to the Islamic State.
Bridges and Ventura, 20 and 18 years old, like Trevor Bickford, 19, of Maine, who was hit with federal charges this year for attacking NYPD police officers with a machete in Times Square, and Xavier Pelkey, 18, also of Maine, who pled guilty in April after trying to recruit two underage teens for a terrorist attack in Chicago, show the rate at which ordinary American teens are converting to Islam and plotting terrorist attacks.
While we made everyone take their shoes off at the airport and labored to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan and Iraq, Islamic terrorists won the hearts and minds of our children.
Our national security establishment feverishly imagined vast Al Qaeda attack plots while ignoring the real attack. An attack so deep and so wounding that it is far more devastating than September 11. It was an attack aided and abetted by the government, our cultural establishment and entertainment industries which urged Americans to learn about and embrace Islam.
Teenagers like Bridges, Ventura, Bickford, Pelkey and many others did. While Muslim immigrants still make up a significant percentage of Islamic terror plots, they increasingly come from American teenagers who converted to Islam. And, unlike past Muslim terror converts who followed a familiar path from drug dealing to prison to terrorism, these are our boys.
Except they’re not ours anymore.
Bridges lyrically spoke of the Islamic terrorists of ISIS as “brothers who have been fighting to establish a khilafah” or caliphate, and “have inspired me a lot, they’re (sic) love for Allah.”
Ventura wanted to fight a “war on kuffar” or non-Muslims.
Bickford carried an Islamic text and had underlined the words, “fight in the Name of Allah and in the Cause of Allah. Fight against those who do not believe in Allah. Wage a holy war.” He wrote in his journal that he wanted a traditional Muslim burial and did not want to be buried “in the land of the kuffar”. If he died while killing Americans, he did not want to be laid to rest in America.
Pelkey, who changed his name to Abdullah, wrote that he wanted to “burst thru the door of Jihad in america and strike fear in the hearts of these kafirun nothing pisses these american kuffar off and scares em more than a term they use ‘homegrown terrorist.’”
Their plans for Islamic mass murder, Bridges wanted to attack the 9/11 memorial, Pelkey was going to burst into a synagogue separate the adults from the children, and then kill the adults, have received what little attention a broken country has to spare for the kind of story that people don’t even pay attention to anymore. We are so busy fighting each other that we hardly even look up when the next generation converts to Islam and signs up with Al Qaeda or ISIS.
Americans used to associate Islamic converts with black nationalist groups, but this is no longer the case. Latinos, like Bridges (raised by a stepfather, his mother’s last name was Gonzalez), are the fastest growing population of converts, but a quarter of converts to Islam are white.
In the UK, young white Muslim converts like 19-year-old Matthew King, whose mother turned him in after an attack plot on British soldiers, or Lewis Ludlow, who changed his name to Ali Hussain and pled guilty to scouting out targets like St Paul’s Cathedral and Madame Tussauds, are also becoming more commonplace.
There are certain common denominators among Muslim converts as there are among school shooters. Bickford was being raised by a stepfather while Ventura had been bullied in school. Bickford’s father had died of a drug overdose, and Pelkey was living with his mother and an autistic younger brother.
Like most cults, the new mosque recruits are lost and looking for somewhere to belong. Missing fathers and a general sense of alienation are a common theme. America no longer provides a sense of identity and even institutions like the U.S. Army don’t offer any real purpose. Falling through the spreading cracks of an imploding culture, they join gangs, movements and Islam.
What too few Americans understood after the September 11 attacks was that this was a culture war. Foreign Muslim terrorists could kill us by the thousands and perhaps even one day the hundreds of thousands, but even at expanding immigration rates it would take generations for them to demographically conquer us. Unlike Europe, America has a more robust birth rate, in part because of migration from south of the border. We would have to conquer ourselves.
The Bush administration responded to 9/11 with an ambitious effort to democratize the Muslim world, unaware and uncaring of the Muslim world’s parallel effort to Islamize America. The withdrawal from Afghanistan, like the failure of the Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS, collapsed the project to democratize the Muslim world. But the Islamization of America is succeeding.
What does Islam offer that we don’t? Patriarchy for fatherless boys, the illusion of belonging to a global Islamic Ummah, the promise of a system of moral order with the creation of the Caliphate, and the escape from a culture that no longer stands for much except comic book movies and politics.
Pop culture and politics have become the religions of a declining nation. In the midst of the culture war, many Americans from both sides have developed hostility and contempt for their own country. Others retreat to imaginary pop culture universes to debate the ins and outs of their devotion to Marvel, Star Wars or Taylor Swift with the intensity once reserved for theology.
Americans are becoming less patriotic and religious and the falloff is most pronounced among the young. It is no coincidence that Islamic recruitment of American teens is booming in areas where traditional organized religion is declining. Is it surprising that Maine, the third least religious state where barely a quarter described themselves as Christians, produced two Islamic terror converts? A decade ago, only 34% of people in the state believed religion was very important. But just because people abandon traditional churches, doesn’t mean that teenagers and twenty-somethings will give up on religion. They will find people who really believe.
And the Jihad really believes.
We are not just losing the military and demographic wars, but the even more important cultural war. America’s political and cultural establishment embraced Islam. And this is the result.
All the episodes of ‘24’ envisioning complicated plots of mass murder were off the mark. What happened instead was that the plotters got on planes, landed and moved here. They set up mosques and schools, they became reporters, executives and members of congress. Like their leftist allies, they fought the war from the inside and we did not so much lose as surrender.
A generation of young men, born after 9/11 and the end of the War on Terror, were urged to learn about Islam, the way they’re encouraged to learn about sex changes. Some castrated themselves and pretended to be women, others joined ISIS instead.
When life looks senseless and meaningless, each day filled with mechanical routines and hollow entertainments, the human soul needs to reach for something that promises more.
America is not becoming irreligious, it is losing its religions and finding new gods. Some of those gods tell their followers to kill the infidels, attack the 9/11 memorial and kill until America is Islamic.
As we take off our shoes at the airport, a new generation is losing its soul.
Phil Copson says
Thanks, Daniel – that’s really poetic:
“A lost generation with nothing to believe in –
And nowhere left to hide…”
Ramesh Chhagan says
If American’s are desperately in search of spiritual meaning, I suggest encouraging the youth to turn to Eastern philosophies (Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.).
Nick says
No thanks. Christianity gives true spiritual meaning, peace and joy. Westerners should turn back to Christianity. Most Christians here are lukewarm and not serious. They need to start becoming serious like the way orthodox Christians did in communist countries
Linde B. says
This article is full of truths about our American society and is a very sad commentary on where America is now.
Thank you, Mr. Greenfield, for telling it
like it is. ???????
phil baram says
brilliant article.
by what means did these young white kids get the urge to convert to jihadi islam? they didn’t get it from going to the library and looking isalm up in an encyclopedia, they didn’t get it from radio,tv, even the movies.
they got it from our general fixation with iphones, twitter, facebook, i.e., social media. the latter is freewheeling, addictive –and can be destructive and deadly. it’s like having a poisonous snake as your friend in bed.
Wellington says
Being born Muslim is bad enough, but converting to Islam is beyond woeful.
James Lincoln says
Kinda like taking steps to join the mafia, Wellington.
Clifford Fodor says
It’s even affecting Jihad Watch. It’s easy to get censored and banned from Jihad Watch if you’re too anti-Islamic.
gravenimage says
It’s difficult to get banned unless you are preaching violence.
somehistory says
All too true. I can recall when photos of young military men were shown on television, the head bowed, down on one knee, eyes closed in prayer. Often in a cemetery of crosses.
When prayer is denounced by *famous* people…politicians, movie people and media people…, when those same ones say, “we don’t want your prayers,” and when people are mocked for believing in the God so many of the Founding Fathers believed gave us all the Right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the young are rudderless, adrift in an angry and confused world of people who have no grounds for advising those young ones.
A few days ago, a young man and woman were going down the alley. The man was riding a bike, the woman trying to keep up. As they passed by, the only thing I could understand the guy to say was the *f* word…with *ed* or *ing* or *er* added.
they didn’t go far, and when they travelled back, the guy also walked and the thing I heard him say then was “Oh my God.” But it was only an exclamation, not a request for help or comfort.
we are constantly being told that islam is the fastest growing religion. And who doesn’t want to be in the “popular” group, the “in crowd”?
I believe part of that is because everyone is called “phobic” if they tell the Truth, so the kids don’t really know what they are in for when they “learn” about it; and when they “accept” it because everyone else is so accepting of it. And they need something to make them feel they have a purpose.
islam just gives them the wrong kind of purpose. And it’s always death.
EYESOPEN says
Very well said, somehistory.
somehistory says
Thank you, EYESOPEN
Aum says
We are not just losing the military and demographic wars, but the even more important cultural war. America’s political and cultural establishment embraced Islam. And this is the result.
Says it all.
Jim says
The trouble is not just culture, our leftists, especially Democrats, encourage violent crime and idealize criminals. They purposely facilitate crime with open borders, calling parents terrorists, trying to destroy the secure sense of our traditions like the binary sexual dichotomy of male and female. They purposely appoint leftist judges and prosecutors who give criminals a pass while persecuting the defenders of our values. They accuse our people of being racists, imperialists, try to put the political opposition in jail while letting the ruling elites go free and make self righteous accusations, while their sins are in plain sight. But Islam has no golden rule, no ethics of love one’s neighbor, no equality of men and women, no protection of children from adult molesters and cruel punishments. So what is their to love about it. Probably it is decadence and perversion that lies behind the move to join us for ISIS
Gurek says
ISIS are not human. They need to be mercilessly exterminated, including the teenager, just as they did to Mideastern Christians and Yazidis.
DEUS VULT!
Nick says
They are made in the image of GOD
brenrod says
“…What does Islam offer ………”
A legal and moral justification to commit violence and murder!
FYI says
Re the Latinos.
Part of the problem here is Jorge Bergoglio and his ilk.Smiley Jorge{ok-pope francis} is a catastrophic failure of a pontiff.A politician and a showman first,far too busy with climate change to be concerned with the plight of Catholics many of whom have no church to go to what with all the rainbows and all.
It is his responsibility for failing to do anything about it.He panders to islam all the time.
That is very much part of the problem.
I once heard someone say ‘we should pray for francis’;what,that some day he finds Jesus in his Jesuitical studies?
bill says
Well Robert I share your concern about US youth, but considering the size of the USA population these people are quite rare. As you have said many times the unanswered question is what is taught to them about the ROP. Nobody seems to take the mullahs who train these ‘converts’ to task and ask them to explain. If fhey really are believers in ROP they should be concerned also. Perhaps that is verboten under the ‘islamophobia rules’ which insure Islam is never held to account. I am sure the ‘good’ Muslims would riot if they were!
I am willing to bet that these would be jihadis have poor relations with their parents.
Spiro says
Religion out of school work place life and society replaced by sports money and perverted life style acceptance
We vote in leadership that’s corrupt and we cry cry cry but re elect
the same people
Everything is just fine just turn on the game and pop a top sit back enjoy the game I don’t see any problem
Oh yeah it’s Sunday let’s go to soccer practice what church why
I could go on but why you got the idea
Larry Storer says
Fact – there is not Muslim race! There were no Muslims before Muhammed. There were no mosques for him to. Ride off to. It was not God that gave him a revelation and declared him a prophet. It was no doubt the Evil One. Deception is his. It started in the Garden, and continued with the temptation of Christ. (The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.) Muhammed is the fake prophet. We do not worship the same God! And Abraham would renounce those beliefs. Mosques, Muslim clothing, ideas and practices are illegal, and “Antithicle” to our CULTURE, founding, Constitution and laws! Take off your Muslim garb and assimilate or leave and stay out!