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Religious conversion and terrorism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Religious_conversion_and_terrorism

Religious converts have been thought to have a special zeal, that frequently exceeds those born in that faith. Religious converts have been thought to have a special zeal,. For example, Rajah Solaiman Revolutionary Movement (RSRM) is a movement of converts to Islam in Philippines that seek to establsh a theocratic Islamic state across the Philippines A number of well known cases in recent past have involved terrorists who are converts..

A study by the Washington-based Nixon Center that examined the backgrounds of 373 terrorists in Europe and the U.S. found 35 of them (9%) were converts to Islam

Examples
Some of the prominent converts suspected of terrorist activities or of providing material support to terrorism include


 * 1) Dhiren Barot ,
 * 2) Adam Gadahn, ,
 * 3) David Hicks,
 * 4) Muriel Degauque,
 * 5) Richard Reid, the shoe bomber
 * 6) Bob Denard,
 * 7) Aukai Collins
 * 8) some of the The Portland Seven.
 * 9) Daniel Maldonado
 * 10) John Walker Lindh
 * 11) Eden Natan-Zada convert to radical Judaism
 * 12) Walid Shoebat former terrorist
 * 13) Ahmad Santos
 * 14) Willie Brigitte
 * 15) Germaine Lindsay

Olivier Roy, a Paris-based authority on Islamic radicalism, believes that the common factor among violent Islamists — converts and non-converts — is that all are "born again." He writes:


 * "They broke with the religion of their parents to fervently embrace a new one, or a more fundamentalist stream of Islam, such as Saudi Arabian-based Wahhabism. He describes converts turning to jihad as following the well-established path of European rebels embracing an extremist cause.


 * "The people going to Al Qaeda today, a good part of them would have gone to the extreme left 30 years ago," said Roy, research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

Harvard sociologist Marc Sageman, author of "Understanding Terror Networks", disagrees
 * "If you look at the history of converts, they usually converted because their friends became Muslims, and when the group radicalized they radicalized along with the group," said Sageman, who studied the profile of 172 known terrorists.

In NE India, terrorism has been linked to religious conversion

Convert terrorists and Police
Simon Montlake, a Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor writes:


 * "Investigators say that Islamic converts can evade ethnic profiling by police, opening up a new front for groups like Abu Sayyaf that are being squeezed by US-aided military offensives in the south. "This tactical alliance [between southern insurgents and Islamic converts] will emerge to challenge the government in new ways," warns Rodolfo Mendoza, a senior police official who tracks Islamic militants."