Like many others, I was extremely shocked by the brutal murders of two young Scandinavian tourist women in Morocco, Louisa Vesterager Jespersen and Maren Ueland. They were murdered whilst hiking in a remote area of the country by a gang of Muslims who had pledged allegiance to ISIS. The Moroccan police are trying to round up all the members of the gang and, according to Sky News, have now arrested approximately twenty people who they believe are connected in some way to this attack.
What is interesting about the way that the investigation is progressing is that one of those arrested by the Moroccans was described by Sky as a ‘Swiss national’. When I first read this titbit of information I thought it a bit odd. After all, the Swiss are more well known for smart handcrafted wristwatches and its secretive banking system than for sharia savagery. Then, after reading an article in a website covering Moroccan news (h/t ROP), it all became much clearer, one of those allegedly involved in the planning and preparation for this attack was a convert to Islam.
The Moroccan website, ‘Moroccan World News’ is a bit more forthcoming with information about this particular suspect, who is not alleged to be involved in the actual attack on the girls himself, but who is claimed to have provided technical help to those who were. Moroccan World News, if they are correct, seems to have been more open with the idea of sharing the information that one of the suspects in this terrible pair of murders than some other outlets, such as Sky News has been.
Sky is claiming that the Swiss man has not been named but this suspect has been named by Moroccan World News. I wonder why this could be? This could be down to Sky wanting to play down the allegation that a convert to Islam for political reasons and some out there will no doubt jump on this explanation and run with it. However it could equally be the case that Sky’s journalists are just lazy as too many journalists have become these days. The reporters may well be relying too much on Moroccan police press releases for information, whilst Moroccan World News has more reporters and sources closer to the story and can therefore get more information and greater detail on this story?
Here’s part of the Moroccan World News story that goes into detail about the involvement in these murders of yet another convert to Islam who has gone extremely rapidly from conversion to jihad in just a few years. As is normal policy for this blog the original text from Moroccan World News is in italics whereas my comments are in plain text.
Moroccan World News said in a report dated December 30th 2018:
Moroccan authorities arrested yesterday evening a man of dual Swiss and Spanish citizenship suspected to have strong connections to the terrorist squad which earlier this month perpetrated the death of two Scandinavian tourists.
While the Swiss-Spanish suspect was “not physically involved” in the murder that claimed the lives of the tourists, investigations have so far uncovered both his identity and his “terrorist past.”
Born Zoller G.K to a Swiss father and Spanish mother, the suspect converted to Islam in 2011 in Geneva’s Grand Mosque. After conversion, Zoller picked Abdellah as his Muslim name. The name remained his nom de guerre as his conversion to his new religion was quickly followed by radicalization.
Oh what a surprise – or rather not. Here we have someone who has chosen Islam as their spiritual and ideological path and then, in a relatively short amount of time turned to jihad.
Prior to moving to Morocco in 2015, Abellah had already earned himself Geneva’s radicalized circles. In 2014, at the peak of his radicalization phase in Geneva, he even attacked jewellery to “finance his jihad and donate the rest of his war booty to ISIS,” a group to which he is believed to have pledged allegiance.
According to Moroccan outlet Le 360, Abdellah was fully radicalized by 20014, a year before he moved to Morocco. A source from the Moroccan government confirmed the news to Morocco World News.
So this jihad savage converted to a religion that we are told by our Western governments as a ‘religion of peace’ and approximately three years later, 2011 to 2014, he was a radical Muslim. We rarely see that sort of swift change from new convert to violent extremist in any other religion. Those who have chosen Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism or Hinduism as a new faith do not behave in this manner and such behaviour would be condemned by these faiths. It’s nearly always those who chose Islam who convert and then kill or become involved in terror plots.
Although I believe in the principle of freedom of religion, the right of people to choose their own spiritual path and agree with Queen Elizabeth I that the government should not have ‘windows into men’s souls’, I do wonder whether an exception to this principle should be made for Islam? There are after all a growing number of individuals who convert to Islam and become threats to others something that is not seen in those who convert to other more genuinely peaceful faith paths.
Maybe we and more importantly Western governments should be more actively suspicious about those who convert to Islam bearing in mind the propensity of converts to this ideology to go bad very quickly and often very violently? There is certainly a case to be made that we the citizens of Western countries should hold those who convert to Islam, if not in complete contempt, but be suspicious about them and guard against them.
I’ve known dozens of people who have converted to a religion in my lifetime. I’ve seen agnostics convert to Christianity, Muslims convert to Judaism, Christians convert to Hinduism and Jews convert to Buddhism. Not all of them were the sort of people I would want to go and spend a night in a pub with, but they all had one thing in common, they were unlikely in the extreme to go and carry out acts of violence in the name of their new faith. This is something that it is difficult to say about those who convert to Islam.
The sad fact is that there are now so many examples of converts to Islam going very bad that this phenomenon needs to be recognised for the problem that it is. It also needs to be recognised that this is a problem that may get increasingly worse as the years go by. I fear that converts to Islam may constitute an ever growing threat of jihad and in order to protect the innocent a change in attitude by Western government’s and security organs towards converts is needed. It would be right for Government’s to have a healthy degree of suspicion towards those who choose an ideological path that is not merely antagonistic to the culture of the West, but which seeks to destroy the West.
