Here’s a bit of a thought experiment for you all. Imagine you have a friend or a co-worker or even a relative, who chooses a philosophical and political path that disgusts you and which is incredibly bloodstained. The path that the friend has taken has a proven record of inciting and carrying out acts of harm to those outside of the particular path that this person has chosen and wants to impose the ideas of this philosophy onto the whole world, by force if necessary. Consider also that the friend or relative starts to act strangely to your view, their circle of friends changes and they start openly promoting their ideology and get more uncompromising in their views. In that situation would you get a bad feeling that this is a person, who has chosen a path that is founded on bad ideas, on the road to something bad.
If the person in question had chosen some form of Fascism or became an uncompromising Communist and these positions seem to be firmly held by the individual, then the person’s friends or family would quite rightly become worried. They would worry both for the fate of the individual person and also consider the more broader implications for society because of this person’s choice to follow a path that is, like all political extremism, a path of violence.
If the family and friends of our mythical Fascist or Communist above may be alarmed at such a conversion, then should society not also be worried about those who choose the third member of a triumvirate of tyranny, that is Islam. It is both remarkable and alarming for me to see so many people who convert to Islam ending up following a Salafist path. It’s getting remarkably common to see those who convert to Islam, avoiding the more peaceful or at least open minded paths within Islam such as the Ahmeddiyya and the Ismailis, and going straight to jihad. As I’ve said numerous times before, this going to the extreme and the violent end of a faith (and all faiths have their violent extremes) is far more common in those who choose Islam than say those who choose Christianity or Judaism. Because Islam is so violent and tyranical and therefore shares a number of similarities with Fascism and Communism, should we not consider those who have chosen Islam to be as much beyond the pale as someone who joined a violent neo-Nazi group or Antifa? Maybe society should?
Sometimes society, including law enforcement, gets it right and manages to stop the convert to Islam before they can kill for ‘Allah’. Unfortunately, if the story below is anything to go by, the authorities are picking up the low hanging fruit.
Here’s the story of the latest ‘straight to jihad’ convert to Islam from 660 News in Florida (h/t ROP)
A man who moved from Florida to Virginia earlier this year was indicted Thursday on a charge of attempting to support the Islamic State terrorist group by posting a video online for making explosives.
Romeo Xavier Langhorne, 30, was formally charged in Jacksonville federal court. He faces up to 20 years in prison, according to federal court records. Langhorne was arrested last month in Roanoke, Virginia, where he moved in April.
Langhorne has been a follower of ISIS since 2014 and has recently publicly reaffirmed his support for ISIS, according to a criminal complaint. Investigators said Langhorne was living in St. Augustine, Florida, in February when he began communicating with an undercover FBI employee who was posing as an ISIS member.
Langhorne allegedly told the FBI officer that he wanted to publish bomb plans and freely admitted that he was a supporter of ISIS. This particular proto-Jihadi doesn’t exactly sound like the sharpest tool in the box does he? The defendant here seems to have jumped at the chance to incriminate himself and he seems to have been a long term ISIS supporter who may have gone under the radar for quite a while.
Langhorne was caught because he was a braggart. The braggarts and the stupid are relatively easy to catch for counter terror authorities. The other, slightly more cognitively gifted, converts to the death cult of Islam, keep their heads down or slip through any nets placed out for them by law enforcement. They are either disregarded as not being a problem or missed. It should not be forgotten that two of the most horrific Islamic terror attacks, the murder of Lee Rigby and the Westminster Bridge attack were carried out by converts who had been off the radar or missed for some reason.
There seem to be so many converts who, when embracing Islam completely ignore and bypass the few peaceful interpretations of the ideology of Islam. To go back to the political analogy that I started with at the beginning. If a person chooses a political path that is clearly associated with violence, racialism, oppression and mass murder, which Fascism and Communism are, would not that be a cause for concern? I believe it would, not just for that person’s immediate associates but also for the wider society. After all we now have a man who follows a deity that tells its votaries to ‘Kill for me’. Something like that should definitely worry both society and those who rule us. Just as the West kept an eye on and countered those who in the past had chosen to commit treason by spying for the Soviet Union, so should the governments of the West maybe keep a closer and more security focused eye on those who choose Islam?
