Word: jihadist
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...that Muslim converts in the U.S. and Europe number in the hundreds of thousands, and anecdotal evidence suggests the number is on the rise. The arrest of at least three English converts in the plot to blow up passenger jets over the Atlantic has raised the troubling possibility that jihadist groups may be drawing some of their most committed operatives from the pool of new believers. "When converts are trying to find their way in their new religion, they are vulnerable to the influence of extremists," says Didier-Yacine Beyens, former president of Belgium's Muslim Executive and a convert...
...shoe-bomb suspect Richard Reid; Jose Padilla, the Chicago native arrested four years ago for involvement in an alleged al-Qaeda plot to detonate a radiological bomb; and Germaine Lindsay, a Jamaican-born Briton who was one of the suicide bombers who attacked the London Underground last summer. "Originally, jihadist groups were suspicious of converts because they saw them as a way for intelligence forces to infiltrate," says Gustavo de Aristegui, a Spanish terrorism expert and the author of Jihad in Spain. "But they're realizing that ... someone with a Western last name and blue eyes is going to raise...
That hypothesis would add one more--and very significant--strand to the web of jihadist contacts Rauf maintained. The breadth of that network has gradually emerged since British authorities flagged Rauf as a "person of interest" about six months ago and notified Pakistani law enforcement, which tapped Rauf's phones and monitored his movements. Investigators tell TIME that Rauf--who was arrested in eastern Pakistan on Aug. 9, a day before British authorities rounded up 24 suspects in connection with the plot (one has since been released)--had close links with several known al-Qaeda supporters in Pakistan as well...
Three years hence, this analysis seems borne out by London. Not only was the attack moving toward execution as Israel and Hizballah ignited the Middle East, but 10 planes exploding over the Atlantic or in U.S. airspace would indeed have created what U.S. experts believe our jihadist opponents desire: an upward arc of terror and dread between a second-wave attack and whatever might follow, five or even 10 years down the road...
...That mind-set has been the subject of two smaller films, the Palestinian Paradise Now and the New York-based The War Within. Hollywood hasn't touched the Jihadist ethic, even to create a villain out if it. Nor have American movies taken the All the President's Men approach to the Bush Administration's post-9/11 game plan. Where is the film industry when it could explain concerns on every viewer's mind? To paraphrase the old refrain, What if they gave a war and Hollywood didn't come...