Converts to Islam or Islamism?

The New York Times today published an article on the security threat posed by Western converts to Islam. The Times wrote that converts are not easily identifiable by immigration and customs officials, a fact likely to be leveraged by Islamists planning terrorist attacks: "Converts will be used for striking more and more by jihadist circles," said Jean-Luc Marret, a terrorism expert at the Strategic Research Foundation, in Paris. "They have been used in the past for proselytism, logistics or support, and they are operationally useful now."

The Times reported that many new converts are social losers who first encounter Islam in prison. In France for example, the prison population is more than fifty percent Muslim. The Times wrote, “Antoine Sfeir, a French scholar who is writing a book on the trend, said a small number of converts, many of them disaffected and often troubled young people, saw the current wave of Islamic terrorism as "a kind of combat against the rich, powerful, by the poor men of the planet."

The Times notes that, “Only a small fraction of Western Islamic converts sympathize with terrorism, and even fewer become engaged in terrorist activity.” While true, the small numbers who do sympathize with Islamism are cause for concern in open Western societies struggling with issues of profiling and security.