The Legion

The Legion of Dishonor:

A genuine look at our enemy's thinking can be obtained here, by looking at their recruiting successes among converts.

“It’s striking, the number of converts engaged in terrorist activities,” said Michael Taarnby, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies who has studied the recruitment and radicalisation of Islamist militants.

Jean-Louis Bruguiere, France’s top anti-terrorism judge, told the newspaper Le Figaro in an interview: “The converts are undeniably the toughest. Nowadays the conversions happen more quickly and the commitment is more radical.”

They wonder what prompts such a large percentage (though still a small number) of converts to Islam to become radicals. The theory is that the enemy is actively recruiting among the small-time criminal population.

Drifters and small-time crooks: Some of the best-known extremist converts whose cases have come to trial were drifters on the margins of society.

David Courtailler, a Frenchman convicted last year of abetting terrorists, was drawn into radical circles when he converted to Islam at a British mosque and was approached by a stranger there who gave him money and an air ticket to Pakistan. Reid, Rowe and Ganczarski all had records as small-time thieves or drug dealers.

“They are people who feel devalued, despised and by becoming terrorists they suddenly become supermen, heroes,” said Roy.

Once they converted, the experts said, such people often moved towards violence quickly, driven partly by a need to prove themselves. They might also be more easily manipulated by extremists because they lacked the cultural grounding to distinguish between true and distorted versions of Islam.

“Basically, you can tell them just about anything and they’re willing to believe it,” Taarnby said.

The kind of people who make up the small-time criminal and drifter class is poor, generally not well educated nor particularly intelligent. They are easy to manipulate, which is why criminal organizations have manipulated them for time out of mind. Whether Columbian cartels, the Mafia, or al Qaeda, this type of person is a useful and essentially disposable tool.

Just what you need when your favored weapon is the suicide bomb.

In interviews with Reuters, European experts said the vast majority of those who converted to Islam did so for legitimate personal reasons. Some convert in order to marry Muslims.

Many converts were drawn, the experts said, by the appeal of a universal faith that transcended national and ethnic barriers, offered a sense of belonging and brotherhood and provided a new identity, including the choice of a Muslim name.

However, a small fraction were extremists who saw in radical Islam a vehicle to challenge and overthrow the existing world order, said Olivier Roy, research director of the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

Many of those "legitimate personal reasons" are likewise apt to draw radicals as well. You should never underestimate the power of the chance to escape an old, failed life and find a new name and a new brotherhood. Sometimes it is an honest motivation. That was, for so many, the appeal of America.

It was also the appeal of the French Foreign Legion, which drew also from this same population of Western drifters and small-time crooks, and turned them into one of the most fearsome fighting forces in the world. The converts came willingly, looking for a new life and a new pride, a life that would be lived under a new and swaggering name, and often lived in a new language -- French, or for al Qaeda, Arabic. The clean break, the heroic image and mythic past, all this drives many who have ruined their own lives to seek out a new, firm guiding hand.

Al Qaeda, by all accounts, does not train its soldiers as well as the Legion did, or does today. That is why they do not enjoy the successes the Legion have enjoyed. Nevertheless, it is no wonder that they find such a ready group of suicides. Many of these people came to them exactly because they wanted to obliterate their lives.