(...)Christian Ganczarski, a German suspected of involvement in a 2002 bombing in Tunisia, converted at 20 before embarking on a jihadist career in which, investigators believe, he became a close associate of bin Laden's.

(...)Other high-profile militant converts include Jamaican-born Germaine Lindsay, one of four suicide bombers who killed 52 people in London in July, and Briton Andrew Rowe, jailed for 15 years last month for possessing terrorist materials.

(...)Frenchman Lionel Dumont, a suspected Rowe associate and another convert, will go on trial in December accused of a series of attacks in the 1990s, including an attempt to bomb a Group of Seven summit in Lille.

(...)"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.

(...)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.

As is evident from the above article, we need keep in mind the simple fact that violent jihad was from the begining of Islam, as it remains today, a vital component of Islamic theology that is in today's Western society, smothered under a "fog of political correctness."

Robert Spencer reminds us that such politically correct views play into the hands of Islamic radicals by making it unnecessary for self-proclaimed moderates to renounce these doctrines, or even to acknowledge their existence. But unless or until a large number of Muslims around the world do so, the call to violent jihad will continue to inspire susceptable young people like John Walker Lindh and Adam Yahiye Gadahn.

Thus whenever someone proclaims that Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists (instead of a religion that contains a violent doctrine that sets it at odds with the rest of world and cries out for reform), they are helping to make sure that more and more disaffected youth like Adam Gadahn will end up in radical Muslim training camps -- and will eventually carry their struggle back to their infidel homeland.

Islam is a violent, intolerant, anti-mind, anti-man(kind) political system, and the goal of Islam is the establishment of an Islamic theocracy; to believe other than that Islam's theocratic aspirations are indeed global, that violent jihad goes part and parcel with Islamic global aspirations and as such violate the chances of mankind's peace on this earth, and that Islamic precepts undermine both societal and individual freedoms, is to be just as naive and blind as a Muslim convert. As for the Muslim converts who become terrorists, their logic defies reason and definition, other than, as Robert Spencer so elloquently states - "they struggle to grow beards."