海角大神

The gruesome murder of a British soldier on the streets of Woolwich, London yesterday appears to have been carried out by men of Nigerian decent who converted from 海角大神ity to Islam.

Reuters reports that "British authorities believe that two men accused of hacking a soldier to death on a London street in revenge for wars in Muslim countries are British of Nigerian descent, a source close to the investigation said Thursday." The wire service goes on to cite local media saying that one of the two suspects is a 28-year-old named聽Michael Adebolajo and that both men "appeared to have converted to Islam from 海角大神 backgrounds," media said.

Now, "a source close to the investigation" and "media said" should always be approached with caution. But with both men in custody and alive, and with one of the killers having given a rambling interview while waving his bloodied hands yesterday, the chances that there's much confusion about his identity would seem to be low.聽

So it seems that the two London killers have some commonalities with the Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the bombing attack on the Boston marathon. The early indications point to both sets of killers being second generation immigrants, who either through their social networks or online media came to militant Al Qaeda-style Islam later in life.聽While the Tsarnaevs were nominally raised as Muslim, most accounts say the older brother had become markedly more religious 鈥撀燼nd more radical 鈥撀爏hortly before the attacks. He was thrown out of a Cambridge, Mass. mosque for launching an angry rant against praise by a prayer leader there for Martin Luther King, a non-Muslim.聽

The zealousness of converts to any cause has given rise to proverbs and copious academic research. Most converts to Islam are not violent, of course. But they are over-represented in cases of Islamist terrorism in the West. Also of note, Muslims who receive a devout religious upbringing are comparatively less interested in involvement in terrorism.聽Some have argued a strong, conventional Muslim religious education actively works against a willingness to commit terrorism to civilians, and in a lot of majority Muslim countries, former drug dealers and convicts have been prime recruiting grounds for militant organizations, more so than mainstream mosques.

Robin Simcox and Emily Dyer wrote for West Point's Combating Terrorism Center in March that from 1997 to 2011 that 171 people came up before the US military or civilian court systems for "Al Qaeda-related offenses." They found that a quarter of the people convicted were converts to Islam and that "in fact, in three of the years between 2007 and 2011, and in eight of the years between 1997 and 2011, converts committed a higher proportion of [Al Qaeda-related incidents] than non-converts."

They write (I've stripped out their footnotes from the text):

Also of interest is that in both cases, the motivations for the two sets of men had little to do with conflicts in their ancestral homes. Chechnya and Nigeria are both home to Islamist militant groups, and there was intense speculation that the Tsarneav's were somehow inspired by the Chechen conflict against Russia.

But as more information about them has come out, it seems their anger was directed at the US for fighting wars in Muslim lands, particularly Afghanistan and Iraq. The London killers appear to have been similarly angry at the UK's involvement in those two wars, as Ian Evans writes for the Monitor this morning.聽

This again appears to fit with Tsarneav's. While it's hard for a complex terrorist attack in the US or the UK to maintain operational security, particularly if they're in electronic contact with a guiding organization abroad, a couple of mates who get inspired to act by rhetoric that they hear, read, or watch on YouTube don't throw off a lot of warning signs that authorities can home in on, if they're smart enough to keep their conspiracy small (bringing to mind the proverb "two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.")

Finally there's the use of "our lands" by the killer who gave the interview yesterday. That led a lot of people to wonder "which lands" but probably, in the context of this attack, they meant all "Muslim" lands, bouncing off the nation-less concept of the ummah (the whole community of believers, which is central to Islam, but in jihadi circles is used to justify a broad war against all who might harm Muslims, anywhere).

According to The Independent, one of the attackers at least fell in with al-Muhajiroun, an Islamist group banned in the UK that praised the 9/11 attacks on the US, after his conversion. The group worked hard to find converts in the UK, and preached a chauvinistic and violent approach to the faith outside of the mainstream.

"Mujahid" means holy warriors. Running down an armed man in a straight from behind and butchering him isn't much like war. But war is clearly what these men had on their minds.