Fooled Again: Why Do So Many American Converts to Islam Learn to Hate Their Home?

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Spc. Hasan Edmonds, a Muslim member of the U.S. Army National Guard, was arrested last Wednesday at Chicago’s Midway Airport. He had been planning to join the Islamic State. His cousin, Jonas “Yunus” Edmonds, was arrested as well. They had allegedly been plotting a jihad attack against a U.S. military facility – making Hasan Edmonds the latest in a long line of people who convert to Islam and then turn traitor.

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Is it just a coincidence that so many converts to Islam come to regard the country in which they were born and raised, the land of the families and forefathers, as an enemy? Or is there some connection?

Hasan Edmonds clearly believed that his new religion required a shift of his allegiance. “I am already in the American kafir [infidel] army,” he told an informant in January, “and now I wish only to serve in the army of Allah alongside my true brothers.”

He also expressed the desire to carry out a jihad attack in the U.S. – something on the scale of January’s jihad murders in Paris at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine and the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket: “Honestly,” said Edmonds, “we would love to do something like the brother in Paris did” – that is, commit mass murder among people he had once considered his countrymen, and whom he had, as a National Guard member, sworn to protect

Edmonds thus joins other American converts to Islam who have turned traitor, including Sgt. Hasan Akbar, an American engineer from the 101st Airborne Division, who murdered Captain Christopher Scott Seifert, Major Gregory Stone, and wounded fifteen others in a grenade and small-arms attack in northern Kuwait on March 22, 2003. As he committed his murders, he yelled:

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You guys are coming into our countries, and you’re going to rape our women and kill our children.

Yet Akbar was not Iraqi or Kuwaiti. He was an American from Los Angeles. But when he became a Muslim, any allegiance he may have had to America was gone. Likewise al-Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn and the Marin County Mujahid, John Walker Lindh, both of whom converted to Islam and ended up waging war against the country of their birth, on behalf of its enemies.

It isn’t just converts, either. A Muslim woman named Aqsa Mahmood is suspected of recruiting young women to join her in the Islamic State as “jihadi brides.” The BBC identified her in a February report as a “Scottish woman,” which means that she made her way from the land of her birth to join up with a group that has declared war upon Great Britain and the rest of the non-Muslim world.

Despite the BBC’s ready identifier of her nationality, however, it is extremely unlikely that Aqsa Mahmood considers herself a Scot in any way other than geographically. She almost certainly grew up in a Muslim area and was taught Islamic values, including the idea that one’s allegiance to Islam transcends all other allegiances, and that one is a member of the international Muslim community, the umma, before being anything else. Those ideas go along with distaste that the “best of people” (Qur’an 3:110) should have for the jahiliyya, the society of the “most vile of created beings” (Qur’an 98:6) — unbelievers.

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Simply by going to the Islamic State, Aqsa Mahmood showed that she clearly rejects a great deal of what most Scots would consider essential to what it means to be a Scot.

Yet for the BBC, she is as Scottish as William Wallace and Mary Queen of Scots — reflecting a key dogma of the Left: that sociocultural values are the same everywhere, and thus it is only geography that makes for nationality. Move a Russian to Poland, and presto, his children will be Polish.

The Western intelligentsia believes that if Aqsa Mahmood’s parents move to Scotland, and Aqsa is born there, Aqsa will grow up Scottish, with Scottish values — and that if she doesn’t, it is the fault of Scottish authorities, who declined to allow him to assimilate because of their racism. The idea that Aqsa’s parents (despite their protestations in reports about her activity) and other Muslims in Scotland might have had no interest in assimilating is not allowed to be discussed.

Meanwhile, if a group of Scots moved to Syria and established a small enclave, a Little Scotland within Syria, and had children born in Syria, would their children be considered Syrians, open and shut, without question? Would the BBC refer to them as Syrians, as in “a Syrian man, Alexander Burns”?

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And will there be an honest discussion in the mainstream media about the relationship between Muslims’ allegiance to Islam and loyalty to the non-Muslim states in which they reside? Inconceivable – and that means that Aqsa Mahmood and Hasan Edmonds will not be the last Muslims to turn against their country, any more than they were the first.

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image illustrations via shutterstock / 

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