One thing you can say about Jack Molloy: he loves his mom. Molloy, a Pittsburgh resident who is now facing up to eight years in prison on terror-related charges, told his mother about his “master plan,” and now that plan is part of the reason why he has come to the attention of the feds. Mama Molloy wrote to her boy: “Your master plan was to join Hezbollah and kill Jews?” The earnest young man answered: “Yes.” It is not an extraneous detail that Jack Danaher Molloy converted to Islam in Feb. 2024.
It's easy to see what attracted Molloy to The Religion of Peace. JNS reported Tuesday that the mama’s boy, “who is a former active duty member of the U.S. military and who converted to Islam in or around February 2024, used an email address on his PayPal that included the phrase ‘glassofjuice88.’” The Justice Department explained that “‘glassofjuice’ is a homophone for ‘gas the Jews,’ and the number ‘88’ is a reference to a white supremacist numerical code for ‘Heil Hitler.’ ‘H’ is the eighth letter of the alphabet, so 88 = ‘HH’ = ‘Heil Hitler.’”
Hating Jews and killing them seemed to be central to Molloy’s worldview. “I have a very fierce hatred of these Zionists,” he said, “and I need to fight.” Killing Jews was a longstanding obsession of his: “I have thought about this every moment of every day since I was 18, for 7 years now.”
Molloy also “supported and idolized violence and wanted to kill Jews, as evidenced by multiple images and videos on his electronic devices and the names he chose as his monikers for his social media and email accounts.” Those accounts “included variations of the phrase ‘k*ke killer’ and ‘gas the Jews.’”
After he converted to Islam, Molloy gave the impression that his Jew hatred was all in the family. “I grew up in a military family, so my mind is always obsessed with military,” he explained, adding that “to me, I am continuing the fight my great grandmother fought against the Zionists, but now Islamically.”
His great-grandmother fought against the Zionists? Molloy, a dual citizen of Ireland and the United States, is 24 years old. Was his great-grandmother among the small number of Irish citizens who fought alongside the National Socialist Germans during World War II?
In any case, in his attempt to follow in her footsteps “Islamically,” Molloy made his way to Lebanon and August and then to Syria in October. On both occasions, he was trying to join Hezbollah, but the trips didn’t work out as he had hoped. The DoJ’s complaint says that the earnest new convert “was told by multiple individuals that the time was not right and that he needed to take other steps before he could join the foreign terrorist organization.”
Molloy himself explained on Snapchat that he had attended a Hezbollah funeral in Lebanon in September and said that “the gate guards even though they were different ones from last week, knew of me, they knew that I’m Irish, that I’m Shia, and somehow they knew that I want in with Hezbollah. They were entertaining the idea of me being Hezb. I fully expect to be taken off the streets at any moment for questioning and vetting.’”
Yet “an unnamed person” responded to Molloy: “You’re going to have to wait, because I think it’s going to take more than a couple of months, and things are not very safe. There are a lot of divisions you can apply for, but right now they are not recruiting, they’re not accepting anyone and due to the high number of Mossad agents, and moles, appearing inside sadly, so it’s gonna take a while. For sure, you can, but it’s gonna take a while especially after the circumstances are over.”
Related: In Germany, a Man Who Was Stabbed by a Jihadi Has Been Fined for Criticizing Islam
Molloy also told his mom about what he planned to do, and she doesn’t seem to have offered any objection to his desire to kill Jews. She did take issue with a new plan he hatched to go to Russia and fight against Ukraine, saying it would simply be “a one-year job.” This idea, his doting mother said, demonstrated “unstable thinking.” The young man told her, however, that the die was cast: “I’ve already spoken to recruitment.”
Molloy didn’t make it to Russia. Nor did he join Hezbollah. In late October, according to the complaint, Molloy told feds at Pittsburgh International Airport that “he had no current or future plans to become involved with Hezbollah” and wasn’t planning to meet anyone in Syria. The DoJ explained: “These statements and representations were false because Molloy knew at that time that he did have current and future plans to become involved with Hezbollah.” He had “traveled to Syria in furtherance of his attempts to join Hezbollah, and while in Syria, set up a meeting with an individual there.” And so now he is looking at eight years of hard time.
What is it about converts to Islam? To write the stories of all the converts to Islam who have turned to terrorism would make for a good-sized book, and yet it remains an iron dogma of American public discourse that Islam is a religion of peace that has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. Every religion has its extremists, we’re told again and again, and yet there are literally hundreds and possibly many more converts to Islam who have joined terror groups, while there are vanishingly few, if any, converts to Christianity or other religions who have done so.
Authorities remain resolutely indifferent to this phenomenon, and not a single law enforcement or intelligence agency anywhere in the world is studying why so many converts to Islam end up in terror groups. To look into this and try to devise ways to prevent it would apparently be “Islamophobic.” Yet this only ensures that ever more new Muslims will find their way into terrorism, as Jack Danaher Molloy can attest.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member