Has any one ever considered this scenario:
A terrorist has come to America in order to help bring down the “Great Satan”.
Say he has managed to get here legitimately (he isn’t illegal); he has never been to America, all he knows about our society is what he has gleaned from Arab media. Once he has been here for a few months, however, he decides this place is really not so bad after all. He actually decides that he prefers our more secular lifestyle over his former situation!
Do you think this is possible? I just wonder if this has ever happened. I know a lot of you guys are much more well-read and familiar with the whole terrorist mind-set than I am, so I thought I would post this in “Great Debates” to see the various opinions as to how probable this scenario could be! (I realize it may seem ridiculous, and I may be way off-base here, but it popped into my mind, so I had to post it!) What do you think?
Sure it could happen.
Is it signifigant? No. A friend of mine- one of the liberalist free living punk rockers you’ve ever met- married a middle eastern guy and is now a veiled Muslim woman. Does this prove anything about either America or Islam? Not a thing.
I imagined it has happened & probably even has been responsible for some of the occasional Gov’t raids of terrorist cells that’s occured.
No, I don’t.
I say this because your OP makes the assumption that the would-be terrorist is some ignorant Islamic hick, whose only knowledge of the west comes from what his leaders tell him, and can be “saved” if he simply experiences the “shining glory” of life in America (or any other first-world western nation).
The simple truth is that most Muslems already do know about life in the west, and are not ignorant hicks. They have cell phones and CNN, they’ve seen Baywatch and read Playboy, they know about the ideas of freedom of speech and democratic governments. And while some of the terrorists’ motivations might be based on religious or social reasons (“Destroy the great satan, who perverts the beauty of women by flaunting them like whores!”), there’s also a hatred of the U.S. for its foreign policies over the last 40 years – interfering with the elected government of Iran, invading Iraq on false pretenses for oil, unconditional support of Israel over the Palestinians, etc.
If the Islamic fundamentalists were simply opposed to western culture, they could easily seal their borders, censor western media/news/etc., and be happy in their own isolated clique. But that tactic doesn’t work when the west (read: the United States) continues to support corrupt middle-eastern governments, engage in (perceived) anti-Islamic foreign policies, and generally sticks its nose into their affairs.
So no, I don’t think the “terrorist conversion” fantasy in the OP is likely to occur, because it’s rooted in false premises.