Counterterrorism Blog

I just wrote a piece for New York Press re the French riots and the misperceptions carried by the MSM. I also touched on the potential transformation from rioter to jihadi. Here is an excerpt:

Some commentators have been quick to accuse Islamists of organizing the riots. This is not accurate. While it is true that in some isolated cases, some rioters were heard yelling Allah Ahukbar while torching cars and throwing Molotov cocktails at the anti-riot police, this has not been the general pattern. When asked about it on November 7, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin answered that the Islamists were not the essential force between the riots. A much better source, the Renseignements Généraux—a unit of the police, which closely monitors the Islamists, the mosques and the exurban slums called banlieues, which are popualted mostly by poor Africans and Muslims—have found no Islamist hand in the latest violence.
France, though, has been undergoing a fast Islamization in the past ten years, most notably in schools. This prevents integration.

Most of the rioters and especially the gang leaders are for now secular and very materialistic, but they will most probably join the rank of jihadis within three to five years if nothing is done.
The usual scenario goes like this: either the rioters end up in jail and are easily converted right there to Radical Islam or an imam from the banlieue convinces them to join the Jihad. At first, family, friends and cops find the transformation almost miraculous. From a drug trafficker, alcohol-drinking, girl-chasing individual, the thug becomes religious, even reserved, adopts a quieter lifestyle and no longer gets in trouble with the police. But this is a transfer of violence: instead of burning cars, the youngster focuses his hatred on the West and becomes a jihadi.
It is no coincidence that scores of French citizens are in Iraq fighting coalition troops (at least half a dozen Frenchmen have died in this fashion).