They put it on the internet, so it must be true.
The latest bit of gossipmongering is that John Brennan, Obamas pick to head the CIA, converted to Islam while working in Saudi Arabia. The evidence for this seems lean… bsically, the FBI guy who wrote a “Muslim Brotherhood training a manual” for the FBI, says so.
Maybe true, maybe not. If it’s true, it’ll be interesting to see how the confirmation hearings go, if the fact of him being a convert to Islam is even raised at the hearings. It is, after all, somewhat akin to finding out that a prospective head of the CIA in 1955 was a convert to Communism. It would explain why Brennan purged such training manuals from the FBI as being “offensive” to Muslims.
A common enough cliche – common because there’s a whole lot of truth to it – is that converts to different religions or political ideologies are usually more fanatical than those born into them.
Another observation: it would be difficult to argue that the 9/11 attacks weren’t successful for Islam. Consider this: after the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans got tossed into internment camps. Loyal Americans were made to suffer due solely to their ethnicity, and had to jump through many hoops in order to simply serve. The idea of an American government official converting to the Shinto faith and becoming director of, say, the OSS is just patently ridiculous. Fast forward to the post-9/11 world: the first new President elected after the attacks was a guy raised in the Islamic faith, has an Islamic middle name and is considered by a great many people to be a Muslim.