Apparently there’s a good living to be made on the American social-conservative circuit by pretending to be an ex-jihadist who has found Jesus.
In a surreal performance, Kamal Saleem took the stage at the conservative Value Voters Summit Friday in Washington and described a life working as a jihadist for a who’s who of Muslim dictators on a mission to destroy America, Israel, and anyone else he disagreed with.
The crowd, virtually entirely right wing and Christian, went wild with applause.
Saleem has been a regular in evangelical circles for the last several years telling his story about how he was a violent terrorist who renounced his wicked ways for Christ.
“How do you change a terrorist? Introduce him to Jesus!” he said in a theatrical Friday speech delivered with a thick, unplaceable accent.
And what a terrorist he was. Saleem said that as a child he “dreamed about killing Jews and Christians” after being told by his mother in Lebanon that it was his sacred duty. From there, he claims, he went on to recruit new talent for the Muslim Brotherhood, study how to properly immigrate to Western countries and infiltrate them with jihadist propaganda, smuggle explosives for PLO leader Yasser Arafat, and run a Libyan terrorist training camp for Muammar Gaddafi — all before reaching adulthood.
“I started working for whoever paid the best to advance Islamism.” he said, pacing back and forth onstage. “Saddam Hussein pays better money than anybody else. He was very generous.”
If Saleem’s story sounds unbelievable it’s because there’s little sign any of it ever happened. News investigations into his past haven’t turned up any corroborating evidence of his terrorist resume, but they’ve found plenty of former colleagues and acquaintances who doubt the veracity of Saleem’s autobiographical details.
Tim Murphy at Mother Jones and Doug Howard, a professor at a Christian college in Michigan who encountered Saleem, have more.
