Young adults convert to Islam, some flash hate for West by justifying Hamas, lauding bin Laden

Young people are converting to Islam, praising Osama bin Laden, and justifying Hamas' Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel despite acknowledging that it was genocidal in what commentators are calling the latest expression of hatred for the West and its values. 

A growing number of young people are claiming to converting to Islam, documenting their journeys on TikTok and citing the Israel-Hamas war as their motivation, after Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, murdering approximately 1,200 civilians and kidnapping about 240 others.

Many videos show Western women telling their stories with the hashtag "#revert," referring to the Islamic belief that everyone is born a Muslim and rather than converting, people are just returning to the religion. A search for "#revert" on TikTok reveals 2.9 billion views and a seemingly endless number of videos. 

One woman, who identifies as a 24-year-old Canadian named Callie, said on Sept. 9 that she wanted more followers. "Do I still want to have 200 followers when I'm 30? No I don't," she said. 

The same woman posted a video on Oct. 17 of her wearing a hijab and taking the Shahada, which is the Islamic profession of faith a person recites to convert to Islam. Now she has nearly 26,000 followers and posts daily videos documenting her life professing to be a Muslim. In most Muslim countries women are officially second-class citizens with restricted rights under the rule of law, ranging from voting rights to property ownership and credibility in sexual assault cases, though she does not address any of these issues.

Other people gained significantly more followers online after their conversions. On Oct. 20, Megan Rice, a black American millennial-aged activist, posted a video on TikTok about how "impressed" she is with the "Palestinian faith." By Nov. 10, she appeared on TikTok in a hijab and her number of followers more than doubled from 400,000 to more than 865,000. She officially converted to Islam the next day, per The Free Press. 

One Instagram page, "reverted_muslims," frequently posts videos of people telling their "reversion story" about how they converted to Islam. For example, one post this week featured the caption, "A Jewish girl taking the Shahadah," with a video of her reciting the required phrase to convert.

Another video this week shows three girls with their hair covered with keffiyehs, a black and white Palestinian scarf, with the caption, "She came for Protest and decided to accept Islam." 

A man on TikTok who identifies as "Robin" and has more than a quarter of a million followers despite only having three videos, posted his first video on Oct. 18 showing himself "before" and "after" his conversion.

The phenomenon of converting to Islam after a horrific terror attack is nothing new. In the year after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, at least 8,000 U.S. women are estimated to have converted to Islam, according to a projection from the Hartford Institute for Religious Research.

The number of Muslims in America more than doubled in the decade after the attacks, according to the 2010 U.S. Religion Census. This was largely attributed to immigration from Muslim countries and conversions.

Hoover Institution research fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim who was subjected to female genital mutilation and had to escape a forced marriage, told Fox News this week that the conversion trend is "a manifestation of the moral dislocation of the West that we're going through."

She also blamed the U.S. education system for being politicized and said: "They use the word hate this and safe to death, but it's really the introduction of a political ideology that is anti-Western. It's anti-American. It's all about tearing things down."

Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro, who is an Orthodox Jew, also said in an interview posted on X, that anti-American and pro-Hamas sentiment is coming out after the Oct. 7 attacks. 

"Young people do not understand what America stands for, and they hate America in many of the same ways that they hate Israel," he said. "There's an enormous number of young people in the country who despise everything the country stands for. They think it's an oppressor colonialist state ... They hate Israel because they hate America."

The hatred of Israel is reflected in polls. Even though nearly two-thirds (64%) of people aged 18-24 say that Hamas' attack on Israel was "genocidal in nature," most of the young people polled (58%) say that the attack "can be justified by the grievance of Palestinians," according to the latest Harvard CAPS / Harris poll released this week.

Additionally, 61% of people ages 18-24 say that President Joe Biden should "pull back" his support of Israel in the conflict, and 64% of people in that group say that a "ceasefire is right." This is somewhat confusingly juxtaposed with the survey also revealing that 51% of people in that age group saying that Israel's military should "keep going until Hamas is defeated and the hostages are released."

While that poll was conducted Nov. 15-16 with 2,851 registered voters, young people's lack of support for Israel and their hatred of the West is particularly pronounced in other areas of society. 

For example, the late Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's "Letter to America," justifying the Sept. 11 terror attacks, went viral on TikTok last week. 

Hundreds of videos praising the letter and sympathizing with bin Laden received more than 15 million views on the app last week before TikTok began removing the videos and banning hashtags on the topic, according to The Washington Post.

Searches for the letter were so overwhelming that The Guardian, which originally published the letter online in 2002, removed it from its website. That still did not stop the deleted page from being one of the top ones trending on the website. The deeply antisemitic letter slams the West for everything from homosexuality to support of Israel.

"Ideally, our youth would find inspiration in texts that aren’t written by a guy who wanted us all dead or converted to Islam, but here we are," commentator Jamie Sarkonak wrote last week in The National Post.

He said the popularity of the letter is driven in part because students are "taught that the West is inherently bad." 

"This is what happens after many years of cultural demoralization. It’s no surprise that young people would eventually start to believe in men who wish death to Jews and keep women in harems," Sarkonak wrote. 

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