From the CNN series: God’s Warriors:
The path to faith often takes unexpected twists. In the case of Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, the road went through three of the world’s major religions — Judaism, Islam and Christianity — and ultimately brought him to the FBI.
Born to Jewish parents who call themselves mystics, he grew up in what he calls the "liberal hippie Mecca" of Ashland, Oregon, a town of about 20,000 near the California border. It was in this ultraliberal intellectual environment that a young Gartenstein-Ross experimented with a radical form of Islam that eventually led him to shun music, reject women’s rights and even refuse to touch dogs because he believed this was "according to God’s will." …
The humble mosque would soon move to a hilltop headquarters in Ashland, thanks to financial support from a Saudi Arabian charity known as the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, which has since been shut down by U.S. and Saudi authorities for alleged terror ties. …
In 1999 he left his job at Al-Haramain for law school at NYU. Away from his co-workers, he was free to question the radical doctrines he’d learned in Oregon and meet with others about spirituality, including Christians. A year later, he converted to Christianity and was eventually baptized in the Baptist church. It was a decision he took extremely seriously because he said his colleagues at Al-Haramain had preached that leaving Islam was punishable by death. …
The Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation would come up in his life again, but in a very different fashion. His first job after law school was as a clerk with the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia. He had to undergo a background check and listed Al-Haramain as a previous employer. Soon, the FBI was quizzing him about the group. Two years later, in 2004, federal agents raided the Ashland offices of Al-Haramain. When he learned of the bust, Gartenstein-Ross says he contacted the FBI.
"I knew about some of Al-Haramain’s contempt for U.S. tax law. I knew about the support these guys had for the mujahedeen in Chechnya," he said.
(Hat Tip: Micah Burch.)
