Sorry, but that calling isn’t coming from God.
Via NBC News:
Just a few weeks ago a Catholic-born, American man –- a former military school student, special forces aspirant, law enforcement officer and bodybuilder — set off on a path far from any he’d envisioned for himself as a kid in North Carolina: on the other side of the world, in Lebanon, he was trying to figure out how to get into Syria and join ISIS, the most radical, bloodthirsty terrorist group of our times.
Don Morgan, 44, said he was answering a higher calling.
“It was months and months and months of asking Allah to guide me or to give me the answers I needed,” he told NBC News in an exclusive interview this summer in Beirut.
Morgan answered our questions on camera as asked by a freelance journalist. Morgan believed U.S. and other law enforcement agencies were already on his trail. He said he knew his desire to join ISIS would likely get him into trouble with American authorities.
The factors that drove Morgan to embrace the ideology of the terror group responsible for beheading two American journalists and killing thousands in Syria and Iraq appear to be rooted in more than faith, based on the extensive conversation with Morgan himself and some of those who know him. Personal disappointments and desires and exposure to increasingly radical social media also contributed to Morgan’s actions.
Most crucial in Morgan’s case may have been the order and discipline that he says he found in practicing Islam –and in ISIS’s interpretation of the Muslim faith and its determination to spread it in the form of a caliphate.
“My reason for the support of ISIS is because they’ve proven time and time again to put Islamic law as the priority and the establishment of an Islamic state as the goal,” Morgan told NBC News.