White Guys Joining ISIS

Gee, nothing suspicious about that. I'm sure they couldn't possibly be intel agents, though not sure why this guy got busted.

From the first link:

The article itself is about the fact that a very high proportion of the 'foreign fighters' in ISIS and in other rebel groups in Syria/Iraq are ethnic European converts. In other words, not first or second generation naturalized immigrants from the MENA region or Central or South Asia, but white Britons, Germans, French and Belgians who've not only converted to Islam but into its most extreme, totalizing variant. In some cases, men (yes, largely men) who have little more than a passing knowledge of the basics of Islamic ritual practice.
A few statistics from the article ...

The countries that apparently export the most Islamic State fighters are France (700 men, according to President Francois Hollande); the United Kingdom (at least 500, according to the Soufan Group, an international strategic consultancy firm); Germany (about 320, according to local news reports); and Belgium (approximately 350, according to The New York Times).

The gist of the article that while ethnic European converts to Islam make up only a tiny portion of the Muslim populations of these countries (not surprising) they make up a majority or even an overwhelming majority of the foreign fighters in Syria, especially with ISIS.
And then this ...

“There are people fighting with the Islamic State who don’t even know how to correctly recite the Shahada,” he says, referring to the Islamic declaration of faith. “They just want to fight the system, and to them jihadi groups have the same kind of appeal that radical left-wing terrorism used to have in the 1970s.”

(emphasis added)