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Former terrorist speaks at Air Force Academy

His credentials include appearing as a pundit on CNN and lecturing at top universities — and, he claims, bombing Israelis as an agent of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Meet Walid Shoebat, self-described former terrorist and speaker at the Air Force Academy’s 50th Academy Assembly, an annually convened gathering on topics of international significance. This year’s assembly, titled “Dismantling Terrorism,” was Feb. 6.

Shoebat was joined by Kamal Saleem, who also claims he was recruited by the PLO at a young age to kill Israelis. A third speaker, Zachariah Anani, says he killed more than 223 people as a militia fighter in Lebanon.

The men, who call themselves the “3-X Terrorists,” now take on speaking engagements across the Western world on radical Islam. Each eventually converted to Christianity, according to their promotional material, and they offer to “expose the agenda of radical Islam” and “confess to the world why they were terrorists” while offering an understanding of extremist minds.

But critics, including Muslim organizations and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, say they are evangelical Christians whose attacks on Islam are outrageous and whose claims to be terrorists are dubious.

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Shoebat has said that “Islam is the devil.”

“I mean, c’mon!” Hooper said. “And these people are going to talk as experts to cadets who may possibly serve in parts of the Muslim world?”

The academy, however, has stated it simply wanted the three men to “share their personal experiences and give insight into their perspectives of terrorism.”

Delegates from more than 50 colleges and 16 nations attended the speeches at the academy. Also attending were Defense Department specialists, Pulitzer Prize-winner Lawrence Wright and terrorism expert Steven Emerson. With the assembly in mind, more than 100 cadets wrote policy recommendations for Congress, the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and Rand, a California-based think tank.

MORE: Group says speakers promote hate