Other avowed terrorists-turned-Christians have drawn scrutiny as well, including U.S. citizens
Walid Shoebat, author of "Why We Want To Kill You," and
Kamal Saleem, who has worked for Focus on the Family and recently wrote "The Blood of Lambs." Like Caner's book, their books purport to be insider explorations of radical Islam.
Shoebat, who has called Islam "the devil," says he was recruited by the Palestine Liberation Organization as a teenager. In 1977, he has said, he threw a bomb on the roof of the Bethlehem branch of an Israeli bank.
The bank, however, has no record of the incident, and it was never reported by Israeli news outlets.
When asked by the Jerusalem Post in 2008 why there were no records, Shoebat surmised that the incident was not serious enough to merit news coverage. Yet four years earlier, he told Britain's Sunday Telegraph: "I was terribly relieved when I heard on the news later that evening that no one had been hurt or killed by my bomb."
Skeptics also point out that Shoebat and Saleem say they carried out terrorist activities in the 1960s and 1970s, long before modern Islamic radicalism emerged in the 1980s. They also ask why, if their stories are true, the two have been able to retain their U.S. citizenship.
Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Caner, Shoebat, Saleem and others like them belong to an "industry" that is often perpetuated by fundamentalist Christians.
"The people that are doing this do it to make money or get converts or to get some personal benefit," Hooper said.
Muslims and non-Muslims alike are troubled that these avowed former terrorists have been welcomed as experts. They have appeared on CNN and Fox News and spoken at Harvard Law School. In 2008, they were speakers at a terrorism conference sponsored by the Air Force Academy, the findings of which were to be distributed at the Pentagon and Capitol Hill.