Rappers who can't make it the old fashioned way might want to consider getting down with the terrorists. I'm assuming that's what Loon just did.

The other day, there was that video of Loon on Al-Jazeera. Maybe you saw it. I'm not gonna lie - I didn't bother watching it myself. There's only so many hours in a day, and World Star really has been stepping its game up, as far as its cam hoo-ers are concerned. DJ Vlad might be making some important contributions to journalism, but he needs to get some hoo-ers shaking their asses. I can't imagine it costs very much money, in this economy. A lot of broads do that shit for free anyway, just for the attention. Or, so I've been told.

But I digress.

I wouldn't necessarily have thought anything of Loon growing his beard out, putting on a funny hat and going on Al-Jazeera to spread his message of peace (natch). Plenty of rappers before him have embraced Islam in some form or another, whether it's what I like to call prison Islam, which, as far as I know (I'll have you know I took two classes on religion in college, plus I read that Christopher Hitchens book), bears very little resemblance to genuine, according to Hoyle Islam; or the kind of Islam they practice over in the Middle East, with the weird sex issues and what have you - terrorist Islam, if you will; or some sort of hybrid between the two. Maybe Loon saw in it the same thing the rest of those clowns did. He's just went a little bit deeper, because it's not like he's got shit else better to do.

Then I read a series of posts over on my boy Combat Jack's site, Daily Mathematics (which has been recently redesigned, btw), and, come to find out, Loon has almost certainly been recruited by the terrorists. This is just the latest development in their ongoing effort to recruit from the black community here in the US, and the hip-hop community in particular. I've been reporting on it for this site going way the fuck back to 2006, when I was having some issues with Lupe Fiasco. You'll recall that bin Laden had a tape out at one point, specifically targeting the hip-hop community. He quoted Malcolm X, which probably would have gone over better, if it didn't just so happen to be during the height of the minstrel rap era. What did he think this was, 1992?

The smoking gun in this case comes at the very end of Combat Jack's series of posts. And if you know anything about the man's writing style, you have to wonder how many people even made it to that point. I'm not saying he shouldn't write as much, if that's what he wants to do. I'm just saying. He buried the lede! Once you get past all of the parts about how Loon was some dumb kid from the hood, and he could have made a shedload of money, but instead he ended up getting ripped off, which I could have told you, and I hardly know anything about Loon, it's revealed that Loon almost certainly isn't sincere in his conversion to Islam. In a series of posts on Facebook earlier this year, he mentioned how he was on his way to Saudi Arabia to meet with some people who realize his potential as an artist, how he was finally about to achieve the level of wealth he'd been striving for, and how he was about to make some real A-rab money.

Of course, the dead giveaway is the fact that he has no potential as an artist. That was already determined 10 years ago. If people like Ma$e and Diddy and Clive Davis couldn't get him to sell any records, how in the fuck are bin Laden and 'em going to? While the global outpouring of grief over the death of Michael Jackson reminds us that people outside the United States have bizarre tastes in music, I seriously doubt these people heard the Harlem World album and saw a money-making opportunity. These Arabs already own half of our country. What the fuck do they need with the proceeds from a Loon album? Then there's the fact that Loon made the mistake of going on Facebook bragging about how he was about to get that A-rab money. Which not only would ostensibly be offensive to his new benefactors, but it wouldn't seem to jibe very well with his supposedly pious religious beliefs, as evidenced by the beard and the silly hat.

Loon must have realized how much money he could make as a recruitment tool for the terrorists, got excited and flew off half-cocked. As Tom Breihan would say, you can take the ninja out of Harlem (in this case, far away from Harlem), but you can't take Harlem out of the ninja.

More From XXL