Start here, mes petites:

In October 2017, the [Islamic State’s] newspaper called on women to prepare for battle; by early last year, the group was openly praising its female fighters in a video that showed a woman wielding an AK-47…

The women once married to Islamic State militants who are now seeking to return to the West may claim to have simply been housewives, but from the beginnings of the group, some women were more radical than their husbands…

[T]he move to allow female combatants is born out of desperation. The group has lost essentially all its territory. Most of its male fighters have been killed, wounded or arrested…

Civilians in Iraq are certainly aware of the new face of the Islamic State. According to a survey a colleague and I conducted in Mosul in December, 85 percent of 400 respondents said that in the past, Islamic State women were as radical as men and 80 percent agreed or strongly agreed that they played an important role in the group; 82 percent said they agreed or strongly agreed that Islamic State women will be dangerous for Mosul in the future.

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Now let’s hear from fans of the repatriation of these women.

It’s not just the use of phrases like ISIS bride and ISIS widow rather than ISIS member, ISIS fighter, ISIS propagandist, etc. As two-X chromosome fanatics begin knocking on the doors of Western democracies to be let back in now that their massacre-Americans broadcasts have been suspended, we’re being treated to full bore sexism on their behalf. ‘Researchers [say] the “tendency to ascribe rational motivations to men and emotional motivations to women” [persists], even though there [is] no evidence that the drivers of radicalisation differ by gender.’ 

“When she was a 15-year-old the police were aware that she was being brainwashed and groomed by Isis, in the same way that people are sexually groomed. [Not her fault. Impossible that a young woman could examine a murderous ideology and decide she liked it. Our fault! Put the police in refugee camps!] When she went to Syria she married a man twice her age [Um. That would be thirtyish. Problem?… Age of consent? That’d be 16 for England and … for ISIS? 16 months?] within a few days of arriving there. [I certainly hope England has mandatory cultural competence classes. Who are you to say that the function of women is not immediately to begin making fighters for a cause?] It’s sexual exploitation as well as [ideological grooming]. [Yes, babe, lay it on. And wait – there’s more.]

The police, [school and] Tower Hamlets were aware she was being groomed and they did not tell her parents. That’s a shocking level of incompetence. [We’re all at fault. Shockingly. Only her parents and her mosque are not at fault by this reckoning.] The police gave her a letter to say they wanted to interview her; it was found in the schoolbag after she was gone. [Wonder why she ignored it? Oh right – her groomers made it impossible for her to understand its contents. And look how pathetic the police were! Instead of hauling her in and deprograming her, they wrote her a civil letter. Shocking incompetence.]

She has said things that have been surprising. I was a police officer for 30 years and every time I had to move a dead body, it shocked and fazed me. The idea that a 19-year-old is not fazed seems bizarre to me. We need to look at what she has been through. [So very traumatized! And such a convenient way of looking at things: The kind of people who can witness suffering and death coldly are not cold people; they are fragile, wounded, damaged people. If this woman said to you ‘You’re a wimp because suffering and death faze you; I’m a revolutionary, and they don’t faze me,’ you’d shake your head and weep yet more for the poor dear. But it would be better if you took a look at the BBC interview in which she said videos of beheadings that she watched well before she went to Syria inspired her to go.]”. [Details of this woman’s morbid nihilsm here.]

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[Former UK national counterterrorism coordinator for protect and prepare] said there “must be consequences” for joining Isis.

“People are trying to say she was a groomed child but … she planned it herself, nobody dragged her onto that plane, no one kidnapped her and put her there,” he added.

“She went with the clear intention to join Isis and if it hadn’t ended up the way it had, she probably would have stayed there.”

… “Now she doesn’t like where she has ended up and she wants to come back – we can’t have that.”

… “[Terri Nicholson, a former Metropolitan Police counterterrorism officer, said that if ISIS members like Shamima Begum do] return it’s a distraction at a time when security and intelligence agencies are at full tilt”…

“Police have prevented 18 terror attacks since March 2017. If we’re able to prevent more people from escalating those figures then that’s what we should be doing.”

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And therefore what to do with jihadis like this one?

UD likes Belgium’s idea of “an ad hoc international jurisdiction.”

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UPDATE: Macer Gifford, a British man who went to Syria to fight against ISIS:

She was fifteen [when she joined ISIS]. When I was fifteen I knew rape, murder, and kidnapping were wrong. There’s no indication that she has any remorse or that she’s any less dangerous.

ISIS girl doesn’t find chopping off everyone’s head or burning everyone alive shocking, but she does find shocking England revoking her citizenship. Maybe she’ll have better luck in Holland, hubby’s home.

Burqa backers sure do twist themselves up into pretzels defending the garment. As another German university bans full facial veiling in classrooms, a Green Party politician assures us that teaching has nothing to do with seeing the people you’re teaching.

… by primitive cults overwhelming the state and making life impossible for normal people. This blog has for years tracked the Iranization (everyone compares emergent ultraorthodox Israel to Iran, so I’ll do it too) of Israel, as it shows itself unwilling to intervene in its future majority’s caveman dreams.

I mean, they’re all over the world… caveman dreams… but they’re usually somewhat constrained by official agents of civilization. Not in Israel.

Nail-biting events in Venezuela currently being led by a guy who spent time in UD‘s Foggy Bottom. Very exciting. Very scary.

Crowd scenes.

This blog’s Venezuela posts.

It has allowed – continues to allow – an insular, ignorant sect, whose members are taught to fear and ignore anyone and anything outside the sect, to thrive within its borders. It has done this because these people represent a monolithic voting bloc.

Now political cynicism has led directly to New York’s largest measles outbreak.

From a link to an article a reader, John, sent me about how fatal violence outside and racist violence inside Italian soccer stadiums mirrors “darker developments in a broader segment of the Italian and indeed the European body politic,” UD was easily able to jump to other similarly appalled analyses of the increasingly unworkable business of putting on a football match in many of the world’s countries (scroll down). Africa, North Africa, South America, the Middle East — ain’t only Europe where the world’s most corruptly run game is also the most violent.  Football, “a sport with a deeply tribal nature and a large captive audience full of disenfranchised working-class males, and thus in many ways the perfect arena for the unscrupulous populist and his macho, nativist fantasies,” has an important “function in the rise of global far-right populism.”

Global football thugs are in some intriguing ways the haredim of Europe:

Their potential for violence is … so strong that pacifying them has been a matter of public order. 

Punishment is as half-hearted as Israel’s efforts to deal with its mobs of violent tribal male ultras – the ultra orthodox – and for the same reason. Violent-Corrupt-People-Is-Us. Absurd moves like making players compete in empty stadiums (there are more and more of these Beckettian theatrics across the globe), allowing only one team’s fans to attend (The Sound of One Side Clapping), or identifying ringleaders and denying them admission to games (guaranteeing violence on the streets — exactly where a nation’s women and children are cowering in an effort to get out of range of fascist gangs) accomplish nothing. Leaders like Viktor Orban want it that way. Even as tribes become smaller and smaller (“[S]tadium attendances [in Italy] plummet every year as people decide it’s better to watch games on TV rather than amid the violence and hatred of the terraces. In Serie A, stadiums are less than 60% full…”) their political and social violence, often stoked by governments, intensifies.

Central European University, under relentless pressure by Hungary’s popular prime minister to get the hell out, is about to do so. It will probably move to Vienna. Lots of people are upset about it. Hungary’s only world-class university has been chased away by paranoid hyper-nationalist know-nothings.

UD proposes that this might be for the best. The ultimate provincial backwater and proud of it; known, if known at all, for its suicide rate, Hungary, like our own Mississippi, elects chauvinistic dolts and ejects the non-doltish. Mississippi and Hungary are hemorrhaging population, whereas Vienna – precisely the sort of place (despite its own rightish political leadership) to which intelligent Hungarians flee – is growing.

If it is the will of people that the places they call home dissolve into nothingnesses ruled by Ubus, if they want to be places outsiders visit to track the spread of wisteria over Faulkner’s manse, or get soused with the ghost of Gyula Krúdy in his favorite watering hole, eh. It’s their right; precisely because of their “shabby littleness,” these places threaten no one.

Hungarians are the west’s Sentinelese. Really best not to intervene. Sad but true.

They seem to take things like this more seriously in Canada.

From the same article:

“There’s this really odd dynamic of ‘I really want to belong, I really want to be part of this team… and at the same time, you have to put up with this assault about something very personal, very private, and very scarring in order to prove your worthiness to be a member.”

Liberals, argue Judith Shklar and Richard Rorty, are people who believe that “cruelty is the worst thing we do.” UD agrees; she has always found the very deep, very twisted, very sexual masochism/sadism of this apparently common child’s play baffling and frightening. But UD has to deal with the fact that all over the globe the human race is cutting off clitorises with dirty knives and lacerating anuses with broken broom handles because …

What’s the cliche? Love is stronger than hate?

Nope. Hate – abundantly obviously – is stronger than love.

And not only stronger. Socially acceptable. If Argentine fans hate opposing teams and try to kill them, fine. If Reuben Foster hates his girlfriend and tries to kill her, fine. My beloved country elected a cruel paranoid as its leader; maybe, to reward him for killing our decency along with our institutions, it will reelect him. We like violence, we like hatred, we like cruelty. Liberal is a dirty word.

An we ain’t kiddin.

Constitutional questions derail America’s first FGM trial; the government will almost certainly appeal, and the beat goes on.

Saudi women are wearing their black sacks inside out as a sign of protest; their leaders are being tortured in Saudi jails.

The farcical current leaders of the Women’s March, with their passion for Farrakhan, Hamas, and Bill Cosby, are under serious pressure to fuck off. One of them, Linda Sarsour, is the Mad Trump of the movement, screaming for Ayan Hirsi Ali’s vagina to be removed, and every day sharing with us more and more of her pornographic imagination. Sarsour is in the grand tradition of

Houria Bouteldja, the [Party of Indigenous People of the Republic’s] charismatic spokeswoman, [who] has in recent years won notoriety for her defense of Muslim men accused of sexual violence. Faced with “testosterone-fuelled virility among indigenous men,” she has argued, women of color should look for its redeeming side, “the part that resists colonial domination,” and stand with their brothers.

Since Sarsour and her co-leaders represent the exact opposite of the democratic values for which the march stands, UD remains baffled as to their continued high profile. It’s precisely zanies like these who continue to sabotage the Democratic Party in this country, making it a big fat target for conservatives.

These are the three big categories under which you will find repression of free speech on the contemporary American college campus. Let’s glance at each one:

1. Inquisition: Way-Christian schools are always alerting us that “Academic freedom is not sacrosanct. […] It too must submit to God in a Christian college,” so shut the fuck up.

2. Ineptitude: Drop-out factories like Chicago State University are the academic equivalent of North Korea because they’ve got an insane amount of corruption and fuckupery to keep quiet.

3. Ideology: One-party states like Sarah Lawrence and Reed College do not take kindly to conservative professors… or, in the case of Reed, to liberal professors.

… Muslim countries are falling all over themselves to ban exactly those garments. Algeria’s already banned them in the workplace; Egypt’s on its way to a more comprehensive ban.

What is striking … is that scholars at al-Azhar, the highest seat of Sunni authority in Egypt, back banning the niqab. While al-Azhar supports the hijab, it said the full-face veil is a step too far.

One of the most outspoken critics of the niqab is Amina Nasir, a member of parliament and a professor of philosophy at al-Azhar University. She described the full-face veil as a threat to national security.

“The full-face veils have nothing to do with the Islamic religion at all,” Nasir said. “It even contradicts some of the verses of the Holy Quran.”

UD‘s old friend Scott Wallace, in The Atlantic.

She has written about him here. And here.

UD‘s old friend Scott Wallace suddenly has the edge (according to one poll – scroll down) in the contest for Pennsylvania’s First District. If you happen to be voting in that district, she’d like a word.

For over a decade, Scott was one of UD‘s closest friends (they’ve drifted apart over the years). Basically Scott had it all – in abundance – and UD was at the beginning of their friendship wary that he might be a snob, obnoxious, ostentatious… hyper-rich person stuff. He was tall and handsome and a multimillionaire and well-connected and he lived in a cool modern house (photographs of his grandfather – Roosevelt’s Vice-President, Henry Wallace – hung in the hallways) in one of DC’s best neighborhoods. His parents lived in a Georgetown mansion.

Scott turned out to be kind, unpretentious, serious, and morally engaged. He was the best of Washington: Informed, passionate about improving people’s lives, tireless in his commitment to good works.

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Unlike a lot of DC denizens, Scott was also an aesthete, with astoundingly impressive musical gifts. Like his mother, Scott played concert-level piano (his son has inherited this skill); to hear him play on the grand in his living room was a huge delight.

I remember lots of great dinners at his house, followed by charades; I remember travel together to local beaches and overseas. There were always long arguments about the politics of the day.

Scott was mild-mannered, generous, curious, funny. I think by nature he is rather quiet, rather observant. Not a natural back-slapper, like Joe Biden. But like Biden he radiates decency and modesty. He shares Biden’s political orientation; he is a natural democrat.

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More than once, I saw him be tight with a penny. His wealth is primarily for distribution to a suffering world. I rarely saw him spend much of it, except on a room in his basement full of electronic music technology. (His extended family is also musical: One of his brothers, a composer, bought Glen Tonche and turned it into a famous recording studio.)

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Anyway. I see that I’ve written a character sketch more than a political endorsement. But – put aside our president – character matters.

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UPDATE: Wow!