In a recent France 24 documentary on ISIS foreign women in the Kurdish-controlled Al-Hawl camp in north-eastern Syria, a camp director said that “when they [foreign ISIS women] gave themselves up, some of them told us that the IS group briefed them, telling them, ‘Surrender, go back to your countries, get your strength back and we will start again.’”
The Unsinkable Molly BOOM.
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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
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It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
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You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
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Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
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[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
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Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
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From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
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Tenured Radical
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If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte
March 28th, 2019 at 9:22AM
The level of sexist hysteria (yes, word chosen deliberately) over these women is remarkable. Now, they’re going to be a fifth column in the west, incubating a new generation of terrorists who will someday rise up and overthrow civilization?
Lovely moral panic we have going here.
March 28th, 2019 at 12:35PM
I don’t think that’s quite it, Total. People in the relevant home countries rightly fear all ISIS adherents, male and female. There are specific things to fear from each gender, based on their activities – past and future – on behalf of the movement.
What’s sexist is the assumption that women will be less dangerous than men.
All of those who stayed until the bitter end and show evidence of continued adherence are extremely dangerous, and unless you’re comfortable dismissing much of the free world as simply suffering from cowardice and hysteria, you need to reckon with the strong disinclination, sometimes to the point of refusal, to have these people back in one’s country.
March 28th, 2019 at 2:41PM
What’s sexist is the assumption that women will be less dangerous than men
These women, as the article makes clear, were non-combatants and people are so panicked about their ideology that they’ve fallen back on the worst kind of misogynist logic. It’s the Manchurian Candidate domineering mother trope all over again.
Next up: Trump announces that waves of ISIS moms are heading north through Mexico to overrun American daycare!
dismissing much of the free world as simply suffering from cowardice and hysteria,
Er…have you looked at the world recently? I’m pretty comfortable with saying that lots of reactions people have are both driven by irrational fears and by prejudice of all sorts. This is one of them.
April 1st, 2019 at 10:25AM
Actual treason is way better than imaginary collusion, eh, Total? When it comes to the US, these women either renounced their citizenship, in which case we owe them nothing, or they are guilty of treason under US 18.1.115 section 2381. Or are you going to pretend that ISIS is not an enemy of the US?
April 1st, 2019 at 12:31PM
Or are you going to pretend that ISIS is not an enemy of the US?
What they may be guilty of is not the same thing as any potential threat that they actually pose. I’m talking about the latter, not the former. Do try to keep up.
My larger points (as I’ve made in multiple responses to multiple posts by UD) are that 1) these women are their countries’ responsibilities, and those countries should bring them back to the country and then, if the evidence is sufficient, let the legal system handle them (yes, with treason charges if necessary; 2) the threat that these women pose is actually negligible and so people are coming up with the worst kind of misogynist bullsh** as a substitute for actual thought. I’m embarrassed that UD seems to have that fixation as well; you, I’ve never been impressed by, so less so.
Oh, one further note:
these women either renounced their citizenship
Really? They appeared in a US consulate and signed an oath of renunciation, which is the actual legal way of doing it?