Australia’s decision, yesterday, to refuse entry to a bunch of ISIS adherents (they have to go back to their camp in Syria) has occasioned another round of ISIS bride language. These women aren’t ideologically committed violent fanatics – only men have the brains to be that. No, they put on their white veils or whatever and did the brood mare thing for whatever incomprehensible nonsense Ahmad was spouting…
It’s simply a measure of how far women haven’t come that everyone feels comfortable denigrating these fully paid cult members in this way. I mean FUCK. The one thing these chicks weren’t is anything remotely resembling what anyone in the history of the English language has ever meant by the word BRIDE.
Read what Shamima Begum said attracted her to ISIS. She particularly loved videos of beheadings.
Stop with the bride shit.
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.
Everyone calls the Isettes “brides” – jihadi brides, ISIS brides, I.S. brides… Sheer sexism, mes petites; a way of cutesying them and why? Everyone knows it’s Always a terrorist; never a bride; everyone gets that it’s like the first page of DeLillo’s cult classic (if you will) Mao II, which describes a mass Moonie wedding in Yankee Stadium: “grouped in twos, eternal boy-girl.”
Anonymous commandeered fuck-couplings (‘Ms Begum said her only role in the caliphate was to “make babies”) don’t really strike UD as very bridey…
Maybe you’re different. Maybe when you think of a filthy tenth century setting in which brainless degenerates deposit sperm after getting themselves sexually excited by watching beheadings you picture a dewy girl in a gown, catching her breath before saying I do… Ms Begum spent her nights fucking men she was directed to fuck and her sweltering days swaddled in black – you can call this way of life many things, but the adjective “bridal” doesn’t pop to mind.
You know why everyone cutesies them. Despite everything, people only want to think of men as criminals. If Marsha Edwards had been Mark Edwards, would he have shared a funeral with the children he shot to death, a pretty photo of him up on stage next to pretty photos of the people he killed?
Marsha gets to be not a murderer. She gets to be Mom.
As the debate over repatriating some of the most dangerous people in the world proceeds, UD hopes that the press will gradually phase out the whole bride thing.
This articulation reeks of the kind of stereotypical depiction of Muslim women that has too often permeated Western societies: one of submission, obedience and lack of personal agency.
…. ISIS offered these young women something that recognized their agency. Not just homemakers and housewives, but combatants and propagandists, ISIS recognized that women had a role to play in their state-building project. The journey to jihadism for these women was not about coercion, but rather about participation.
There remains a great urgency to help debunk the myths surrounding how and why women become involved in terrorist activities. From combat roles to suicide bombers, policymakers must recognize women’s agency in terrorist organizations and how gender roles function within groups.
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Details.
Yes, well, I think that’s rahtha obvious.
You’re certainly not going to catch any news outlets calling F-E an ISIS bride. All the world’s media love to call ISIS females ISIS brides, because it’s ever so important to assure both us and themselves that girls are sweet and boys are beasts. Boys evolve violent ideological commitments. Girls are too dumb for this and only want to be brides and have babies. So we certainly shouldn’t prosecute these dumb lost souls should we capture any of them.
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F-E should definitely help people with their ISIS bride problem. An American who started out as a Kansas schoolteacher (I am not making this up), F-E came to recognize, accept and finally embrace her spectacular bloodthirstiness, sprinting up the ISIS career ladder until she was conducting classes in how to kill large numbers of people.
But F-E did not merely teach; she was able to attract funding.
… Ms. Fluke-Ekren had a plan in 2014 to attack a college in the United States using backpacks filled with explosives. Prosecutors did not reveal which college she had wanted to target. The criminal complaint said her plan was presented to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State at the time, who approved it for funding.
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I’m not saying F-E could never assimilate back to life in the United States. There are indications, in fact, that in some respects she’d fit in quite well.
[O]n one occasion, a young child of hers was seen holding an assault rifle.
So that’s promising; but I think we probably should put her in prison for some period of time because she’s been trying to kill, and get other people to kill, LOTS of Americans; and she still appears determined to do this.
So maybe we should give her life imprisonment. She seems almost as dangerous as… as a man!
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Are prisoners allowed video games? I can’t see F-E keeping her spirits up without Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, aka A La Recherche des Décapitations Perdus.
How interesting! When an ISIS member’s lawyer wants to justify her having been allowed to return to Norway from Syria’s Al-Hol camp, he goes right to her niqab-dump! Why ever does he do that? How interesting that he clearly thinks we’ll be … reassured about something… consider it something positive and good… that a woman has rejected the niqab…
Yet my burqa:my freedom, and my niqab:my freedom have become international memes; the world’s press routinely publishes I love my burqa and you’ll never take it away from me opinion pieces. We are intended to find Islamophobic this man’s implication that removing the niqab – and hey wait a minute – –
How do we know she didn’t dump it under duress, desperate as she is to get Norwegian medical care for one of her children?
“The woman remains a security concern,” [a local terrorism expert] acknowledged. “But at least she will be under control and surveillance in Norway. Apart from France, no European-born returnees from the war in Syria [have] carried out new terror attacks in Europe.”
Oh yeah right apart from France… As in – apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play…
Bringing her back to Norway is bringing down the Norwegian government; but after all what a good idea to let this “ISIS Wife,” as the NYT headline absurdly calls her, back in the country.
Keep calling these chicks ISIS wives. Go ahead. I mean, that’s all the poor stupid dears were, right? Mobile vaginas immobilizing themselves for a time in ISISland in order to produce babies for one husband after another. No other personal identity here, and certainly no moral agency and certainly no slave holding or beheading applauding or propaganda issuing… The sexism with which these women are being received in Europe and America is astounding.
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UPDATE: Norway’s ruling coalition has disbanded after the populist Progress Party (FRP) left the government, partly due to the repatriation of a mother with suspected ISIS links from Syria.
The Prime Minister said there were no options, but there were. Bring in the child for treatment while the mother stays behind and works out her citizenship options. She grew up in Norway and presumably has family there who can look after the child. She has a Pakistani background, and one of her husbands has (had?) Chilean roots – she may qualify for citizenship in those countries, or in whatever country her other husband came from (he is not identified in news stories).
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ANOTHER UPDATE: So as the thing becomes a big story – a whole government falls because someone thought Norway needed to repatriate and permanently surveil an ISIS militant – we can scan a big ol’ page of news stories about it and find not ONE reference to this woman as an ISIS militant. Let’s see what we find… ISIS spouse, ISIS widow, ISIS bride, ISIS wife… Occasionally we get suspect, woman, returnee… But take a look and you’ll see overwhelming use of the reductive, sexist formulation. Do we call ISIS men ISIS husbands? Why not?
“Ms. Muthana is an accomplished ISIS member in her own right, having joined one of the top terrorist organizations in the world at the age of only 20,” said FAIR spokesperson Keith Finneran, explaining how terms like “ISIS bride” and “wife of ISIS soldier,” routinely used to refer to Muthana in news headlines, are derogatory in that they credit the woman’s hard-won contributions to the war on infidels to her husband… [Y]ou shouldn’t refer to Muthana as a “female terrorist” either, because the countless hours she’s allegedly spent online calling for the death of Americans makes her just as much of a terrorist as anyone else.
First Hoda goes all ISIS, and now her sister Arwa is arrested trying to do the exact same thing!
After [Arwa] Muthana was arrested, she waived her Miranda rights and stated during an interview that she was willing to fight and kill Americans if it was for Allah.
What is it with the Muthana family? At this point I think we need to have a chat with the parents, no? As Lady Bracknell said: “To lose one daughter to ISIS, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like you brought them up that way.”
She’s stuck in a rancid ISIS prisoner camp, and England won’t take her back. Intelligence services believe that this fanatic (she says that’s all over) continues to represent a threat to the country.
Here’s her attorney on the subject:
What happened to Christian forgiveness? Does it not apply to a woman — and a dark-skinned one at that? It seems that different rules apply… Is it perhaps that some of us are more British than others of us? Shamima is of Bangladeshi descent, does that change her right to British nationality? I am tempted to think it does…
SOS says: Manifold are the ways one can speak up on behalf of one’s client. Admittedly, this attorney has a superjumbo problem on her hands, since her client not only renounced her British citizenship when she embraced Islamic State citizenship, she also committed vile acts (suicide vest sewing; slave-ownership; public support of mass murder in Europe and beheadings in the caliphate, etc.) and has expressed little remorse for her extensive blood-thirstiness. But SOS wonders whether lazily pushing certain buttons is the best one might do for Begum.
The lawyer’s weakest button is the Christian thing. Not sure she’s looked around at England lately, but it’s the land of empty churches. It rivals France for empty churches. If you’re going to go the Christian route, try getting her American citizenship. We’re the land of full churches…
But, you know, 135,000 slaughtered Assyrians later, I’m not sure you’re going to have much success in that direction either. Better drop the whole Christian thing.
That leaves sexism and racism. UD readers already know my take on the there there little woman you can come back cuz you’re a stupid harmless li’l thing approach to this problem. The sexism in the Begum story locates itself firmly in defenders who believe – claim to believe – that women are just too nice to be mean, and too dense to form serious, protracted, ideological commitments.
There are of course many light-skinned people among those that various countries have refused to repatriate. ISIS enjoyed a broad appeal.
Finally, yes: Begum is of Bangladeshi descent. And it is to Bangladesh that her lawyer should direct citizenship claims.
England really doesn’t want his daughter. She can exhaust every possible appeal, but it’s way unlikely that a British court will take her back. He’s living in Bangladesh where she can try claiming citizenship, and though Bangladesh doesn’t want this dangerous woman any more than England does, it just might let her in.
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The national security argument heard in court was that Begum had aligned with the Islamist group not only by travelling to Syria but by remaining until nearly the last days of the self-styled caliphate, thus showing a high degree of commitment to it.
Security sources have gone further, suggesting Begum was a member of al-Hisba, Isis’s morality police, during which time she carried a Kalashnikov and had a reputation for strictness. Begum also allegedly “stitched suicide bombers into explosive vests”. These are all claims the intelligence community stands by, arguing that women are as capable as men of actively participating in a violent regime.
Does one really have to argue this? Isn’t the correct word “noting,” rather than arguing? Do we have to drag little Irma Ilse Ida Grese and company out yet again? “Legal proceedings, [one of Begum’s lawyers argues], ‘fail to provide swift and practical answers to such acute human predicaments as this’.” You said it babe, and that means that just as there’s no way to confirm intelligence claims that she shouldered a big ol’ gun etc. etc., there’s also no way to confirm claims she warnt so godawful bad as all that … It IS a fucking predicament; but nowhere is it written that an entire citizenry has to shoulder the uncertainty inherent in returning atrociously depraved people to its midst.
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In a series of laws in the 00s, Labour allowed government to deprive anyone of citizenship, even if they had been born in Britain, if it was “conducive to the public good” to do so.
Poor Kenan Malik is deprived of his Right Wing Neo-fascists did it argument in yet another lame effort to urge that citizenship is a right that may under no circumstances be taken away. Labour signed off on the law allowing it to be taken away. “In 1870, MPs viewed citizenship as a right that should not be arbitrarily removed by the state.” Ah, the good old days. But of course no one is doing anything arbitrarily. It’s like saying, whenever a child is removed from grossly abusive parents, “parenthood is a right that should not be arbitrarily removed by the state.” I mean, there are justifiable circumstances in these matters, no?
The absence of even one opinion piece expressing … forget support — expressing even sympathy for Hoda Muthana’s current situation tells you that she will have to try another approach in her effort to get her tent in al-Roj swapped for a Caliphate Barbie bedroom in Hoover Alabama.
UD proposes that she write a book, which might entail a book tour. Hear me out.
This chick had at least three jihadi husbands, and basically her only function was to produce babies. As soon as one sperm depositor was shredded, another popped up.
It was like Oh Girl I want to be with you all of the time, all day and all of the night.
I think a large reading public would be interested in details of what happened when a jihadi bride carefully nudged aside a few inches of her burqa in order to facilitate entry while remaining obedient to God’s will for women. I think a lot of people would read a first-person account of sex among the faithful.
She can frame it any way she likes – it will only be more titillating if she paints herself as a kind of slave – as long as she provides her book agent with long flowing passages of passion. UD has already provided a title (see above); and if they package the whole thing as a cautionary tale for other young girls enticed by the prospect of living in the desert, under thick robes, as a fuck doll for Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi al-Qurayshi, Muthana could definitely go on tour in Europe and even maybe America, where she could press her case with the State Department more directly.
Who can say why countries are reluctant to have them back?
… who, as the debate on rematriation and repatriation rages, go by so many different names…
One otherwise sophisticated writer makes the kind of weird atavistic argument about both male and female ISIS you’d expect from Mussolini.
[Their] indelible marks of national origin tell us that the foreign fighters are, in the end, products of our own societies, and no more capable of being disowned than any other villains we produce, either for domestic mayhem or for export. They are Japanese and American and British. We inflicted them on the world. They are our responsibility, and we have to punish them …
Two problems here: The writer seems to have missed the last eighty years of thought about nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and postmodernism, and settled back comfortably into the most reactionary notions of … well, add ‘German’ to his curiously selective list of countries of origin and see how that feels…
And second – even if we could agree with the absurd proposition that breathing this or that air uncontrollably infuses one with originary territorial belonging, nothing in this position precludes disownership. Parents disown children; nations disown citizens. All those ISIS self-inductees who as their first revolutionary gesture burnt their passports disowned their countries. It’s hardly common, but it happens and isn’t that shattering a scandal. It merely means that free people realize they retain the right to expel others or to expel themselves from familial or political collectivities.
As Christian Barry and Luara Ferracioli write:
[Those] who have engaged in [certain extreme] forms of political violence … have themselves strongly communicated their disassociation from [any particular political] community through their actions. And if they are prepared to carry out such acts of serious political violence then they have no grounds for complaints if the community chooses to banish them. They have already, in effect, self-excluded.
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Come back! All will eventually be forgiven. is neither a rational nor dignified stance for a self-respecting country to take in regard to people who act assiduously to destroy not only it but the entire world. To hold that cultists who regard every manifestation of culture as a Semtex site should be acknowledged as our own is bizarre. If the legal and moral act of disownership means anything, it means we disown these people. And keep in mind that provisions for appeal exist: “U.S. law provides [Hoda] Muthana a mechanism to challenge the secretary of state’s conclusion that she is not a citizen, even from outside the United States.”
I think best practice would be our establishing, with other countries, in-place international tribunals to try these people, whose crimes after all are against humanity, not particular countries. As to where they’d serve their sentences: Some people argue that international prisons radicalize their prisoners yet more; but when we house these people in our own prisons, we make ourselves vulnerable to radicalization. “Even if convicted, they would threaten to radicalise others in prison.” “Convicted IS fighters will occupy a laudatory position within the prison estate, particularly among those convicted for domestic terrorism offences. They will also have an opportunity to use their experiences to radicalise those from the general inmate population and to educate them in any firearms or explosives proficiencies they may have acquired.”
And as to where these people would go once they served their sentence: I’m sure some version of ISIS will still be in place for them to join up with; or, if they want to assume citizenship of a country, they can make a case for their rehabilitation and therefore possibly be able to return to their erstwhile home country; or they can apply for citizenship elsewhere. (Hello, Macedonia!)
BBC
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Let the cat fights begin!