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.”
UD‘s had what to say about allowing female ISIS fighters (not all of the posts I just linked to are relevant; scroll around) to return to Europe and America. She certainly agrees that an entire life in a camp for ISIS prisoners in Syria doesn’t sound very nice, but allowing terrorists trained to kill Americans into America doesn’t sound very smart. Allowing people who held and abused slaves, who broadcast propaganda calling for the death of America, who were party to the beheading of people and the blowing up of buildings full of people all over Europe, etc., etc., to live among us is … I’d call it suicidal.
Bring them here and put them on trial? Convicting people who lived in a whirling bloody chaos, doing disgusting, undocumented things, for years and years, will be difficult, ja?
But after all she seems to be sorry for what she’s done and says she’s changed – why not believe her?
You go ahead and set up your own country where the population is willing to take risks like that.
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It can therefore be no surprise that, in the case of one of these women, one US court after another says unh-unh. (Here’s the latest failed appeal. The authors frame it as a sad event.) Hoda Muthana grew up in Alabama, daughter of a Yemeni diplomat, but left when the clarion call of the butchery of the innocent became too loud to ignore. She was a “prominent spokeswoman” for ISIS. Now that ISIS as a territorial thing is no longer an option, she’s ready for Option Two: the USA. She brings with her a son who, one presumes, she’s raising to be as dangerous as she is.
About that son – he had a Tunisian father, which might allow him to move to Tunisia as a citizen. (The father died long ago while in the process of trying to slaughter as many evil idolators as possible.) And it’s possible that Yemen – where Muthana would feel right at home, because Yemen still has slavery – would be willing to take her. Goes without saying that the kid would be far better off in Tunisia, but separating them would be an obvious cruelty.
This Vox piece is the best summary of Hoda Muthana’s situation I’ve seen; it predates a judge’s recent ruling that she is not in fact an American citizen. Certainly the details in my headline suggest that, along with requesting Yemeni citizenship (her father was born in Yemen), Muthana could approach Tunisia on behalf of herself and her son.
Furthermore, ISIS remains wealthy; it is certainly in a position to give Muthana and her son money to buy citizenship in any number of countries that trade citizenship for hard cash. She might ask private wealthy sympathizers (from the Gulf states?) to give her money; or a Go Fund Me page might be set up by family and friends for this purpose.
The only full-throated defense of welcoming Muthana back to the States that I’ve seen is Noah Feldman’s sober warning that revoking her citizenship will “set a terrible precedent for others whom the government might try to strip of their citizenship in the future.”
To which ol’ UD says: Well, there’s precedent and there’s precedent. How often, in fact, has the US government revoked a person’s citizenship? My sense is that it happens exceedingly rarely. And why? Because it’s exceedingly rare that a US citizen voluntarily leaves the country to become a terrorist in an organization at war with the US, an organization that carries out mass murder all over the world, and in its own territory tortures, takes slaves, and publicly beheads. As her first act abroad, Muthana filmed herself burning to ashes her despised passport; and as her second act she broadcast international propaganda calling for the extermination of Americans. This series of acts Feldman characterizes as “offending public sentiment.”
The next time a U.S. citizen abroad offends public sentiment, you can expect the government to start looking for ways to pull his or her citizenship. That prospect is worrying to say the least.
Yes, the next time some old hippie in France burns the American flag you can expect… Really? Muthana did much more than hurt our feelings; she tried to fucking kill us. UD‘s beloved Christopher Hitchens said it best: My enemies are the theocratic fascists… I want to destroy them. In the case of Hoda Muthana we want to keep her out of our country rather than destroy her.
Feldman points out that this desire originated with the politically liberal Obama presidency; his administration was the first to tell her no. In this extreme case of indeed virtually unprecedented degeneracy and obvious threat, public sentiment is not offended; it is united in being justifiably terrified and disgusted.
This is from the government’s response to Hoda Muthana’s father’s lawsuit.
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It’s kind of funny picturing her telling her husband Hey I need to try to renew my passport…
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Judge denies her request to expedite her case. So no meatloaf with the folks this Sunday.
As the Supreme Court today rejects without comment ISIS propagandist Hoda Muthana’s appeal of the decision to declare her not an American citizen, we do well to recall Christian Barry and Luara Ferracioli’s comment about self-exclusion.
And listen. It’s just Muthana’s bad luck that the political and judicial establishment of this country has its hands full, at the moment, with January 6 domestic terrorists. We can’t get rid of those assholes. Apparently we can rid ourselves of Muthana.
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Here are my Muthana posts.
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It is time for Muthana to do what she should have done long ago: Look for alternative citizenship. She has claims on Yemen through her parents. And slavery is still quite popular in Yemen, so as an ISIS slaveholder, Muthana would feel right at home. Through her son, she has claims on Tunisia. Several countries offer citizenship for a price, and they may be willing to take a chance on her. Letting her innocent son grow up in the squalid prisoner camp they now inhabit is pretty vile behavior; even if she cannot accompany him to, say, Tunisia (his father was Tunisian), she should, for his sake, allow him to go.
Through her philosophically committed, extreme, and persistent violence against the US and other democracies, Hoda Muthana has certainly destroyed her own life. No one can be surprised if a person this depraved decides to go ahead and ruin her child’s life too. But it would be nice if she decided not to.
It’s been an awfully sudden fall for senior Trump official Mina Chang, whose State Department page has just crashed and burned. (Background here.)
Those of us fortunate enough to have studied her original self-creation recall paragraph upon paragraph touting her Ivy League credentials, her fearless compassionate forays into the world’s worst places, and more valor medals than Field Marshal Zhukov.
So what if it was all staged?
Chang had portrayed [a] 2015 trip to Afghanistan as a humanitarian mission for her nonprofit, but a defense contractor footed the bill and no aid was delivered, according to documents from the company and a former employee.
After the Afghanistan trip, Chang posted photos of herself meeting a group of Afghan women in a room. In a video posted on her charity’s website, she refers to the photo and says the Afghan women are “in hiding” at a secret location.
“This is in Afghanistan, I am sitting with women in our program, they are living in hiding. I can only say they are right outside of the Kabul area,” Chang said in an interview posted on her nonprofit’s website.
But the women were not part of any program run by her charity, Linking the World. They were wives of local employees of the defense contractor that paid for her trip…
I’ll say this for her: The woman has balls unto the breach. Having been exposed as – in the words of Fielding Mellish’s jury – incredibly guilty, she lashes out, in a statement, at all of her enemies (she shares this enemies list, and of course the Fake It Til You Make It M.O., with her president). When you finish reading Hoda Muthana’s tell-all (see post below this one), you can turn to the book I’m sure Chang will write about the lurid upbringing that turned her into a liar.
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.
… has ruled that ISIS propagandist Hoda Muthana is not an American citizen and can’t come back here? The New York Times, which runs a Pietà image of her with her child, calls it a “surprise ruling,” but if you read this blog you’re not surprised. There’s reasonably compelling evidence, in this case, that as the daughter of a Yemeni diplomat she never held actual American citizenship.
[Judge Reggie] Walton expressed sympathy for [Muthana’s father], but he ruled that there was enough evidence that Hoda Muthana was born while her father still had diplomatic status…
Assuming she can obtain Yemeni citizenship, she will be much happier there, because, just like ISIS, they still have slaves in that country.
As a member in good standing of ISIS Hoda Muthana quite likely had a personal Yazidi slave. Wherever she ends up, she’s unlikely to know the pleasures of owning another human being again. Though she might try applying for citizenship in one of these countries.
Hoda Muthana to US gov’t: Off with your head!
… this response, by Human Rights Watch, to the Shamima Begum decision. (Put “Begum” in my search engine for background.)
The first mistake Yasmine Ahmed makes has nothing to do with her writing. It’s about timing. The British court threw out Begum’s appeal almost a week ago, and the news cycle on this latest rejection is basically over. I’ve got no idea why HRW waited so long to weigh in, but their outrage on Begum’s behalf is getting much less attention than it might have simply because responses to the decision have already happened.
Okay, so first sentence:
The United Kingdom’s highest court delivered a shocking blow to justice when it ruled that Shamima Begum, who was just 15 when she left for Syria to join the Islamic State (ISIS), could not return to Britain to challenge the government’s stripping of her citizenship.
Where to start? No one is shocked by this latest unanimous (shocking!) decision; it followed many other forms of rejection Begum has experienced since her citizenship was… stripped? Stripped is a wonderfully nasty word, so bravo Ahmed; but she might have mentioned that in becoming a citizen of the Islamic state Begum basically stripped herself of British citizenship. And when you consider that Britain has revoked the citizenship of several other ISIS enthusiasts, things become even less shocking.
The shocking thing in Ahmed’s sentence is that a fifteen year old girl, excited by watching Youtubes of ISIS beheadings, secretly left England for a life of Yazidi slave-owning, suicide vest-sewing, and ISIS brood mare sex. That. Is. Far. Out.
Another sentence:
With the Supreme Court’s blessing, the UK government has left Begum de-facto stateless and prevented her from effectively challenging the decision that did so. If Begum did commit crimes during her time with ISIS, she should be brought home and given a fair trial.
Begum’s mother is from Bangladesh, but there’s no indication she has attempted to get citizenship there. I don’t know why she hasn’t. She is not stateless until she finds out whether Bangladesh – which, according to some legal experts, is compelled to take her – will take her.
If Begum did commit crimes there is little chance a court will be able to find that out. Do you think ISIS kept records of her “crimes”? The slaves and beheadees who might have testified against her are dead or scattered. She’ll be released back to the community due to lack of evidence.
To turn [our] back on [people like Begum] is not only a legal and moral aberration, but a long-term security risk.
Maybe. Maybe. But here’s one thing we know: As long as dangerous people like Shamima Begum are in prison camps, they’re not free to kill us. It’s sheer sexism to cluckcluckcluck about what a poor misguided babe she is. Why do feminists like Ahmed deny women like Begum ideological agency? She herself has said repeatedly that the decision to join ISIS was hers alone. She spent years as a serious adherent. Grotesque as it is for normal people to imagine commanded sex with one stranger after another for the sake of the caliphate (her “husbands” kept dying in combat), it seems not to have been the slightest bit extraordinary to Begum. She was – and probably still is – a twisted, risky person.
I’m perfectly willing to listen to her argue that she has undergone radical moral reform; but that argument should be broadcast from Bangladesh.
… does it have to be this dumb?
Charles Swift, Muthana’s lawyer … [said the withdrawal of her citizenship is] “incredibly terrifying. .. If they can do this to Hoda, they can do it to anyone.”
Yes! Beware! For any of us could fall in love with these men and their cause:
Research centres such as the one I lead at King’s College London (the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation) archived millions of pieces of output from foreign fighters who cheered attacks in the West. When one occurred, they agitated for more. They celebrated the beheadings of Western hostages such as the American journalist James Foley. His death followed months of agonising torture, which included beatings and waterboarding. Foreign fighters mocked and belittled the sexual slavery of Yazidi women, the detention of their children, and murder of their menfolk.
Hoda Is Us!
… 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!)
Show me the way to go home
I’m ISIS and I want to go to bed
And after all Islamic-ally you know
It’s wonderful to cut off people’s heads
I’m a Brit and she’s from Alabam
We find ourselves in something of a jam
So listen while we sing our little song
Show me the way to go home.