I miss my mum. I know that sounds a bit toddler-ish… Even if I could just see my mum… I would like just a phone call, I don’t know if Britain can do that for me here, but I’d like just a phone call to my mum – it’s been two years. If I could make a request. I’m probably not in a position to make requests. That’s it all, really. I miss my mum.

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.]

*****************

[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.

Hoda Muthana to US gov’t: Off with your head!

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.

… for a quieter time, when the only thing they were famous for was massive welfare fraud.

Wigged out, baby.

Shades of James Tracy, Mike Leach, and other campus conspiracists.

Rather than simply acknowledging the Sandusky/Nyang’oro Principle at our most sports-obsessed schools – university administrators can’t and won’t control anything having to do with big-ticket athletics – Jim Jordan and his fellow conspiracists deny the fucking obvious and the obvious fucking at one more degenerate American university sports program.

Called to account for what happened at Ohio State, they reach way, way outside the orbit of anyone’s moral responsibility.

Indeed the Deadspin writer I quote in my headline is right: Eventually Jordan and Louie Gohmert and company will determine that like the “dead” “kids” of Sandy Hook and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, their accusers from the wrestling team are all crisis actors.

UD‘s beloved DeLillo stars in the New Yorker’s account of the YouTube killings.

There will be a temptation to read the attack as a dark parable of the attention economy — the story of someone so hungry for views that she took a handgun to those who, in her belief, had limited them. But the truer story is that going berserk with guns has become a way of American life.

Correct. Guns are now the way America’s berserk turn down the bed and turn out the lights.

[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.

West Virginia has been the hardest hit.

The proximate responsibility for this grotesque overprescription of opioid painkillers lies with West Virginia’s doctors. But no conscientious wholesaler could look at how many painkillers they were shipping to low-population areas of the state — and at how many people were dying from overdoses in those areas — and not realize that they were enabling a deadly epidemic.

Bernie’s calling for an investigation.

But it’s good. It’s all good. The worst of the wholesalers – McKesson – has a CEO who sits on the distinguished board of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, shaping the political thinking of America’s best and brightest. The same man will soon be lecturing us on health care policy. Arizona State University has bestowed its Executive of the Year award on him.

All of this cuz, you know, he made sooooooo much money.

What’s his corporation’s secret? Here ’tis:

[Y]ou can make a lot of money selling dope to addicts.

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Yes, sadly, addicts die. You just advertise for more.

We manage to stick them occasionally for insider trading.

FORMER GOLDMAN SACHS DIRECTOR [RAJAT GUPTA] COMPLETES PRISON SENTENCE

….

But the big boys at Goldman seem to have some sort of immunity.

…. ROBERT RUBIN WAS TARGETED FOR DOJ INVESTIGATION BY FINANCIAL CRISIS COMMISSION

Rajat Gupta’s Goldman Sachs crony was targeted… But nothing happened. Strangely, it didn’t go anywhere.

And you wonder why ol’ Bern is doing so well.

Things have taken a sinister turn at Boston College, where despite raking in huge yearly sums simply by being in a big-time league, the entire university, starting with its president, is suffering from ACCedia – the dark night of the soul in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Unlike its sister affliction, acedia, which refers to a “gradual indifference to the faith,” ACCedia involves a gradual indifference to being a fan. The money’s still coming in, the games are still being staged, but no one cares, and almost no one shows up in the stands.

Allow UD to draw from her years of experience writing about university football and basketball in order to suggest some reasons for this strange turn of events.

The big glaring reason is this one: You’re either willing to give your full soul over to football, or you are not. You’re either fully committed to your completion percentage, or you are not. You’re either willing to spend most of your school’s money on athletics, admit academically unqualified players, and wrest all control over sports decisions from the school’s president, or you are not. Boston College languishes in a limbo of less than thorough football fervency.

To be sure, BC is doing some things right: It has appointed as the highest-paid person at a Catholic college a man whose every other word, on national television, is fuck. “[The football coach’s] profane sideline behavior [was] most damaging [during] a nationally televised loss to Notre Dame at Fenway Park, first when a camera focused on Addazio shouting the F-word, then when he received an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty for berating the officials.” You want a Christian role model at the very top, a signal lesson in how to behave if you want to earn the lord’s rewards, and Steve Addazio fits the bill.

And you want to schedule hard-hitting games.

In one of BC’s most embarrassing episodes last season, the Eagles defeated a stunningly inferior team from Howard University, 76-0, the game shortened by 10 minutes because of the mismatch.

That’s the kind of gladiatorial combat that puts butts in seats. Another way Addazio is earning his money.

But utter spiritual alignment with football does not end here. “God does not want you for a fair-weather friend,” as Marilla says to Anne at Green Gables farm, and the Boston College community has not yet learned this lesson. Being a fan is not merely about cheering on wins; it is about cheering on losses as well. If you cannot maintain enthusiastic faith in a team that loses most of its games, you are demonstrating a fundamental incapacity to perceive the divinity of sport.

The solution must begin in the soul – the collective soul of Boston College. UD suspects, for instance, an insufficiency of gridiron liturgy during public worship at BC. At every possible point during the mass and other sacred occasions, football (and basketball, if there’s time) should be invoked. BC has much to learn from Notre Dame here. And from Florida State.

… raging out of control.

Mark Cuban has thrown quite a missile into the stupidhappy world of American football. He predicts the greedy NFL, which seems to be moving toward 24/7 televised football games (and what a noble physical spectacle football is; one player, anticipating yet another weekday game being added, says that for him it would be like “getting in a car wreck Sunday then getting hit by a train Thursday.”), will implode in ten years via saturation bombing.

And what (ahem!) are the implications of this possibility for American universities – many of whom are already largely given over, financially and academically, to the game? I mean, in all the responses to Cuban’s argument, no one mentions that it’s not only national saturation via professional football. Most of the people staring at NFL games are also staring at university games… SO much football, my fellow Americans…

Before UD offers an analysis of the higher ed implications of Cuban’s thing, she reminds you that attendance at university games (as well as professional) is down across the country and will probably decline more over the next few years. Even the state god of Alabama has warned the little people they’d better start showing up at games (and staying at games – these university things are televised too, and it looks pathetic when after the first half the stands are empty) or else. Add to this picture continuing huge expenditures for bigger stadiums (Take the University of New Hampshire for a sample of the sort of thinking university administrators are doing on this issue. Its spokesperson explains that “it attracts about 750 students to [its current stadium], which seats about 6,500 but would grow to 10,000 under the new plan. UNH said a new stadium would attract more students to games and to the university as a whole.”), continued high-profile team criminality (Cuban talks about this as a factor in the decline of NFL too), continued reputational damage due to cheating scandals, etc.

Okay, so what should universities do at this point, if Cuban is in any way correct in his description of the future of the game?

If the NFL implodes, someone’s gonna have to be there to pick up the shards of what’s left. When American public opinion is so disgusted with the corruption and greed of professional football that people abandon it, there sits the sweet innocent university, ready to give our people the true unadulterated game again! Football played by uncompensated scholars who play for the love of the game… Who play whenever their academic schedules permit… It’s inspiring, it’s about clean-living, it’s what this country very badly needs. It’s a winner.

The faculty of Yeshiva University, through all these years of scandal almost entirely moribund, begins to stir.

UD has no idea why they let shady trustees and their useful tool president fuck over the school for so long.

It’s too late, in any case, to avert disaster. UD recommends faculty stop calling themselves professors and start moving the word facilitator around on their tongues. It’s University of Phoenix time.

… that the NCAA will be looking to hire around ten thousand lawyers in the next couple of decades. Cases like these are going to be a steady source of employment.

UD is pleased to see this language becoming boilerplate in writing about Ruth Simmons, whose approval of obscene compensation for people like Lloyd Blankfein will follow her all the days of her life. As Brown University’s new president is named, Simmons will rightly be remembered primarily in this way.