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Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman  

April 2010

What Can These Women Be Thinking?


Register Pajaronian
April 20, 2010

Since 1985, more than 250 women, Tamil, Chechen, Indian, and Muslim, have become suicide bombers.

An unsettling new trend is emerging: conversion of Western women to Islam and their recruitment into Islam’s most murderous cults. How can such a misogynistic movement seduce women?

Recently two American women were picked up on terror charges: one the petite blonde known as “Jihad Jane” and the other, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez. What’s even worse is that there are more in the pipeline.

Colleen LaRose, whose Internet name is “Jihad Jane,” converted to Islam and acted as a screener and recruiter for assassins to murder a Swedish cartoonist who “offended Islam.” She was trying to find others like herself—preferably women who would not easily be identified as Muslim—to carry out such missions. Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, a 31-year-old American (a blonde like LaRose), was arrested in Ireland for conspiring to murder the same cartoonist. What might these women have in common?

Such women are troubled, not well educated (often school dropouts), and would be called losers in our society—but get attention and the illusion of affection from Islamic radicals. The militants need such women, and will do anything to recruit them. LaRose was so secretive about her activities that even her last live-in boyfriend (she was married and divorced several times) was unaware of what she was doing. She also had a history of alcohol abuse, and her former boyfriend noted that she was not very bright.

Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, according to her distraught mother, was also married three times—as a teenager, then to an illegal Mexican immigrant who fathered her child and was caught and deported, and now to an Algerian Muslim she met on line. She has taken her six-year-old child with her to Ireland, and her mother says that the child is being radicalized to hate Christians and to become a “good Muslim.”

Most American or European women who convert to Islam do so out of love and marriage to a Muslim. They generally have little idea of what their lives would be in their husband’s homeland. Even if they did, however, they delude themselves that their case would be different—and that loving husband would never let them (or their children) be so abused.

Sometimes even education does not matter. Easier to identify and harder to explain are such women as a Pakistani immigrant, Aafia Siddiqui, an MIT and Brandeis-educated scientist who lived for years in Boston, but returned to Pakistan. There she became a killer of Americans in Afghanistan (convicted in a NY court).

Two Chechen women served as suicide bombers (March 30) in the Moscow subways at rush hour. This is looking your victims in the eye before murdering them. One of these was a baby-faced 17-year-old who had been kidnapped at 16 and married to her terrorist kidnapper. When he was killed, the militants gave her the choice of becoming a suicide bomber. Some choice.

These women are oblivious (or know too well) how militant Islam regards them when they are no longer useful to the movement. The latest cynical example, cited by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Joel Brinkley, is Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti, who banned celebrating children’s birthdays. How convenient not to know how old a child is before forcing her into marriage. And how loving are parents who marry off little girls? Last year, a Saudi judge refused to grant an 8-year-old a divorce, just ordering the husband not to have sex with her (again) until she reached puberty. How can a Western woman convert live with that?

In Iran, by Islamic law, girls can be married off as young as 9 and boys at 14. But Iranian human-rights activists have succeeded in getting the law changed to 13 and 15 (small change). But who is enforcing even this law?

As long as women are willing to be “useful idiots” for Militant Islam, they will continue to be recruited, seduced, and (if they are from traditional Muslim families) blackmailed into being cannon fodder for this wretched movement.

665 words
Laina Farhat-Holzman is a writer, lecturer, and historian. You may contact her at Lfarhat102@aol.com or www.globalthink.net.

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