What is up with these 'Jihad Janes'?

Politics International Politics
1

aside from a pretty cool nickname (Jihad Jane :slight_smile: )

do you think there are a lot of these birds fluttering about?

this is the second one in a few short days.

kind of interesting (please note story was pulled from Foxnews.com so there is likely to be some hyperbole).

foxnews.com/story/0,2933,589147,00.html

[quote] Last Easter, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, a 31-year-old mom with a $30,000-a-year job as a medical assistant, announced to her family that she had converted to Islam. A few months later, she began posting to Facebook forums whose headings included “STOP caLLing MUSLIMS TERRORISTS!”

On Sept. 11, she suddenly left Leadville, Colo., a small town in the Rocky Mountains, with her 6-year-old son for Denver, then for New York, to meet and marry an Algerian man she connected with online, her family says. Paulin-Ramirez, who is 5-foot-11 and blonde, phoned her mother and stepfather in Leadville, providing them with an address in Waterford, Ireland, they say.

Now, she is in the custody of the Irish police, along with three other individuals, arrested as part of an investigation into a conspiracy to commit murder, according to officials familiar with the case. The nature of the authorities’ suspicions about Paulin-Ramirez couldn’t be determined on Friday.

Irish authorities this week announced the arrest of seven Muslims in the alleged plot, only identifying them as three Algerians, a Libyan, a Palestinian, a Croatian and an American woman married to one of the Algerians.

Irish police said Saturday three Muslims arrested in the case were freed without charge, but three men and an American woman remain in custody.[/quote]

2

[quote=“Deuce Dropper”][quote] she began posting to Facebook forums whose headings included “STOP caLLing MUSLIMS TERRORISTS!”

Now, she is in the custody of the Irish police, along with three other individuals, arrested as part of an investigation into a conspiracy to commit murder, according to officials familiar with the case. The nature of the authorities’ suspicions about Paulin-Ramirez couldn’t be determined on Friday.[/quote][/quote]

Kookoo… kookoo… kookoo…

3

They’re definitely lacking something. I read the first one got pregnant and dropped out of school at 16, then lived with a convicted felon. I suspect it gives them a feeling of belonging and purpose–like a cult.

4

Anyone else but foxnews to quote on this, dd? I have an allergic reaction to their “news” services that includes explosive diarrhea and projectile vomiting.

5

Will the Boston Globe do?

Jihad Jane: YouTube’s green-eyed monster

6

Yea, FOX news is rubbish, but this story has been in real news sources. Apparently there’s at least 1 blond-haired, American born woman without ancestors from the middle east who began communicating with extremist muslim wackos online and wanted to kill a Swedish cartoonist for mocking their religion, or something like that. I haven’t read about the second such person, but I don’t doubt that one or more others of that ilk exists. I don’t think it’s a phenomenon though. I think it’s just a few screwed up, lonely individuals with troubled upbringings and a need to belong to a group with fellow teammembers and purpose, as I mentioned above, and events in their lives somehow, by chance, led them to al quaida (as opposed to scientology, or falun dafa, or hare krishna, or southern baptist, or the army, or a gang, or athletics, or whatever else they could have turned to for such reasons) and it’s so damned odd and peculiar that now they’re a big news story. Poor, screwed up crazy misfits. Not saying they deserve any mercy if they committed serious crimes. Just saying it seems to me they probably turned to that for some of the same reasons others turn to all those other groups I mentioned.

7

Blonde womenfolk wants to murder Swedish artists.

This is the end of the world. As bad as it gets.

:astonished:

8

My guess would be that when you have at least half a billion “western women” in the US and Europe (not to mention S America if you’re counting them), the odds are you’ll have at least a thousand who fall into that category, guess the real question is, how many of them have taken action on those beliefs? Even if the answer if 5%, there are still at least 50 Jihad Janes still out there.

9

So it’s true about blonds, the thing that people say they are … :whistle: just saying … :ponder:

10

Is it:

11

Not for Jihad Jane #2. She was released by the Irish authorities along with several of the others who had been arrested in the matter. But her story is not surprising. All these sad and lonely people, different, other, misfits, children of divorce, victims of violence and/or neglect, searching for acceptance and meaning. It’s little wonder many of them turn to such nutty groups. As I said before, some might choose scientology or hare krishna or catholicism, some choose street gangs or muslim extremism. The results are different, but their reasons are pretty much the same.

[quote]For the parents of Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, the news late Saturday that Irish police had released their daughter from custody did little to alleviate the question of how she may have become involved with suspects in a plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist targeted by Islamic radicals.

When word of her release reached this mountain town, Paulin-Ramirez’s stepfather, George Mott, said it was “both good news and bad news.”

Mott and his wife, Christine, said they still could not reach their daughter and feared that she and her 6-year-old son, Christian, may still be involved with radical Islamists she had followed to Ireland last year.

Earlier Saturday, the Motts had described their daughter, a convert to Islam, as a lonely woman looking for acceptance. They were trying to explain how she became linked to a number of suspects arrested in an alleged plot to kill cartoonist Lars Vilks, whose 2007 drawing of the prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog outraged many Muslims. . .

But what is clear, according to her parents, is that she long struggled to fit in. She had a hard time making friends, they said, but became even more isolated when she moved from Denver to this isolated, 10,000-foot-high town two years ago.

After several months, she found another, virtual community, one of Islamic extremists with whom she could trade messages via Facebook and MySpace. [color=#FF0000]Always fascinated by foreign cultures, Paulin-Ramirez – who had previously been married to three Mexican men – mounted an image of a turbaned Arab on her computer as a screen-saver. She donned a hijab.

Her parents hoped the fascination was just an attempt to be noticed[/color]. “It was killing her – she couldn’t get a single person to come up to her,” George Mott said. That changed after her conversion.

“You’re blond-haired, blue-eyed and now you’re Muslim,” he said. "Everybody is going to want to know why. . . .

"She doesn’t have the sense God gave a goose. She’s book-smart and common-sense-dumb," said Christine Mott as reporters filed in and out of her house. “If she’d done something dumb like get online and marry some murderer in prison, that wouldn’t surprise me. . . . She wanted someone to love her.” . . .

“Most of these people were self-radicalized,” Jenkins said. "These are individuals who are seeking. It isn’t about a religious journey. Rather, it’s people who are discontented and who get swept up in an ideology, the invention of a new persona, and the prospect of adventure."

Paulin-Ramirez was born in a Kansas City suburb, where her parents divorced while she was young. She suffered from a hearing disorder and was a frequent target of bullies.

Her first marriage ended after her husband beat her, her mother said. Her second husband, father to Christian, was an illegal immigrant and deported. A third husband, also in the country illegally, was also deported, the Motts said. . . .

One day she made a surprise announcement: She was converting to Islam.

She later said that her Pakistani correspondent wanted her help in coming to the U.S. to attend flight school. “That raised some red flags,” her mother said.

Then another man entered her online world, a Muslim from North Africa. “She spent every waking moment she wasn’t working on the computer talking to him,” Christine Mott said.

Both of the Motts argued with her, trying to persuade her to rethink her new allegiances. Among the people she chatted with online, they said, was Colleen R. LaRose, known as “JihadJane,” a Pennsylvanian who was charged last year with helping extremists target Vilks. . . [/quote]

articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/14 … -2010mar14

12

[quote=“Mother Theresa”] All these sad and lonely people, different, other, misfits, children of divorce, victims of violence and/or neglect, searching for acceptance and meaning. It’s little wonder many of them turn to such nutty groups. As I said before, some might choose scientology or hare krishna or catholicism, some choose street gangs or muslim extremism. The results are different, but their reasons are pretty much the same.

[/quote]

For me it’s posting on a cynical expat forum and extreme blogging.

13

[quote=“Mother Theresa”][But her story is not surprising. All these sad and lonely people, different, other, misfits, children of divorce, victims of violence and/or neglect, searching for acceptance and meaning. It’s little wonder many of them turn to such nutty groups. As I said before, some might choose scientology or hare krishna or catholicism, some choose street gangs or muslim extremism. The results are different, but their reasons are pretty much the same.

[/quote]

I think that’s it in a nutshell. Muslim’s happen to be the boogeymen of current times so they get the press, but it’s no different to joining any other sect, cult or gang. Actually, come to think of it, there’s probably less chance of a Muslim “terrorist” group committing harm than there is a street gang.

14

[quote=“cfimages”][quote=“Mother Theresa”][But her story is not surprising. All these sad and lonely people, different, other, misfits, children of divorce, victims of violence and/or neglect, searching for acceptance and meaning. It’s little wonder many of them turn to such nutty groups. As I said before, some might choose scientology or hare krishna or catholicism, some choose street gangs or muslim extremism. The results are different, but their reasons are pretty much the same.

[/quote]

I think that’s it in a nutshell. Muslim’s happen to be the boogeymen of current times so they get the press, but it’s no different to joining any other sect, cult or gang. Actually, come to think of it, there’s probably less chance of a Muslim “terrorist” group committing harm than there is a street gang.[/quote]

Muslims may indeed be the boogeymen of current times, especially for me, but it is possible and logical to think that all sects, cults or gangs are in the least operating from a philosophical baseline of being batshit crazy (since honestly, if I came out preaching Odin and Ragnarok, everyone would rightly think I were off my chops, and yet we collectively shrug our shoulders when someone comes out with any of the creation myths or revelatory stories of any major religion) and quite possibly being dangerous to boot.

Still, there are two differences. Firstly, the damage done by a bad Hare Krishna is that you get a bad vegetarian meal, ranging from an unappetising culinary experience to perhaps unintentional food poisoning. The resulting incidents of death must be virtually zero, if not actually zero. So, whilst I think they’re a bunch of fucking weirdos, they’re a bunch of harmless fucking weirdos.

Secondly, I believe you may be incorrect about the lesser chances of a Muslim terrorist group committing harm than a street gang causing harm for two reasons. Firstly, your average street gang concerns itself with fairly banal and small-scale operations because your average street gang is composed of fairly banal and small-time thinkers fighting over fairly banal and small-scale operations. Their anti-social behaviour is generally driven by less than ideological motives, and so is probably a lot easier to predict and detect, and thus, avoid. Nobody flies huge planes into buildings as part of a turf war, despite the best efforts of some of those grandiose crazies in Mexico. By and large, you have to be stupid and/or reckless to get into trouble with your average gang by wandering into their territory. Someone on an ideological bent comes to you though. Secondly, even accepting that gang members on an individual basis are more likely to cause all sorts of harm (which may or may not be true), it still has a fairly localised and minor effect given the size of membership of such organisations. By virtue of the primary (actively harmful) and secondary (general believers) membership size of cults, most notably Islam with something in the order of 1.4 billion adherents, they are many multiples more dangerous even if a relatively small percentage of their population is actively harmful. To put this in perspective, if a gang were to have 100 members (which would probably make it a fairly large gang), that would, by comparison constitute only 0.000007142% of Muslims in the world. Given their weird set of beliefs, that if held by people in much smaller numbers would probably constitute something akin to strong signs of schizophrenia (or would prompt most members of the general population to make circling motions with one finger beside their heads when the afore-mentioned group was mentioned – for me, it’s all the same – Heaven’s Gate followers, Muslims, Catholics, any of the God Squad and their ilk are all fucking weirdos living in an alternate reality, the difference is simply in the numbers), I wouldn’t like my chances of meeting the general population, let alone those who held such strange beliefs and assuming only 0.000007142% were dangerous. Even if we only just counted members of various dangerous Islamic groups such as Hamas or JI (rather than the extended circle of all those who grant them support of a material, intelligence or tacit nature), I still venture that they’d outnumber all the non-religious gangs in terms of membership. In other words, absolute terms are far more important than nominal terms simply because of the sheer scale involved.

15

[quote=“GuyInTaiwan”][quote=“cfimages”][quote=“Mother Theresa”][But her story is not surprising. All these sad and lonely people, different, other, misfits, children of divorce, victims of violence and/or neglect, searching for acceptance and meaning. It’s little wonder many of them turn to such nutty groups. As I said before, some might choose scientology or hare krishna or catholicism, some choose street gangs or muslim extremism. The results are different, but their reasons are pretty much the same.

[/quote]

I think that’s it in a nutshell. Muslim’s happen to be the boogeymen of current times so they get the press, but it’s no different to joining any other sect, cult or gang. Actually, come to think of it, there’s probably less chance of a Muslim “terrorist” group committing harm than there is a street gang.[/quote]

Muslims may indeed be the boogeymen of current times, especially for me, but it is possible and logical to think that all sects, cults or gangs are in the least operating from a philosophical baseline of being batshit crazy (since honestly, if I came out preaching Odin and Ragnarok, everyone would rightly think I were off my chops, and yet we collectively shrug our shoulders when someone comes out with any of the creation myths or revelatory stories of any major religion) and quite possibly being dangerous to boot.

Still, there are two differences. Firstly, the damage done by a bad Hare Krishna is that you get a bad vegetarian meal, ranging from an unappetising culinary experience to perhaps unintentional food poisoning. The resulting incidents of death must be virtually zero, if not actually zero. So, whilst I think they’re a bunch of fucking weirdos, they’re a bunch of harmless fucking weirdos.[/quote]

Yes but it’s not the full picture. Hare Krishnas are just one school/branch of Hinduism, whereas you’re equating it with all Muslims. Not the same. Better to equate the Hare Krishnas with something like the Mevlevi Order (Whirling Dervishes) and the terrorists with something like Shiv Sena.

[quote]

Secondly, I believe you may be incorrect about the lesser chances of a Muslim terrorist group committing harm than a street gang causing harm for two reasons. Firstly, your average street gang concerns itself with fairly banal and small-scale operations because your average street gang is composed of fairly banal and small-time thinkers fighting over fairly banal and small-scale operations. Their anti-social behaviour is generally driven by less than ideological motives, and so is probably a lot easier to predict and detect, and thus, avoid. Nobody flies huge planes into buildings as part of a turf war, despite the best efforts of some of those grandiose crazies in Mexico. By and large, you have to be stupid and/or reckless to get into trouble with your average gang by wandering into their territory. Someone on an ideological bent comes to you though. Secondly, even accepting that gang members on an individual basis are more likely to cause all sorts of harm (which may or may not be true), it still has a fairly localised and minor effect given the size of membership of such organisations. By virtue of the primary (actively harmful) and secondary (general believers) membership size of cults, most notably Islam with something in the order of 1.4 billion adherents, they are many multiples more dangerous even if a relatively small percentage of their population is actively harmful. To put this in perspective, if a gang were to have 100 members (which would probably make it a fairly large gang), that would, by comparison constitute only 0.000007142% of Muslims in the world. Given their weird set of beliefs, that if held by people in much smaller numbers would probably constitute something akin to strong signs of schizophrenia (or would prompt most members of the general population to make circling motions with one finger beside their heads when the afore-mentioned group was mentioned – for me, it’s all the same – Heaven’s Gate followers, Muslims, Catholics, any of the God Squad and their ilk are all fucking weirdos living in an alternate reality, the difference is simply in the numbers), I wouldn’t like my chances of meeting the general population, let alone those who held such strange beliefs and assuming only 0.000007142% were dangerous. Even if we only just counted members of various dangerous Islamic groups such as Hamas or JI (rather than the extended circle of all those who grant them support of a material, intelligence or tacit nature), I still venture that they’d outnumber all the non-religious gangs in terms of membership. In other words, absolute terms are far more important than nominal terms simply because of the sheer scale involved.[/quote]

Again, you’re equating all Muslims with terrorists, conveniently overlooking the fact that 99% of them have nothing to do with the terrorist movements. It’s no different than saying all black men are members of drug gangs, or all Italians are in the Mafia.

16

Whoa there, Nellie. Not so fast. Maybe to you they’re a bunch of dhal munching drum beating peaceniks, but that’s not the way the rest of the world sees them. They have a long association with right wing Hindu violence in India and child abuse in the US and elsewhere. Hare that!

HG

17

HGC: Well, in that case (I’ll have to look into it more), they would be more than just weird. They’d be dangerous and weird. I may stand corrected.

cfimages: Any group that allows a dangerous and criminal element to prosper in its midst is open to condemnation in my mind. If poor black communities allow gangs to prosper, then there is a deeper problem in such communities. If Italian communities allow/have allowed the mafia to prosper then there is a deeper problem in such communities. If people in Northern Ireland allowed their communities to be hijacked by such people, then there was a deeper problem in the broader community. People make out like Hamas or Al Qaeda or JI or any other of these wackos operate in a vacuum. They receive widespread tacit (if not material) support from the local communities in which they operate and also from the wider Islamic world. If they really had to survive on their own (without material or moral support – because I’m not claiming that every Muslim is a terrorist, that much is rather obvious), they would be relatively easy to root out and destroy.

There are people with weird ideas everywhere in the world, and some of them do try to act upon such ideas, but one of the many differences between different parts of the world is the degree to which institutions and the general populace will tolerate, let alone encourage, such people. There is a very real difference in kind between Sweden and Saudi Arabia.

18

GiT - Generalizing here coz I’m tired and it’s been a long day, but I’d say that pretty much every group in every society has some form of criminal element that prospers to some extent. Blaming all Muslims for terrorism, or all low-income black communities for street gangs is about as useful as blaming all business people for the acts of white-collar criminals, or all Americans for the invasions of Afghanistan & Iraq.

19

cfimages: Fine, but then it should come as very little surprise when executives take bailout money, pay themselves big fat bonuses and nothing much changes. Same with any other group. No one wants to play the blame game, so nothing changes. If no one wants to acknowledge and cut out a cancer, then what can we say? In the case of white collar crime, I think it’s not just a problem with the broader business community, but with the general level of apathy within the broader civic sphere. Taking the U.S. as an example, it seems to me that both the Democrats and the Republicans are very much in the pockets of big business, and lots of people like to complain about that, yet they keep re-electing the same goons (sometimes just with a different face or party affiliation). People do get the governments and societies they deserve. If they’re not willing to stand up and say they don’t want these creeps holding their communities or countries hostage, then they deserve all they get, including being regarded by others as the boogeyman.

Also, saying “I’d say that pretty much every group in every society has some form of criminal element that prospers to some extent” conveniently misses the point that different independent organisations actually do rate countries (and presumably, they could do this between groups within countries also) on such things as rule of law, corruption, etc., which is why I wrote that Sweden and Saudi Arabia are quite different. I could be fairly sure that if I wanted to do a whole lot of different transactions in northern Europe, the exact same rules would apply to me as applied to the last person who tried to do the same things, or if there were different conditions, these would be clearly defined, freely available, and open to independent scrutiny. Likewise, I could be sure that I would not have to pay a bribe to the bureaucrat behind the counter in order to accomplish such things. Put me in many other parts of the world, and my faith in the process would be greatly reduced, for obvious reasons. So no, I don’t agree with your premise. Corruption and organised crime are pretty well ways of life for large parts of the world, but for some other parts of the world, they’re virtually non-issues, and this in turn helps to explain a whole lot of other differences, such as prosperity levels, political stability, violence, etc.

20

Yup, Hare Krishnas are not cool, as an organisation. You’d probably be fine with the food, though. The footsoldiers you meet in Britain are usually good people, though.