There has been much argument over the Albanese government’s decision to secretly smuggle “ISIS brides” into Australia — and more-or-less turn them loose in suburbs. Often suburbs where a high proportion of their former victims have settled.
Supporters argue that the jihadis shouldn’t be punished for making bad choices as teenagers. But there’s bad choices and bad choices: shoplifting a Playboy from the local newsagent is a bad choice. Joining a murderous jihad army bent on destroying the West, because you liked their beheading videos, is quite another thing entirely.
Then there’s the argument that Australia owes some sort of “duty”. It seems more than a little convenient that people who explicitly spurned Australia are suddenly begging it for help.
More pertinently, Australia also owes a duty to its people who never deserted it: a duty to keep them safe.
Just what sort of people is Anthony Albanese turning loose in Australia’s suburbs? People like this.
An American woman nicknamed the “Empress of Isis” has been sentenced to 20 years in prison in the US, after her own children urged the judge to impose the maximum sentence.
Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, from Kansas, admitted to enlisting and training over 100 women and girls as young as 10 as leader of Islamic State’s all-female Khatiba Nusaybah, teaching them how to use automatic weapons and detonate grenades and suicide belts.
What a charmer.
The Fluke-Ekren case is one of the most horrific IS trials to be heard in a Western court.
Her status as a US-born woman who rose to leadership status in the Islamic State makes her story unique among terror cases.
Like so many jihadis, far from “oppressed”, she was uniquely privileged.
She had a trouble-free childhood, growing up on an 80-acre farm and attending an elite private school. After leaving her first husband, Fluke-Ekren attended the University of Kansas, where she married a fellow student named Volkan Ekren and converted from Christianity to Islam.
They had five children together and adopted another after the child’s parents were killed as suicide bombers in Syria.
They blow up so quickly, these days.
Disillusioned with Libyan militant group Ansar al-Sharia, which apparently was not violent enough, she forced her family to move to Syria in early 2013 […]
Even within the Islamic State, people who knew Fluke-Ekren described her radicalisation as “off the charts” and other terrorist groups refused her plans to form a female battalion until she finally found a taker in the Islamic State.
Fluke Ekren “in effect became the empress of Isis,” said [US Attorney Raj Parekh] at sentencing. “She brainwashed young girls and trained them to kill,” he said. “Fluke-Ekren’s actions “added a new dimension to the darkest side of humanity”.
Telegraph
This is a not unusual phenomenon: since at least the days of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, it’s been observed that women involved in terror are often as or more violent than the men. Women certainly made up an unusually high proportion of ISIS recruits, flocking from around the world to join a group whose main recruiting tool was graphic videos of the most horrific violence.
In fact, the narrative we are being fed, of “ISIS brides” as unwilling, manipulated victims of their husbands, is largely false. According to counter-terrorism researcher Nikita Malik, “in fact, many of them had done due diligence before making their decisions: communicating with those already in Islamic State, reading material online, and even leaving letters for their families […] justifying their decisions”.
According to Indonesia’s Kompas newspaper, “Women have repeatedly demonstrated that they participate in violent jihad with their own missions and aims …when combatants who had been fighting in Afghanistan began returning home to Indonesia, people heard stories of the ‘heroic’ acts conducted by women jihadists”.
Given all this, at some point surely Western governments must have the backbone to finally and unflinchingly rule that some of their “citizens” by technicality only have simply abrogated their right to the privileges of citizenship.