A down-home gal from Alabama wants to come home, and who could blame her? This would be a heartwarming human interest story were it not for just a few inconvenient details: Hoda Muthana left Alabama to join the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria, and she can’t return because she was stripped of her American citizenship. But she is making a new appeal to come back now, and her attorney is claiming (how did you guess?) that she is a victim, and thus the red carpet should be rolled out for her.
The Associated Press reported Monday that Hoda Muthana, who “ran away from home in Alabama at the age of 20, joined the Islamic State group and had a child with one of its fighters says she still hopes to return to the United States, serve prison time if necessary, and advocate against the extremists.” Muthana currently resides in the Roj detention camp in Syria, and claims in a new interview that she was “brainwashed by online traffickers into joining the group in 2014 and regrets everything except her young son, now of pre-school age.” Muthana declared, “If I need to sit in prison, and do my time, I will do it. … I won’t fight against it. I’m hoping my government looks at me as someone young at the time and naive.”
Sure. But whoever “brainwashed” Muthana did a thorough job, as she once urged Muslims in the United States to “go on drivebys, and spill all of their blood,” that is, the blood of non-Muslims. Among the many hair-raising things she wrote on social media was “Terrorize the kuffar [non-Muslims] at home.” And, “Men and women altogether. You have much to do while you live under our greatest enemy, enough of your sleeping! Go on drive-bys and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over them. Veterans, Patriot, Memorial etc Day parades Kill them.”
Muthana also wrote: “We have men (and women!) who love death as ardently as you love your lives! I was watching an American documentary on a battle in Afghanistan and the Americans are such cowards. Crying and shaking on the battlefield and saying, ‘our aim is to get everyone home where they belong.’ While our men’s aim on the battlefield is to reunite with our Lord. Our honor is in jihad, either victory or shahadah [Islamic martyrdom]. These men cry for their lives while we cry for our death (shahadah)!”
Charming indeed. But AP reports that Muthana “now says her phone was taken from her and that the tweets were sent by IS supporters.” Well, maybe, but it isn’t as if she suddenly found herself in ISIS domains by chance and against her will. She was, according to AP, “raised in a conservative Muslim household in Hoover, Alabama, just outside Birmingham. In 2014, she told her family she was going on a school trip but flew to Turkey and crossed into Syria instead, funding the travel with tuition checks that she had secretly cashed.” Her actions were so egregious that the Obama administration, of all people, took the unusual step of revoking her American citizenship in 2016.
Related: ISIS Bride Who Wanted to ‘Spill Blood’ of Americans Pleads to Return: ‘I Want to Have My Own Car’
Now, however, Muthana is playing the victim card for all it’s worth: “Even here, right now,” in the refugee camp, “I can’t fully say everything I want to say. But once I do leave, I will. I will be an advocate against this. I wish I can help the victims of ISIS in the West understand that someone like me is not part of it, that I as well am a victim of ISIS.” Her attorney, Hassan Shibly, claims that it is “absolutely clear that she was brainwashed and taken advantage of.” Shibly added, “She was absolutely misguided, and no one is denying that. But again, she was a teenager who was the victim of a very sophisticated recruitment operation that focuses on taking advantage of the young, the vulnerable, the disenfranchised.”
Disenfranchised? How’s that again? Hoda Muthana was disenfranchised in the United States? Was she barred from voting? Barred from holding certain jobs, or from entering certain areas? Was she a second-class citizen in some way? Of course not. Shibly’s charge is hysterical and baseless, and of course he did not bother to explain what he meant. He didn’t have to. He was just repeating the words that he knows work among American Leftists. And they very well may work again this time, and soon send Hoda Muthana back to her sweet home Alabama.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member