by Ruthie Blum
Aqsa Mahmood is [a] young
woman from Scotland. The daughter of Pakistani-born parents who built a
successful business in the U.K., she grew up with all the benefits of an
affluent and educated British girl. She lived in a posh suburb, where
she attended a costly, prestigious school.
Like her friends, Aqsa
loved Harry Potter books and bought lip gloss and giggled about boys.
After high school, she went on to study radiography at Glasgow
Caledonian University.
Her life was clearly on
the track that her mother and father had dreamed about when they
decided to raise their family in Britain, with all the opportunities
that a Western democracy has to offer, and the freedom to take advantage
of them.
This would have been a
simple success story about upwardly mobile immigrants, hardly worth
mentioning, if not for the fact that Aqsa, now 20, took her upbringing
in a direction altogether different from that which her parents had
intended or peers anticipated.
In November, she
suddenly picked herself up and went to Syria to join the Islamic State
terrorists -- one of whom she married -- and became a leading member of a
religious police force, the Al-Khanssaa brigade. The purpose of this
female militia, purported to be dominated by British-born jihadists, is
to punish women for "un-Islamic behavior."
Its mission is to
search the streets of Raqqa (the de facto capital of the self-proclaimed
Islamic State) to make sure that women are appropriately clad from head
to toe; to look under burqas to snuff out any enemy men in disguise;
and to prevent men and women from mingling, among other forbidden
displays of "Western behavior."
Hailing from the West, these Jihadi Janes are best equipped to detect it, after all.
According to the
London-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and
Political Violence, some 60 British women are now in Syria with ISIS.
And since the decapitation of journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff
at the hands of a British national, many more are taking steps to
travel there to join the estimated 500 other British men in their jihad.
Aqsa Mahmood is
believed to be instrumental in encouraging other young women in the U.K.
to follow her lead. Active on social media, she posts anti-Western
messages and promotes actions like the beheadings of Foley and Sotloff.
Last week, she tweeted a photo of a baby holding a Kalashnikov and an IS
flag.
Meanwhile, her buddies
in ISIS continue to abuse, molest, torture, sell into slavery and murder
women -- whether non-Muslims or Muslims on the side of Syrian President
Bashar Assad's forces -- in addition to raping and/or marrying little
girls. That this is in stark contrast to policing in the name of purity
makes no difference to Aqsa and her Al-Khanssaa gal pals.
Nor does it appear to
matter to them that other Muslim females from Britain, Australia and
Malaysia are leaving their countries for Syria and Iraq to engage in
"jihad al-nikah" (sexual jihad) with ISIS terrorists. This is another
way of saying that they service the men who need to relax after a hard
day's work at chopping people's heads off.
As upstanding citizens
who thought they had created a normal household. Aqsa's parents are
mortified. In a statement read by their lawyer, the Mahmoods said, "We
are not in denial and do not make any excuses for her and absolutely
condemn her involvement in ISIS and recent comments. If our daughter,
who had all the chances and freedom in life, could become a bedroom
radical, then it is possible for this to happen to any family."
They are right. But why? How has Britain become such a breeding ground for radicals like Aqsa?
There is no simple answer, certainly not in relation to families like the Mahmoods.
There are clues,
however, which indicate the need for a sea change in the cultural
paradigm that has enabled violent Islamism to thrive unthwarted in the
U.K. and elsewhere.
A prime example is the
case of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, where 1,400 British children were
raped, beaten and trafficked by groups of Pakistani-born Muslim men for
16 years, while British authorities looked the other way. This recent
revelation about the period between 1997 and 2013 is sending shock waves
throughout the U.K.
That it happened at all
was horrifying enough. The fact a third of the incidents reported
during that time were filed away by social services is causing calls for
heads to roll (no pun intended).
But the most incredible
aspect of this human tragedy is the reason that it was swept under the
carpet in the first place: Social workers and police were afraid they
would be considered racist if they pointed a finger at the perpetrators,
all of whom shared the same -- uh -- ethnicity. The victims, too, were a
pretty homogeneous bunch. White and from poor backgrounds, they were
conveniently viewed as slutty street urchins, rather than sexually
enslaved children in need of rescue. Had it been the other way around,
with British Christians raping Muslim immigrants, the upshot would have
been very different.
In such a climate,
where even crimes like pedophilia, pederasty and pimping are tolerated
when committed by Muslims, is it any wonder that mosques preaching
global jihad and the establishment of an Islamic caliphate are welcomed?
It is time to
acknowledge that Aqsa and her ilk are a symptom of a serious pathology,
not an aberration in an otherwise healthy organ.
Ruthie Blum is the author of "To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the 'Arab Spring.'"
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=9917
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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