Hoda Muthana left college and her family ties in Alabama four years ago to join the Islamic State. Three husbands later — two of them dead — with ISIS in ruins and with an 18-month-old son in a refugee camp in northern Syria, she says she made “a big mistake.”
Ya think?
Now 24, Muthana wants to come back to the United States. A lawyer is advocating for her return, in part suggesting that she could be a resource of intelligence about ISIS while also serving as a sort of spokeswoman against the foolishness of buying into radicalization.
At the very least, the lawyer says, Muthana is willing to face whatever punishment the U.S. government might have in store for her, while she also wants to see her toddler son safe.
Fine. Young people in America make mistakes all the time. Depending on the circumstances, they usually get a second chance — and then some.
But consider, while Muthana says she was “brainwashed” by online material and became enamored of the ISIS message, she also claims her family in Alabama were deeply conservative and placed restrictions on her movements and interactions, factors she claims contributed to her radicalization.
“You want to go out with your friends and I didn’t get any of that,” she told the United Kingdom’s The Guardian newspaper earlier this week.
Yet she was attending business classes at the University of Alabama at Birmingham — not exactly the stultifying existence she paints — while making the elaborate arrangements to fly to Turkey and, from there, to join ISIS.
In short order she became one of the terror group’s most prominent online agitators, taking to social media to call for the death of Americans. After her first husband, jihadist Australian, was killed in 2015, she tweeted:
“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…go on drive by’s + spill all of their blood or rent a big truck n drive all over them. Kill them.”
That same day, she tweeted out a photo of her ISIS husband’s bloodied body:
“I’m the most content I have ever been in my life. … And never think of those who have been killed in the cause of Allah as dead,” according to the UK’s Daily Mail.
And then there was the tweet in which she urged the taking down of President Barack Obama:
“You can look up Obamas schedule on the white house website. Take down that treacherous tyrant!”
Another husband (the father of her child) was killed fighting for ISIS, while she lost track of the third husband as the terror group crumbled under the push of American-backed forces.
When the ISIS life started looking like less of the bargain than she imagined, only then did she decide she wanted out.
“I look back now and I think I was very arrogant,” she says. “Now I’m worried about my son’s future.”
No doubt — just as there’s no doubt that one Diane Foley desperately wanted to see her son safe and home again from the Islamic State. Except James Foley, an American journalist, was savagely beheaded by ISIS in 2014, nearly two years after he’d been abducted in Syria.
That was the horror that Muthana freely and eagerly joined when she left her life in the United States.
It’s anyone’s guess how her situation will end up. The Trump administration on Wednesday declared she won’t be allowed back in the U.S. because she’s not an American citizen. Associated Press reported that the administration’s stance is that she was born here while her father was a Yemeni diplomat, hence she doesn’t enjoy U.S. citizenship.
So Muthana may not get the chance to spread her word of remorse and enlightenment back in the good ol’ US of A.
But we don’t need her back to get the message loud and clear: Don’t run off to join a murderous, warped demi-state run by radical terrorists who are the No. 1 enemy of the civilized world.
It’s not going to end well for you.
(Jim Eckstrom is executive editor of the Olean Times Herald and Bradford Publishing Co. His email is jeckstrom@oleantimesherald.com.)
