September 5, 2014

"There was nothing they (Aqsa's parents) could have done different. She was a bedroom radical."

"And if this could happen to Aqsa, who had all the life chances, the best education that money can buy, a family that was moderate, liberal ... if it could happen to her, somebody who was so intelligent, then it could happen to any family."
"She was the best daughter you could have. We just don't know what happened to her. She loved school. She was very friendly. I have never shouted at her all my life, all my life"....

Her parents insist there were no signs that the Glasgow teenager harbored any extremist beliefs. She listened to Coldplay and read "Harry Potter" books. On her desk, colorful loom bands and bracelets hung from a goosenecked lamp, a dog-eared copy of "The Hunger Games" nearby....

"We used to tell her ... this is not Islam, some of these groups are not Islam. They are doing wrong things which we don't approve of. Obviously, no Muslim approves this.... We are against all this ISIS carrying on. This is no Islam. Islam is peace. Any killing we are against, whoever it is. That's what we have been taught by our prophet -- peace be upon him."

52 comments:

Ignorance is Bliss said...

Hunger Games? Harry Potter?

No wonder she turned into a right wing extremist

Deirdre Mundy said...

When Catholic kids rebel against their secular folks, they either start going to Latin Mass or do the Catholic Worker thing.

When Protestant kids rebel, they go full-throttle evangelical.

It's pretty typical for a 19 year old to decide her parents are just going through the motions, while she's on fire and ready to change the world.

She obviously fell in with a bad crowd at college-- so instead of 'setting all afire' by working at the homeless shelter and preaching to the lost, she's...literally setting all afire.

Ironclad said...

Obviously she read the Koran and realized that her parents were full of it - the whole "Islam is peace" stickt is just for the rubes. Or maybe she bailed because her father had lined her up to marry a first cousin from Pakistan that hadn't made it past the 6th grade. Now that she has brought shame to the family, she might as well stay in Syria, she will end up dead if she goes home to assuage "family honor".

The whole Pakistani experience in Britain is turing out to be a monumental disaster - they kept every part of a toxic culture and now it is starting to contaminate the natives. They have been so coddled and protected by law there that they have set up ghettos where they essentially push out western culture or thought. Rotherham is the tip of the iceberg too - a community of less than 10,000 there abusing over 1400 underage girls under the blind eye of the police and social services - and that is just one 200,000 population town.

When the jihadis start coming home to Britain, it's going to be interesting to see if the population fights back. I'm betting on mass expulsions within 5 years

Pettifogger said...

A tragedy for her family and for Western Civilization. If Western Civilization is able to resist, the fight will take generations.

David said...

Imagine teens of the slums of Cairo then.

Expat(ish) said...

Anyone get a Patty Hearst vibe off that snipped?

-XC

MayBee said...

Obviously Slytherin.

Mr Wibble said...

Humans are social creatures. We want to be part of a tribe, and the strongest one at that. Multiculturalism, moral relativism, attacks against traditions, and milquetoast social institutions undermine a society. Looking at modern Britain, it's no wonder that the young are drawn to jihad. It gives them a sense of order and purpose in their lives that they don't get elsewhere.

sinz52 said...

When I was in high school during the 1960s, I saw this kind of radicalization take place in some of my classmates.

We all had the same teachers, the same courses, the same curricula, the same textbooks.

But a few of the students just started becoming very rebellious, walking around with chips on their shoulders and hair-trigger tempers, personally attacking students and even teachers for disagreeing with them. They ended up being the violent student radicals on college campuses. They also started experimenting with illicit drugs, which hurt them.

For example, most of the high-school girls were doing what girls do: Going on dates, gossiping, studying for class, etc. But a few just started becoming hostile and scowling, walking around with chips on their shoulders, pushing radical feminism out of some imagined grievance that the whole country was oppressing them.

Back then, I never understood why. From modern research, it could well turn out to be a personality thing. Different people still react in different ways to the exact same stimuli. It's starting to look like our brains are actually wired differently: Some of us are pre-programmed for shyness, mental illness--and perhaps even violence and hostility.

In this case, evidently the other daughters aren't reacting the way this radicalized daughter is.

Anonymous said...

Aqsa come home, says her mother. Aqsa has gone home. May her mother follow her. Wishing it comes before forcing it. It's very late and the will seems to all be on the other side. Europe is likely toast. We'll see.

Anonymous said...

she is really a very good girl

Mr. D said...

Eric Hoffer explained it all back in 1951.

madAsHell said...

I'm sure that they will find a mentor that played upon her insecurities. A Jim Jones, or a Marshall Applewhite that convinced her that suicide was a meaningful expression.

Birches said...

I'm reading The Looming Tower right now about the origins of Al-Qaeda and 9/11. What's so interesting about the book is how many of these guys come from families just like this and probably even more secular than they are. Many of them were radicalized at college or high school by teachers and professors.

I guess the college experience the world over is being used for indoctrination.

Wince said...

The Men in My Little Girl's Life, by Mike Douglas

The Men In My Little Girl's Life
The men in my little girl's life
The men in my little girl's life
It seems like only yesterday when I heard my little girl say
"Daddy, there's a boy ouside, his name is Achmed.
He wants to play in our backyard
Can he daddy? Can he daddy? Oh please daddy."

exhelodrvr1 said...

Occam's Razor - this is inherent to Islam.

Unknown said...

Mohammed is her mentor

Ann Althouse said...

"Anyone get a Patty Hearst vibe off that snipped?"

I thought of the Philip Roth novel "American Pastoral."

Ann Althouse said...

Patty Hearst was kidnapped, kept in a closet and raped and terrorized before she allied with her oppressors.

That's not the same as a nice daughter who seems fine, reading books and thinking thoughts in her family home bedroom and going intensely radical.

Insufficiently Sensitive said...

Looks like the 'strong horse' line works in some cases. How many?

Anonymous said...

It's actually not that big a leap from The Hunger Games. Those books are dystopian and intense with a female protagonist who bears extreme hardship for the good of her people. The movies don't really capture it.

Related: An article in the Wasington Post by an American who pulled himself back from the brink of radical Islam about his initial motivators. Turns out he was deeply influenced by what amounts to American heroics.

Link brought to you by Our Friend, Glenn Greenwald. Lulz.

traditionalguy said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

She's a good girl
loves her Mama
loves ISIS
and martyrdom too.

traditionalguy said...

The Manson family was also filled with a spiritual strength that was missing from their earlier times living in the civilized world where they were raised.

Apparently it is not enough to learn to be a good person. People know that they are not able to be good all of the time. They sense the need for a spiritual strength to become a whole person that is allowed to express their bad as well as their good natures.

That is the lure of Mohammed's legalistic cult that enjoys spiritual worship around the Khaba at Mecca were an ancient Moon god Idol was picked to be the One god.

That spirit tells them that good followers are approved when they do bad to infidels. They can kill them and enslave them, and steal their lands. Because Mohammed's god says the infidels deserve it for refusing to bow to the evil spirit five times a day.

In other words, you cannot fight a spiritual battle without spiritual weapons.


mccullough said...

I'd never heard the term bedroom radical before this article.

Jason said...

"Can you hear the drums, Fernandoooooo?"

Women have been romanticizing soldiers in shitty causes for centuries.

Bill, Republic of Texas said...

They are doing wrong things which we don't approve of. Obviously, no Muslim approves this.... We are against all this ISIS carrying on. This is no Islam. Islam is peace.

I used to believe them when they would say this but now I don't. Where are the marches and protests from the "moderate" Muslims against ISIS? They are quick to fill the streets protesting Israel. But total silence now.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

There was nothing they (Aqsa's parents) could have done different.

They could'a started by not naming her Aqsa.

richardsson said...

Well if multiculturalism is such a great idea, why isn't the Austro-Hungarian Empire alive and thriving. I'm reading Gregory Wawro's A Mad Catastrophe and there are parallels there to what is going wrong in the West today.

Fernandinande said...

We used to tell her...this is not Islam...

"We used to lie to her."

gerry said...

That's not the same as a nice daughter who seems fine, reading books and thinking thoughts in her family home bedroom and going intensely radical.

Harry Potter and Hunger Games. The Koran.

Fantasy and Savagery vs. Meaningfulness and Salvation?

Skyler said...

Just contributing to making a bigger target to bomb. She needs to be rewarded with her own death. Freedom of religion does not apply to religions that murder as a policy.

gerry said...

By the way, Islamists hate dogs.

gerry said...

In other words, you cannot fight a spiritual battle without spiritual weapons.

traditionalguy summarized it perfectly.

And now, as an added bonus, secularist "educators" have lost the ability to reason: The guidelines as to what “bias” relies heavily on student emotion — when a student feels at all offended by someone’s differing political or religious ideologies, a file is reported and is required to be officially investigated by university officials.

Birches said...

That Wapo article was a little silly. Americans just love violence so much I wanted to be apart of some.

So tell me, why aren't all the cool kids up and joining ISIS?

Clyde said...

Girls like bad boys, and they don't come any badder than head-chopping Muslims. Maybe she's just going through a phase, like reading the young adult novels, but she's likely to find that her new homicidal friends are not as easily set aside as a Harry Potter book when she tires of them.

Blue@9 said...

Some people are just psychopaths and want to blow up the world. Sure, they "seem" normal, dress normally, do the normal things people do, but inside they're imagining themselves stabbing everyone to death. Radical Islam lets the psychopaths do it in real life. The West? We've got psychos too, but they end up being lone-wolf criminals or joining small gangs. There's no broad-based and socially-acceptable psychopath movement in the US (complete with clerics saying that it's divinely ordained). Even if only 1% of the population is this way, 1% of a billion Muslims is still a lot of psychos.

sinz52 said...

A lot of conservatives blame college for radicalizing young people.

But I can only go by what I saw personally.

The kids that became radicalized had the same teachers and courses as the other students.

They just turned out differently.

One of the reasons why conservatives blame college is because parents are often unaware of how their high-school-age kids are feeling. The kids keep their mouths shut "to keep peace in the family." They don't tell their parents how frustrated and angry they feel.

Until they turn 18 and go off to college and start living outside the home.

Then they "come out" and the parents blame the school for having done that to them.

It may just be a question of personality.

It is known that fraternal (not identical) twins can have very different personalities, despite having very similar upbringing.

Maybe we're just hardwired that way: Some of us are just innately more shy, or are innately more extroverted, some of us are more peaceful and conforming, others are more angry and rebellious.

sinz52 said...

I should also say that the kids I knew were already radicalized by the time they got to college. The radical professors didn't have to "brainwash" them. Rather, they actively sought out radical professors and deliberately signed up to take their courses.

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

Mr. D-

Yay! That book still exists! It's the best book for explaining extremists ever written.

buwaya said...

Geoffrey Wawro is great !
I've been reading everything he publishes.
Nice to meet another fan.

hombre said...

If the parents are moderate they aren't following the Koran.

richardsson said...

Thanks buwaya. My apologies to Dr. Geoffrey Wawro. A Mad Catastrophe is about fecklessness at the top and an unraveling multiculturalism at the bottom. Instead of planning for the upcoming war they were about to start, all the military leaders took their usual three week vacations on schedule. I see parallels.

Anonymous said...

What do reading any of those books have to do with anything?

Imagine a serial killer, unconnected to any religion, and his mom says, "But he read good books. He read The Giver, and The Maze Runner, and Game of Thrones!"

What the hell does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

HoodlumDoodlum said...

I feel bad for the parents; their pain seems genuine. I felt a little bit bad for hoping their daughter fails in all her objectives and is killed or captured as part of a larger defeat for her organization. Then I pictured their daughter running the camera on the beheading videos and I didn't feel bad anymore. As sad as it is for her parents & family, she's made her choice.

Gospace said...

As far as books possessed by bombers go, the MSM repeatedly failed to report that Al Gore's book was prominent in the unabomber's library. And id you haven't taken the quiz http://www.crm114.com/algore/quiz.html , it's difficult to discern Al's quotes from teh unabombers.

Known Unknown said...

What do reading any of those books have to do with anything?

They are "normal" Western books that all lot of people read, so she couldn't possibly have become what she did.

Leslie Graves said...

What comes to my mind is one of the mental illnesses that can emerge in the late teens...like the manic stage of bipolar disorder.

Mountain Maven said...

My guess that that moderate Islam like the type her parents practice is thin gruel for someone looking for more meaning than the materialist modern culture. Analogous to American teens turning to more devout Christian denominations over the old watered-down mainline ones.
The difference is that devout Islam is now murderous imperialist Jihad. Prob fell in with them in college. There is a lot of spirituality, good and bad going on that people either don't see or don't want to.

Birdwatcher said...

Hormones? Maybe.

Jupiter said...

"We are a moderate Muslim family."


And your daughter wants to commit suicide and take a bunch of other people with her.

"Obviously, no Muslim approves this."

Yeah, obviously.

Jupiter said...

"When the jihadis start coming home to Britain, it's going to be interesting to see if the population fights back. I'm betting on mass expulsions within 5 years."

If the population of Britain is going to "fight back", they will first have to get rid of their government, which is a much more formidable enemy than some dizzy jihadi bint and her gun-crazy boyfriends.