The Beeb has more details on the three addled teenage girls who ran off to be with IS, and how much fun they can expect to have there.
Dr Erin Saltman, from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which offers independent expertise in counter-terrorism, said IS propaganda targets young women specifically with the promise of being part of a humanitarian movement.
She said: “They are the wives and mothers of the future jihadists so quite a lot of dedication and time has been put into trying to allure these younger women to come and join in these efforts.
“They are very much restricted to the house and home for the most part. There is strict sharia law in the region.”
Imprisoned in a house by themselves, in other words. No friends, no school, no shopping trips, no music, no films, no hanging out, no evenings at the pub…no anything. Just being raped, and doing household chores. I wonder how long it will take them to realize they ran away into a nightmare.
But if they and their families are very lucky they’ll be found before they cross into Syria.
BBC home affairs correspondent Daniel Sandford said it was “absolutely extraordinary” that four girls from the same year at the same school had travelled to Syria, with the apparent aim of joining IS.
He said “very difficult questions” were being asked about how friends, family and the police had not managed to dissuade the three girls from going to Syria when their best friend had travelled to the country in December.
Home Secretary Theresa May said it was important “to look at the whole question of the ideology that is driving these actions” and the government was working on extremism strategy.
But shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said the idea of the schoolgirls travelling to Syria was “very disturbing” and showed more action was needed to counteract extremist recruitment messages.
“Extremism” blah blah “extremist” blah blah – that’s an empty word. Imagine if they were “extremist” humanitarians or “extremist” volunteers with MSF – how welcome that would be. The issue isn’t “extremism,” it’s what they’re extreme about.
Where is the evidence they’re “addled”? Seems insulting. They’re not so addled that they couldn’t organise themselves an international flight – that’s not something that even some of my non-addled relatives can manage without near-meltdown stress levels. There’s no evidence whatever that they’re anything other than mentally competent.
I’ve seen this sentiment expressed repeatedly, but never is it explained what’s especially disturbing about it. These are not the first people to go to Syria. HUNDREDS of British women have gone, the papers tell us. The only unusual thing here is that two of the people in question are only 15 years old, so in UK law they’re considered children.
This is obviously a tragedy for the girls’ families. They should be asking themselves some serious questions about why they allowed these girls to do what they’ve done. Rather more importantly, the police should be asking the parents those questions too.
It is unclear to me, however, why anyone else would give a monkey’s. Why is this news? They’re out of the country now, and their names are public. It should be relatively easy to prevent them returning, or imprison them if they try to return as is usual for people returning from that region after having gone there with the express intention of aiding terrorist Islamists. But frankly, I’m with Ahmed Aboutaleb, from today’s post:
As Ophelia said – unimprovable.
They’re children, sonofrojblake. Children groomed to be household slaves, for the most part, and to be sexually exploited with precious little hope of escape once they’ve been isolated from family and friends.
Or maybe you think all the kids raped in Rotherham and elsewhere should just fuck off too, because they weren’t necessarily abducted by physical force every time?
Just going by what I’ve read in the news, they didn’t have to “organise themselves a flight” – there was “help” and advice given to them.
Being children doesn’t make them angels, but it doesn’t have to – it’s simply not the point. There’s a reason we don’t hold children’s decision-making to the same standard as that of adults, and even though the precise cut-off age is of necessity a legal contrivance, it remains a fact that children are not as equipped to make decisions as adults are. The same applies to child soldiers everywhere.
Mary Dejevsky in today’s Guardian is in agreement: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/23/if-britons-want-to-join-isis-let-them-go-london-schoolgirls.
Wow, that’s some vile disingenuousness right there. How you come up with any equivalence is a mystery.
Maybe my anger got the better of me. Or maybe I just don’t properly understand the fundamental distinction between one case of children being victims of grooming and another?
What’s the difference between the way the UK should treat, say, any two 15-year-old victims of the Rotherham grooming and the two 15-year-olds in this case?
I’m sure that in reality you wouldn’t tell the Rotherham victims to fuck off, and I’m happy to apologise for having spoken in anger, but why then should these girls be told to fuck off?
The victims in Rotherham were not living in a society where they were surrounded, every day, in all available media outlets – television, radio, newspapers, internet and the rest – by warnings about and condemnations of their abusers. Quite the opposite in fact. They were living in a society where the establishment was scandalously reluctant to believe they were being abused and scandalously reluctant to investigate their abusers. They had no escape, because the abusers were right there in their neighbourhoods. In some cases the abusers placed themselves in positions where the authorities would place children directly in their care. That, combined with slut-shaming and other social pressures, meant that those children had no agency, no chance to do anything effective to save themselves.
In every available media outlet in the UK there are daily stories making absolutely clear that Daesh are barbarian scum who are perpetrating the worst kind of mediaeval war crimes, sometimes on unfortunate westerners, but mostly on large numbers of other Muslims. Despite this, and of their own volition, some hundreds of men and women have decided to go and join them. One or more of those people has been responsible for passing on information by social media to these girls, who have in turn decided to take the time and make the considerable effort required to head to Syria.
Granted, in the eyes of UK law they are still children and unable to, for example, consent to sex. But also in the eyes of the law they are well above the age of criminal responsibility. In the eyes of the law, they know right from wrong and can and should be held responsible for their actions. It’s reasonable to say that they know what they’re doing is wrong. If they are allowed back into the UK, they should be tried and imprisoned for acts preparatory or aiding terrorism, as have others who have done the same.
Comparing them to the helpless victims in Rotherham is the worst kind of insult to the children who were abused there.
Right, got you. It’s vitally important to be the right kind of victim, and victim of the right kind of grooming.
Why is this news?
Because lots of people give a shit about minors being deceived and victimized. Why do you have a problem with that?
I held off joining the islamophobia debate back a few posts as I thought this story might get an airing and it has relevance.
The sister of the woman thought to have arranged for the girls travel has criticised the security services for not monitoring their social media accounts closely enough.
When a muslim condemns an organisation for not protecting another muslim from Islamisists is she being islamophobic?
When I worry that she is playing right into the Home Secretaries hands by demanding more police scrutiny of social media , am I being islamophobic?
I sympathise with the families and I worry for their daughters, I am not bigoted in respect to Muslim people.
I fear the way militant political Islam is trying to change my pluralist secular society through things like blasphemy laws or more police powers and this is not irrational.
A little off topic but concerning an earlier post
” What is it about being a Chelsea fan that requires or enables this?”
please note the young girls teddy bear
opps, that was supposed to just be the link :/
That’s ok, I don’t object to embedding.
sonofrojblake, the evidence that they’re “addled” is the apparent fact that they have run away to embrace a horrible fate. I think that indicates that they’re confused and not well informed. It’s not particularly insulting…I was quite addled at that age myself.
They’re immature, and they’re going through puberty. Those two factors alone are enough to add up to a state that can easily be called “addled.” I was pretty addled at that age. And that’s not even counting the effect of backward religious thinking and sexophobia on an already-troubled phase in one’s life.
Yup. It’s a dangerous age – you’re old enough to rebel, try to act like an adult, etc, but not yet old enough to be good at judgment.
What if their “husbands” find them not to be virgins? Off with their heads? Wouldn’t surprise me. After demanding ransom, of course.
Addled = not thinking clearly. On the one hand, you might perfectly well make the case that merely being Muslim or indeed any religion is evidence enough that they’re addled. But since that isn’t polite, it’s not enough. But the manner of their “running away” contradicts your point. If they were, as you contend, addled, they’d have tried to walk to Syria, or hitch-hike, or some other equally preposterous and impractical scheme. The very fact that they were able to obtain airline tickets, check in and get boarding cards, negotiate security and boarding and so on is evidence they’re thinking more clearly than many people in airports I’ve been in seem capable of. You can’t simply let them off the hook by writing them off as “confused”.
As for “not well informed”, these were, we are told, relatively high-achieving students at an outstanding co-educational non-faith academy school in London, not home-schooled hicks who were never allowed out.
https://www.gov.uk/age-of-criminal-responsibility
They’re officially old enough to know what they’re doing is wrong. Specifically, one of them is definitely old enough that travelling on a stolen passport is a criminal offence.
“old enough to know that” obvs. Sorry
“Able to obtain airline tickets … and so on” just means that they can follow instructions, since all the steps you listed are pretty well documented. The addled part refers to their judgment of whose words to take on faith, since they are not in a position to independently verify anything their groomer has said about what they will find in ISIS-controlled territory. Ability to follow instructions != mature judgment about people, and I see the same dichotomy in my nieces who are 12 and 15.
sonofrojblake:
I recently ran into a friend of mine who I hadn’t seen for the totality of three weeks. Within that three weeks, he was found walking along a road in the middle of nowhere, without any form of ID, money or a phone (or anything else that would be useful if you’re planning on walking a long trip) and mentally unwell. He was picked up by the police, taken back to safety and then transferred into a mental hospital. He was in the mental hospital for a small period of time (I’m not sure exactly) and was then transferred back into his mothers care in their home.
I got back from a cross country flight, landed in my home city and randomly ran into him on the street. He was coherent, completely capable of interacting with people and doing things (for instance, he negotiated his way into a club whilst also finding a place for me to store my baggage while I sat and had a drink with him).
He then promptly tried to convince me that he was a genius and everyone else on the planet was sub-par in comparison; that when light falls into a black hole, it actually shoots out the other side, but is invisible when it does so because of ‘gravity’; that he can look into a beer and understand the universe because he knows that the bubbles will float to the top; that evolution is going to work so fast in the next few years that we will all become completely resistant to cuts and infections of any sort and he then popped off three separate times to talk to one group of women who rebuffed him every time (each visit it seemed as though he had forgotten that he’d approached them before).
While he was acting like this to me, he was charming bouncers, exchanging cash at the bar to use for a pinball machine, ordering drinks for himself and generally carrying on a fairly sane dialogue with everyone else around him.
It was clear to me that he was very mentally unwell and I (in an act that I have some modicum of shame about) gave him a hug, told him to look after himself and left him to his demons (I could see that both my presence and my non-agreement with his statements was agitating him greatly and I wasn’t sure if he might attack me at some point).
There would be no barriers whatsoever to him booking an international flight and disappearing to god knows where, despite all of the signs of mental illness he showed to me because in general people don’t care. I cared enough to talk to his family afterwards, but I certainly didn’t care enough to try to find him some immediate help at the time (and he was lucid enough to do anything he wanted while still being quite mentally unwell).
I find it astounding that you think that two 15 year old girls, by the act of flying on a plane, are displaying clear signs of well organised thought patterns that correlate with sanity and rationality. Two 15 year old girls who are going through puberty, rebellion, anger at their parents (an assumption, but I think it’s common enough amongst teenagers to be a given) and whatever else might be haunting them at their city of residence. Apparently, they should totally be held responsible for their actions and if they turn up headless in a pit of sand, well then, that just shows that they shouldn’t have gone…
If my memory serves me correctly, I’ve read a lot of your comments and I tend to agree with them. This is not one of those times. People are irrational, whether it be through general mental illness or simply passing moods. To act as though youthful idiocy should carry the sentence that they are going to receive when they reach their extremist masters is abhorrent and I don’t think it’s a viewpoint worth trying to persuade people about…
Sorry about the long comment Ophelia, it just kind of got my goat…
@Danny Butts, #9:
Duly noted. That’s some seriously cynical manipulative shit right there.
@Numenaster, 18:
I repeat the point – these are not some cloistered, homeschooled hicks from some rural hole in Pakistan. They attended, and were by all accounts doing pretty well at, an officially adjudged “Outstanding” co-educational high school in the capital city of an advanced Western nation. It is hard to imagine a more conducive position from which to encounter information which may lead them to conclude Daesh are Muslim-murdering scum. That they have concluded otherwise in the teeth of the avalanche of media coverage they’d definitely be exposed to strongly suggests they’re just deliberately ignoring it.
@Drewzilla, 19: Fair enough. We disagree on this, but I can sympathise with your reasons.
sonofrojblake
I was just pointing out that it was a Chelsea football club merchandised teddy bear, so you know #notallchelseafans
but to take issue with your use of the age of criminal responsibility website, this also means of course that they are all too young to legally use a credit card and therefore someone must have bought them the tickets*, presumably that person also gave them their itinerary and probably encouraged them right along.
I believe that if we are able to get them back safe and sound, and I’m truly hoping against expectation, there will be some form of judicial punishment as the government has stated that anyone travelling to join Daesh will face arrest on their return.
If someone had given me a map to the socialist Utopia of USSR and paid for my ticket, holding my hand and encouraging me all the way at the age of 14** I have no doubt that I would have jumped at the chance, so if a little charity can be shown to these girls on their return it wont upset me.
*I’m guessing they arent “valley girls” with daddies credit card.
** I think by the time I was 16 my eyes had been opened to the abuses of the Russian empire , however I may well have gone just for the adventure.
@sonofrojblake:
In the BBC item yesterday, one of the experts interviewed said that the vast majority of the mothers of these children have no computer skills, let alone that they have any idea what is going on in the social media their children have access to. And, being the smart and not-addled children that they are, these girls had access to social media. One of the things that the expert wants to change, is to increase the computer skills of mothers in the communities where the risks are highest, so they have more insight into what their children are doing and can (hopefully) catch unwanted developments earlier.
Does that help to clarify things for you?
Firstly, they’re all 15 and 16, not 14 – if that matters much. Second, nobody was holding their hand through the airport. Third, and by far most important, I was 15 at the height of the cold war in the mid-eighties, when the prospect of nuclear war with the USSR was so taken for granted as a near-inevitability that they were making number 1 pop songs about it. And at NO STAGE during that war of ideologies was my side, the West, able to point to the other side and say “Look – they behead people who disagree with them, in public. They lock people in cages and burn them alive.” More significantly, the other side didn’t triumphantly advertise that fact as one of the reasons people should come join them. There was a lot wrong with the Soviet Union, but I’d live there for a decade to save myself from having to spend a day with Daesh.
And the major point here is – EVERYONE KNOW THIS. You can’t claim these girls were ignorant of that information. Daesh themselves have done everything they can to disseminate it as widely as possible, and by all accounts have been pretty successful. It is reasonable to assume these girls saw the video of the Jordanian pilot being burned alive. It is entirely unreasonable to assume that they didn’t know it had happened. Either way, they considered that event, and instead of turning away from it in disgust, they thought “I want in on that”.
For all those people saying “Ooh, when I was fifteen…” – think on that. You’re making an equivalence between yourself and someone who, when told of a group that burns a man alive, videos it and puts it on the internet for the lulz, thinks “Sign me up”. That’s not “addled”. That’s not hormonal confusion, or understandable misguidedness. It’s evil.
Hobbes described life as “nasty, brutish and short”. We’ve come a long way in the West to changing that. These girls have signed up for a life that pretty much hits all three points. I hope they get it.
sonofrojblake
When I started on internet atheism (TM) I took a 101 course called “understanding and avoiding confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance”.
If we get these girls back, maybe they and you could take the course together.
It might work as a prophylactic for them and it looks like you need a remedial.
That’s an interesting point, if a little naive. What’s interesting about it is that the question of who paid for their tickets and how has never been mentioned in any of the news reports I’ve read. Has it been reported at all? The identity of the person who paid for those tickets would seem to me to be of great interest. It’s inconceivable that the police don’t have that information, and yet it seems it hasn’t been made public. Got to wonder why not.
Then again, on a perhaps related note, at least one of these girls was travelling on a passport that was not her own. Let’s be charitable and assume she’s a thief or otherwise obtained it by deception (the uncharitable assumption would be the holder, her older sister, gave it to her with knowledge of what she planned to do with it). Is it much of a leap to think that someone who stole a passport would also steal a credit card? Or at the very least use it fraudulently to book airline tickets online?
As for “confirmation bias” – what evidence am I ignoring that contradicts my position? “Cognitive dissonance” – between what contradictory ideas?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/aqsa-mahmood-warned-jihadi-brides-they-must-prepare-to-be-widows-in-blog-post-weeks-before-missing-school-girls-fled-to-turkey-10067290.html
“At least one of the girls appears to have been in contact with Mahmood over Twitter before they went missing.”