12 August 2016

Isis promised Kadiza Sultana utopia, but in Syria she found fear and death

.... At the age of 16, Sultana and her friends were radicalised online, persuaded to leave their homes, and marry Isis fighters. In the digital age, radicalisation no longer necessitates physical access to extreme preachers or getting hold of jihadi material.

Recent research by the Centre on Religion and Geopolitics and Digitalis found that access to extremist content, ranging from Isis magazines, beheading videos, and jihadi manuals, is no more than a Google search away.

Counter-narratives to such propaganda are failing to compete. As a result, young, impressionable internet users like Sultana are left vulnerable to dangerous ideologies, even in the supposed safety and security of their own bedrooms.

According to her family, Sultana was a very bright student with wide opportunities open to her. Extremist ideologies are powerful, not because of the current grievances, but because they seem to offer a utopia. Women all over the globe have been radicalised by Isis, and there is a considerable amount of diversity in their profiles. The notion that all the western women who travel to join Isis are migrating with the sole intention of becoming “jihadi brides” is misleading. [805 comments]

[TOP RATED COMMENT 1235 votes] These idiots watch the new about beheadings, burnings, hand choppings, rape, bombings etc. etc., plus they know how women are treated, yet they still say to themselves, "I'll have some of that". Are we meant to sympathise?

[4TH 652] I think we're meant to take the blame, to be honest. That's certainly likely to be the case given the publication.

[2ND 836] That seems to be the intention of the family lawyer and MP earlier; berating the government for something or other.

Family, Mosque, community, nowt to do with them it seems.

[3RD 789] Anyone leaving the UK to join ISIS should have their British passport cancelled

[5TH 526] I once saw a person on a Guardian article commenting that we shouldn't cancel their passports: It's inhumane. As he said, "Even in World War 2, there was no talk of cancelling the passports of people who defected to the Nazis".

It's objectively true. We didn't cancel anyone's passports. Because we just shot them all.

It was the most interesting case of being technically correct whilst basically lying through your teeth I've ever seen in my life. I still have the screenshot somewhere!

[6TH 365] I have zero sympathy for these idiots, anyone with an ounce of sense can see the atrocities committed by ISIS yet they willingly joined up. Besides that it should be fairly obvious that travelling to an active war zone from a safe country entails serious risk, so the outpouring of sympathetic articles from the media puzzles me. [Guardian Cif] Read more