Jamie Paulin-Ramirez (aka Jihad Jamie) pleaded guilty today to providing material support to terrorists. The oh-so-famous Jihad Jane (Colleen LaRose) recruited Jamie in 2009 to attend a training camp in Europe and partake in a terror plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist.
A few interesting trends to point out that occur in this case:
1. More and more women in the U.S. are choosing to participate in terrorist activities. Some women are single (Jihad Jane, Aafia Siddiqui, Nima Ali Yusuf, Amina Farah Ali and Hawo Mohamed Hassan) while others are corroborating with their husbands (Proscovia Nzabanita, Nadia Rockwood, Amera Akl and October Martinique Lewis).
2. Jamie was recruited online. It’s tough to think of someone charged in the U.S. on terror offenses in the past few years who do not have an online component to their recruitment or radicalization process.
3. Jamie was a fan of Anwar al-Awlaki on Facebook. And her co-defendant, Jihad Jane, reposted Awlaki’s blog posts on other extremist message boards. Jarret Brachman and I explored the issue of al-Awlaki’s appeal in our recent article, You Too Can Be Awlaki!, which we published in the Fletcher Forum in January. In the article we argued:
By using the Internet to brand himself as a user-friendly al-Qaeda personality, al-Awlaki has repackaged al-Qaeda’s convoluted and inaccessible message into something that his followers are not only able to understand, but can replicate on their own.
In one of al-Awlaki’s posts that Jihad Jane reposted, he said:
What I mean by Jihad here is not just picking up a gun and fighting. Jihad is broader than that. What is meant by Jihad in this context is a total effort by the ummah to fight and defeat its enemy.
It’s no wonder that Jihad Jane and Jamie, as well as a slew of other Americans inspired by al-Awlaki, are joining the global terrorist movement.
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