Quote of the Day:

The barbaric Islamic State is recruiting so many Western women that it’s giving new meaning to the phrase the “feminine mystique.”

Monica Crowley in the Washington Times

Tashfeen Malik put a spotlight on the female Islamic terrorist when she and her husband killed fourteen people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino. She was a Pakistani-born terrorist, but Crowley reports that Western women are also being recruited and that female terrorists "add a new dimension" to the global jihad.

Crowley writes:

In the past, militants have welcomed the support of women as mothers who sacrifice their children as suicide bombers, propagandists and covers for terrorist activity when authorities closed in.

Now, however, terrorist organizations are actively recruiting women as incubators of the next generation of fighters, as social media queens and most disturbingly, as killers.

According to a new report from George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, of the 71 recruits for the Islamic State arrested in the United States since 2014, 10 were women.

As The Washington Times put it, “Researchers identified 300 American and/or U.S.-based Islamic State sympathizers who use social media to radicalize new recruits. About one third of those accounts were operated by women.”

 What on earth could attract women to a movement that treats women as chattel?

Without answering that question, Crowley cites recent cases of women joining that jihad: Shannon Conley, 19, of Colorado, tried to join ISIS but was stopped at the Denver airport. Former British housewife, Samantha Lewthwaite, is now ISIS' famous “White Widow” and is reportedly training an all-woman team of suicide bombers. Crowley wonders if the former Mrs. Lewthwaite could have helped out with training for the three female suicide bombers at Lake Chad, who took twenty-seven people out with them.

On the good side of the ledger, Kurdish women fight side-by-side with men against ISIS, but, unlike their ISIS counterparts, don't embrace a dark theology that leads them to blow themselves up.

The female jihad fighter is going to pose a particular threat to the West because we simply didn't expect anything like this.