to think they should charge the Syria girls

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If they are indeed with terrorists in Syria then when a small chink of sense comes back to them and they want to come home, I hope they will be charged.

ilovepud

The use of the phrase "I think" precludes an assumption about knowing anything for certain. Which I why I used the phrase

Because you think everyone thinks the same as you?

Where did I say that, ilovepud?

But if you aren't 'their type' of Muslim you are lowest of the low and deserve to die. My family darkly joke that they would be first up against the wall.

I thought it is implied in your post SurburbanRhonda but the Bugler case touches a particular nerve for me and I get wound up by a lot of the apologists so I'm sorry if I was projecting a bit there.

Muslims do not face racism. Islam is a religion not a race. If I converted to Islam I would still be white British/Irish.

I don't sympathise with them either. I was listening to the radio yesterday (The World Tonight on Radio 4) where a lady was suggesting that they had been groomed in the same way that children are groomed by sexual predators.

If these girls ever watch the news, they know how dreadful ISIS/ISIL is, not just to Western hostages but their own people. If they really are stupid enough to want to go off to a dangerous war zone to join these evil horrifying people, more fool them.

My family haven't encountered Islamaphobia in the us/us. They have been called 'bloody foreigners' in the past though.

No problem, ilovepud.

Sickoffrozen I totally agree about the worry about who gets in after Obama. Some of the right-wing US politicians seem so extreme to me, and I'm scared they'll drag us to hell with them.

I am torn on this one tbh.

On the one hand they simply cannot have enough experience to really know what they are letting themselves in for.

On the other hand I currently have 4 teenage girls upstairs, two white british, one indian hindu and one british muslim.
All four would be horrified that some people think they are not capable of understanding the atrocities being meted out by ISIS and the like. It is incomprehensible to them that other teenage girls from their own country of residence could see things so differenty from the way they do iyswim.

We do a disservice to most of our teens by applying the catch-all excuse that being young is somehow a reason for being utterly vile.

My ten year old has a fairly good grip on the situation in the ME. And he is quite a young ten year old.

it's on a par with that girl running off with her maths teacher

WHAT!! Was the teacher a terrorist and a murderer??

The area (Bethnal Green) where these girls come from is very much a ghetto and their lives wiki be very controlled by their parents and community. They will be expected to come home straight after school, help with the housework and cooking, be segregated to a large extent socially from boys then have an arranged marriage preferably to someone from their parents' village in Bangladesh. If that was your fate as a teenager then an offer of an all expenses paid trip for a cause abroad with the prospect of being with a handsome crusader would be seen as a once in a lifetime opportunity.

I think we need to understand the lives of these children who are living parallel lives in ghettos around the country and ensure they and their families are far more assimilated into British society.

mumzy how do 'we' ensure they and their families are assimilated into society? I think it's fairly obvious that they don't want to be.

Doesn't alter the fact that teenagers do know what's right and what's wrong

But what is right and wrong depends on the lens you use.

FIL's brother joined a terrorist group when he was 16. Took part in sabotague, killing and would have bombed had he been able to get his hands on anything that would blow stuff up.

He was caught and served several years imprisonment with harsh punishment as a result. He came really close to being executed.

You might call him a hero. Since he was a partigiano. But in the context of time and place many, including those in charge and his own "Il Duce" loving family, thought he was a murderous, traitorous bastard. Who didn't know right from wrong.

I know what my concept of ISIS is, and I'm confident it is the right one. But I am 47, fully formed, have had my passions and need to be a protagonist tempered by time/maturity and have not been exposed to a drip drip drip of alternative reality where they are reframed as the avenging Heros out to do Allah's good work against the nasty people. Which is something of an advantage when resisting the blandishments of those who seek to capture hearts and minds by any means necessary. Including outright lies, propaganda, logical fallacies and false evidence.

Where an impressionable teenager is exposed to that drip drip drip and reframing of what is right and what is wrong, who are the baddies and who are the good guys, they are telling right from wrong. It's just their right/wrong radar has been heavily influenced to weight it differently to what it would have been had they not been seen as a potentially swayable mark.

I don't think the mechanism is probably all that different to that where impressionable, possibly weak and needy people can be drawn into a cult and persuaded that white is black and black is white.

If it was just a case of telling right from wrong, and it were always easy peasy to tell the sheep from the wolves in sheep's clothing then 3/4 of the world's ills would melt away in a heartbeat.

Some people don't want to integrate. I lived in Bethnal as a student and met women born here who couldn't speak English.

When my relatives moved here, their attitude was 'we live here, so we speak the language, try the food, learn about the culture and history and get on with the locals'.

Cut yourself off in your own world, pretend you are 'back home where its better' and look down on the country, culture and people if where you actually live, and you are setting yourself, and your kids, up for a shit time.

Excellent post Mutters!

I suspect one of the problems with this is that these girls tend to grow up in fairly isolated and sheltered circumstances, so they never have the typical experiences that give girls from other communities a greater awareness of danger.

You know, the only two women under 25 that I have personally known to be murdered by their boyfriends have been women from the British Muslim Pakistani community -- and I do wonder whether it is because girls from this community cannot easily pick up on the "he's a bloody psychopath" signs. They just do not have the experience to realise when something is very screwed up.

I reckon these girls have no idea how horrendous life in IS-held territory will be, or how appalling their lives with these jihadi husbands may get. And why would they? Their heads will be full of romantic ideas. It will be like Sansa Stark and her ideas about noble knights.

These girls probably do not realise that they are actually going to Syria to provide a sexual service to these fighters, even though that service will be made "permissible" through a marriage contract, which will, in reality, be not worth much more than the paper it is written upon -- who is going to enforce any of the conditions, for a start? Some IS sharia court who don't want to piss off their fighters? And that is supposing traditional clauses are actually included in said contract. And there will be no state structure to enforce anything further.

The fact is that IS know their fighters want sex and if it isn't supplied in some way, they are going to have serious discipline and morale problems. This situation is exacerbated further by the fact that IS tends to run many of its operations on a kind of demented blood lust that is not particularly very easy to suppress afterwards.

Not that this is any excuse. By going to Syria, they have willing gone to become part of the supportive structure for IS military action by providing sexual and domestic service.

I mean, we have to remember ... they tarred and feathered French women who collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation of France. And these girls have made the decision to "collaborate" with these jihadis in far less strained personal circumstances.

Very interesting post Mutters, food for thought.

I do feel a bit sorry for them. They probably have no idea what they're letting themselves in for. They most likely lead quite dull lives under strict parents and see this as a bit of adventure.

yes - they should be charged.
they are the epitomye of stupid, ill-informed, know-it-all young girls who swan off abroad with stars in their eyes to support what must be one of the most misguided causes in human history.
saying that, the life that they have chosen will certainly be one of misery, indigence, penury, slavery, abuse and rape. that's punishment enough, i'd say.

'Adventure' would be bunking off school for the day, slipping into jeans and stilettoes, and sneaking off to Alton towers for the day. Possibly beer and boys may be present.

Not flying off to a warzone where it is well documented that people are being murdered, raped, sold, dehumanised, enslaved, brutised and burned/beheaded.

thanks misc re turkey
muttersdarkly you post brilliantly o every thread ive ever seen you on. any chance youd consider becoming a politician?
absy, you wouldnt feel sorry for them if they were held hostage and then beheaded for the internet? id feel a milder version of what im sure their parents would feel - sheer blind panic

Vivienne

I'd add sexual adventure to that.

The likelihood is that they don't get many avenues for satisfying blossoming sexual urges. Mix in the attraction of romance and the accessibility of sex and WotsHsiFace down the road for a lifetime might be a less attractive and exciting prospect than some mysterious, rippling muscle Freedom Fighter, whocomes home from the battlefield to ravish you nightly. With a good chance he'll die off sooner or later and you won't have to spend your whole life gritting your teeth at his annoying habit of snuffling while he eats.

I am a full blown adult. So my libido is easily controlled and I don't have make any sweaty efforts to keep it firmly within the boundaries of what is realistic and appropriate. But I remember the force with which my teenage self experienced sexual yearnings and feelings. It was powerful stuff and left me a bit head spinny and not very willing to exercise reality checks. Putting the brakes on when it went off whirling down very much the wrong road was no easy feat. I at least had the possibility for some dipping of the toe in the water without the need to massively restructure my life in order to do so.

It won't be the whole story. But I wouldn't be surprised if the "sex dressed as romance" angle played some part in the softening up of a female teenage mark with a relatively restricted life.