Jihad Jane

Jane was born and raised the daughter of Lutherans in surburban St. Louis. With blond hair and blue eyes, she was “the perfect Aryan,” of German descent like many people in that part of the country. Therefore, her family was stunned when she announced that she was marrying a student from Iraq, Hassan, and converting to Islam. What did she possibly see in the swarthy Iraqi, who was almost ten years younger than her? Her answer was that he was "good" to her and had been exceedingly polite when they first met; he treated her with respect.

Jane was now in her thirties, twice married and twice divorced, the mother of three children by three different fathers. She had battled drug addiction and seemed to have won. Not only was her drug counseling being financed by the state, as a condition of her probation for a drug offense, but the state was also paying for her college tuitition. Some members of her family groused that it was “a crock,” but at least she was no longer selling herself on the streets for crack cocaine. At least the state was no longer threatening to take her kids away, but that was because her mother had gotten custody of the kids while she was in jail.

Since her family didn’t approve of Hassan, who called himself “Sam,” Jane saw little of her family after the wedding. Jane and Sam moved to the part of town where Muslims from the Middle East lived and joined a mosque. She took to wearing the hijab and the long, flowing robes that observant Muslim women often wear. Except for some verses of the Qur’an, it really wasn’t necessary for Jane to learn Arabic, because there were many second-generation Muslims who spoke English among themselves rather than Arabic, but Jane started learning to read and write in Arabic at the mosque in a class led by the Iman’s wife.

The Iman was from somewhere in the Persian Gulf, like Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, but he spoke fluent English. He preached his sermons in English, since there were some people in the mosque, like Jane, who weren’t fluent in Arabic.

At first, the Imam preached about the need for the people in his congregation to be good Muslims. Women were admonished to “behave modestly” and not “reveal their nudity” towards men other than their husbands. Since all the women covered their hair with hijabs, and some even covered their faces with the niqab, Jane took it to mean that women should cover as much of their bodies as possible, to avoid the “prying eyes” of strange men.

However, the Iman’s sermons began to take on a more political tone. After the bombing of the World Trade Center, he began to condemn the way Muslims were being treated. There were rumors all across America of Muslims being beaten in the streets, and Muslim women having their shawls pulled off their heads and veils removed from their faces. While few, if any, of the women had actually experienced this behavior, all of them believed without question that these things were happening to Muslims all across the country, and even in Canada. Why would the Imam lie? Thus the Imam gave voice to their fears.

Once the United States was at war in Iraq, the Imam started condemning the US military for atrocities against Iraqi civilians. How he knew, once could only guess. Perhaps people from back home had told him. Maybe he heard it from Al-Jizeera. Then the world learned about how Iraqi prisoners had been treated at the prison in Abu Ghraib, and the Imam’s sermons assumed an even more strident tone.

You could say that the Imam went over the edge when he heard about a newspaper in Sweden that had printed a cartoon that was “offensive to Islam.” Not only had the cartoonist implied that the Prophet was a terrorist by concealing a bomb in his turban, but the cartoonist had even made an image of Him. What blasphemy! For it is understood among Muslims that no Muslim should ever made an image of Mohammed, since nobody today can even say what he looked like.

Then the Imam thundered, “This man must die! But who will kill him?”

Let it suffice to say that the Imam wasn’t the only person that day who went over the edge. Jane and Sam decided that they must kill the Swedish newspaper cartoonist. Over the Internet, “Jihad Jane” searched for like-minded Muslims who also wanted to silence this Swedish infidel once and for all.

In time, her web searches seemed to bear fruit. Somebody in Europe offered to purchase airplane tickets for her and her husband if they would fly to Europe and do the job. Together with this unknown person in Europe, Jane and Sam hatched up a plot to assassinate the cartoonist. They decided that Jane would make contact with the cartoonist and lure him through the promise of sex to a hotel, where Sam would stab him to death. Because Jane was blond-haired and blue-eyed, and American, nobody would ever suspect that she was a Muslim. She wouldn't be wearing the hijab.

Jane contacted the cartoonist online and told him in an e-mail how much she admired his work. After they send a few e-mails back and forth, she sent him a picture. Finally, the cartoonist said that he would like to meet her.

As Jane and Sam were about to board a connector flight to Frankfort, Germany, from where they would take another flight to Stockholm, they were arrested at the airport by the FBI. The person who had purchased the tickets for them was really an FBI agent, not a terrorist. What’s more, the cartoonist had been informed of the plot on his life and encouraged to play along with it, to lure Jane and Sam to the airport, where they were arrested.

Jane and Sam have spent months in a federal prison, waiting to be formally charged. The Imam and his wife were deported because they had let their visas lapse without having them renewed.