Her name is “Toronto Jane.” And according to this CBC report she’s the new face of terrorism: an ISIS recruit who recently left Canada to go fight with the Jihadist group in Iraq.
Apparently, it’s not just radicalized young men from Canada and elsewhere in the Western world who are attracted to the Jihadist cause. Women and girls, according to a number of recent news reports, are also “falling into the grip” of radical Islam. Police have reportedly tracked other recent female Jihadis to a female recruiter in Edmonton.
Some are venturing into the war zone to reportedly marry ISIS fighters. But some analysts are so far stumped as to what else may be attracting women to the cause.
As Jeff Weyers, a security researcher, told the CBC: “You wonder what the attraction is for a female to go to the Islamic State, and join these groups given all the knowledge that we have of what happens to a female in terms of being used in servitude-type roles.”
Women are not supposed to be allowed to fight in Jihad, but in fact, women have been used to facilitate the entry of men into the cause of radical Islam for some time. Al-Qaeda has had a female arm known as Mujaidaat since at least 2006.
As a report of the Canadian Centre for Strategic Studies points out, our own gender biases in the West has led us to underestimate the role of women in radical Islam. In fact, a third of all terrorist attacks since 1985 (this would include by radical left-wing terrorist organizations) have been carried out by women, according to one estimate.
Women are joining ISIS for many of the same reasons young men do, feelings of cultural alienation among them.
Not all experts ascribe to the theory that the attitudes of those venturing half way around the world to fight for the cause are rooted in their isolation in the West.
Take the killing of 10 staffers at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in France last month and in response to that publication’s publishing of Muhammad cartoons. Precious little ink was spilled on what role the fact the two attackers came from the no-go zones in the Paris suburbs, the banlieues known for high unemployment and crime, may have played in their radicalization.
Instead, the incident was framed as an attack on freedom of expression – as in, what the terrorists really despise about the West is our freedoms. Protestors brought pencils to rallies around the world to emphasize the point.
But there’s ample evidence to suggest marginalization of young Muslim men and women is contributing to their radicalization in the West.
Fahim Ahmad, one of the young men arrested in the Toronto 18 terror plot, told The Intercept recently about his feelings of anger because of social alienation: “There would be things like people calling you ‘terrorist,’ or mistreating you for how you were dressed or being racially profiled by police. You start to feel like you don’t fit in, and the only way you can fit in is by maybe going away somewhere else, like maybe the country your parents came from, or maybe an ‘Islamic State’ somewhere.”
So why so many recent reports of women joining ISIS? There’s evidence of young women joining radical Islamist groups like Al-Qaeda for some years now.
Ahmed Hussen, president of the Canadian Somali Congress, told the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security in 2011 that recruiters have been turning their attention to women in Somali communities in Toronto and Ottawa, around the same time as reports of dozens of young men disappearing to go fight with Al Shabaab in Somalia, surfaced a few years back.
Hussen cited “growing pains of integration into the larger Canadian mainstream” as a driving force. He noted statistics showing the median income of Somali families as three times lower than other visible minorities in Canada. And unemployment rates among Somali youth hovering around 40 per cent.
Hussen said the response of Canadian authorities “is to view this phenomenon through the prism of law enforcement.” And that “there has been no parallel attempt to counter the toxic anti-Western narrative that creates a culture of victimhood.”
Hussen was speaking mostly about young men, but integrating into secular norms is arguably just as hard if not harder for young Muslim women, whose job prospects may also be compromised by their choice to wear a hijab or headscarf, for example.
That’s certainly the case in France, where a ban on wearing religious symbols in the public service has spawned widespread discrimination documented by Amnesty International, among other human rights groups.
No similar ban exists here, although Canada banned face coverings for people swearing their oath of citizenship in 2011. The courts struck that ban down, but the feds are appealing. In 2013, the Parti Quebecois introduced a bill in the Quebec national assembly to ban the wearing of religious symbols similar to France for employees in the public service, but that proposal died after the Liberals swept into office.
Still, widespread discrimination exists, as noted in poll after poll on Canadian perceptions of Muslims. A 2012 report of the Ontario Human Rights Commission says Muslims in Canada have experienced “increased scrutiny, negative stereotyping and discrimination” since the terror attacks on 9/11, which “re-ignited existing perceptions of Muslims as ‘different.’”
The report focused on more subtle forms of Islamophobia in workplaces and Canadian society in general, those cases “which do not always make it into the media spotlight,” and concluded that the social implications of those “are more disturbing because they contribute to silencing, marginalization or exclusion of Canadian Muslims.”
Only this week it was reported that a Quebec judge refused to hear the case of a Montreal woman because she was wearing a headscarf. The woman was in court to get back the car her son was caught driving while his license was under suspension. “I felt that I am not Canadian anymore,” she said.
enzom@nowtoronto.com | @enzodimatteo
