ianstone
03-14-2010, 12:45 PM
From The Sunday Times
March 14, 2010
Jihad Jones spread fear in suburban US
Christina Lamb in Washington
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00696/LaRose360_696810a.jpg
Colleen LaRose was arrested over an alleged plot to murder the cartoonist Lars Vilks
div#related-article-links p a, div#related-article-links p a:visited {color:#06c;} SINCE terrorists turned planes into bombs on September 11, 2001, US intelligence has been on constant alert for the latest threat from Islamic extremists. The last place they expected to find it was in an army of bored divorcées from small-town America.
Yesterday it was revealed that a second American woman had been arrested, this time a blonde Colorado mother, just days after the FBI announced it was holding a housewife from suburban Pennsylvania who called herself Jihad Jane.
Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, 31, from the small town of Leadville in the Rocky Mountains, left her job as a medical orderly last September and set off with her six-year-old son to meet a Muslim man she had encountered online. The next her family knew she was under arrest in Ireland in an investigation into an alleged conspiracy to murder a Swedish cartoonist.
Like Jihad Jane, 46, whose real name is Colleen LaRose, Paulin-Ramirez was a discontented divorcée who spent her spare time on internet social networking sites.
LaRose had posted a desperate message complaining: “I’m so bored, I want to scream.” Paulin-Ramirez, who is said by family sources to have been married as many as four times, was equally fed up.
“She never liked who she was,” Christine Holcomb-Mott, her mother, told The Wall Street Journal. “She was always looking for something.”
Instead of taking a lover, or Prozac, or finding a hobby, both women decided the answer lay in radical Islamic jihad causes.
Paulin-Ramirez, a nursing student, changed her Facebook photograph to one depicting her in a hijab with only her eyes showing and told her astounded family she had converted to Islam. “It came out of left field,” her mother said.
She began posting messages on Facebook forums with headings such as “Stop calling Muslims terrorists!” and communicating with Islamic radicals around the globe.
LaRose, 1,800 miles away in her second-floor flat in Main Street, Pennsburg, was doing the same on her laptop.
Kurt Gorman, her then boyfriend, said he had no idea of her secret life and believes she had never met any Muslims before fleeing their home last August. “She seemed normal to me,” he told local newspapers.
On Thursday LaRose will appear in court on charges of conspiring with terrorists to kill a Swedish cartoonist who had drawn the head of the prophet Muhammad on top of a dog’s body.
The charges have astonished those who knew her. “She wasn’t no rocket scientist,” said Gorman. Neighbours said they often heard her talking to cats.
LaRose came to the FBI’s attention in July, alerted by a member of the Jawa Report, the online community, who was concerned that she was using her Twitter social networking account to raise funds for Pakistani militants.
A month later LaRose took off for Europe. There she declared online: “Only death will stop me now I am so close to the target.”
In September she applied to join Ladonia, an online artists’ community run by Lars Vilks, allegedly her intended victim. Vilks cartoons of Muhammad in a Swedish newspaper in 2007 caused an outcry among Muslims and a $100,000 (£66,000) bounty was put on his head.
According to court documents, LaRose tried to track Vilks down but on October 15 she flew back to Philadelphia. She was arrested as she stepped off the plane. Held on charges of identity theft, she was later charged with terrorism. Her testimony apparently led to the arrest of Paulin-Ramirez and six others in Ireland last week. One was an Algerian said to be Paulin-Ramirez’s husband.
That the two women were arrested in connection with the same alleged plot suggests they were in contact, although no details have yet emerged.
The pair are the latest in a string of American citizens to have been arrested in recent months, suggesting the country is facing a rising problem of home-grown terrorism.
Until recently US authorities believed this was a problem peculiar to Britain. “The feeling was we’re a country of immigrants and people tend to come to the US and feel accepted, whereas in Europe they are caught between two worlds,” said Stephen Grand, director of US-Muslim relations at the Brookings Institution, a leading Washington DC think tank.
The past eight months have seen 13 cases in which 30 American citizens allegedly plotted to carry out attacks or joined jihadist organisations in Pakistan or Somalia.
“I think these are just the tip of the iceberg,” said Sue Myrick, a Republican member of the House intelligence committee. “But people in this country are in denial. They don’t want to admit what’s happening and it scares me.”
Last week Sharif Mobley, 26, from New Jersey was arrested in Yemen by the country’s intelligence services during a sweep of suspected Al-Qaeda members. For six years before moving to Yemen, Mobley had worked at three nuclear power plants in New Jersey.
Al-Qaeda has long tried to attract Americans and Europeans to its cause. The recruitment of American women as home-grown jihadists presents a nightmare for the US authorities. “It’s like looking for the proverbial needle,” said a senior FBI official.
The women’s alleged target is far from complacent. Vilks, the cartoonist, has installed barbed wire in his downstairs hall, barricaded all the doors to his home and keeps an axe within easy reach.
“If anyone comes I will be able to fight for 30 minutes,” he said. “I won’t hesitate to use the axe if it is a life or death fight.” He has even written a poem about his alleged assassin. “Jihad Jane will come when it is dark . . .” it starts. “It is a sexual drama,” he explained.
We have this type of anarchist, fifth columnist, sleepers and dick warts buried within our shores to my shame and disbelief. Never thought you had them.
March 14, 2010
Jihad Jones spread fear in suburban US
Christina Lamb in Washington
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00696/LaRose360_696810a.jpg
Colleen LaRose was arrested over an alleged plot to murder the cartoonist Lars Vilks
div#related-article-links p a, div#related-article-links p a:visited {color:#06c;} SINCE terrorists turned planes into bombs on September 11, 2001, US intelligence has been on constant alert for the latest threat from Islamic extremists. The last place they expected to find it was in an army of bored divorcées from small-town America.
Yesterday it was revealed that a second American woman had been arrested, this time a blonde Colorado mother, just days after the FBI announced it was holding a housewife from suburban Pennsylvania who called herself Jihad Jane.
Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, 31, from the small town of Leadville in the Rocky Mountains, left her job as a medical orderly last September and set off with her six-year-old son to meet a Muslim man she had encountered online. The next her family knew she was under arrest in Ireland in an investigation into an alleged conspiracy to murder a Swedish cartoonist.
Like Jihad Jane, 46, whose real name is Colleen LaRose, Paulin-Ramirez was a discontented divorcée who spent her spare time on internet social networking sites.
LaRose had posted a desperate message complaining: “I’m so bored, I want to scream.” Paulin-Ramirez, who is said by family sources to have been married as many as four times, was equally fed up.
“She never liked who she was,” Christine Holcomb-Mott, her mother, told The Wall Street Journal. “She was always looking for something.”
Instead of taking a lover, or Prozac, or finding a hobby, both women decided the answer lay in radical Islamic jihad causes.
Paulin-Ramirez, a nursing student, changed her Facebook photograph to one depicting her in a hijab with only her eyes showing and told her astounded family she had converted to Islam. “It came out of left field,” her mother said.
She began posting messages on Facebook forums with headings such as “Stop calling Muslims terrorists!” and communicating with Islamic radicals around the globe.
LaRose, 1,800 miles away in her second-floor flat in Main Street, Pennsburg, was doing the same on her laptop.
Kurt Gorman, her then boyfriend, said he had no idea of her secret life and believes she had never met any Muslims before fleeing their home last August. “She seemed normal to me,” he told local newspapers.
On Thursday LaRose will appear in court on charges of conspiring with terrorists to kill a Swedish cartoonist who had drawn the head of the prophet Muhammad on top of a dog’s body.
The charges have astonished those who knew her. “She wasn’t no rocket scientist,” said Gorman. Neighbours said they often heard her talking to cats.
LaRose came to the FBI’s attention in July, alerted by a member of the Jawa Report, the online community, who was concerned that she was using her Twitter social networking account to raise funds for Pakistani militants.
A month later LaRose took off for Europe. There she declared online: “Only death will stop me now I am so close to the target.”
In September she applied to join Ladonia, an online artists’ community run by Lars Vilks, allegedly her intended victim. Vilks cartoons of Muhammad in a Swedish newspaper in 2007 caused an outcry among Muslims and a $100,000 (£66,000) bounty was put on his head.
According to court documents, LaRose tried to track Vilks down but on October 15 she flew back to Philadelphia. She was arrested as she stepped off the plane. Held on charges of identity theft, she was later charged with terrorism. Her testimony apparently led to the arrest of Paulin-Ramirez and six others in Ireland last week. One was an Algerian said to be Paulin-Ramirez’s husband.
That the two women were arrested in connection with the same alleged plot suggests they were in contact, although no details have yet emerged.
The pair are the latest in a string of American citizens to have been arrested in recent months, suggesting the country is facing a rising problem of home-grown terrorism.
Until recently US authorities believed this was a problem peculiar to Britain. “The feeling was we’re a country of immigrants and people tend to come to the US and feel accepted, whereas in Europe they are caught between two worlds,” said Stephen Grand, director of US-Muslim relations at the Brookings Institution, a leading Washington DC think tank.
The past eight months have seen 13 cases in which 30 American citizens allegedly plotted to carry out attacks or joined jihadist organisations in Pakistan or Somalia.
“I think these are just the tip of the iceberg,” said Sue Myrick, a Republican member of the House intelligence committee. “But people in this country are in denial. They don’t want to admit what’s happening and it scares me.”
Last week Sharif Mobley, 26, from New Jersey was arrested in Yemen by the country’s intelligence services during a sweep of suspected Al-Qaeda members. For six years before moving to Yemen, Mobley had worked at three nuclear power plants in New Jersey.
Al-Qaeda has long tried to attract Americans and Europeans to its cause. The recruitment of American women as home-grown jihadists presents a nightmare for the US authorities. “It’s like looking for the proverbial needle,” said a senior FBI official.
The women’s alleged target is far from complacent. Vilks, the cartoonist, has installed barbed wire in his downstairs hall, barricaded all the doors to his home and keeps an axe within easy reach.
“If anyone comes I will be able to fight for 30 minutes,” he said. “I won’t hesitate to use the axe if it is a life or death fight.” He has even written a poem about his alleged assassin. “Jihad Jane will come when it is dark . . .” it starts. “It is a sexual drama,” he explained.
We have this type of anarchist, fifth columnist, sleepers and dick warts buried within our shores to my shame and disbelief. Never thought you had them.