Jihad Jane

Never gets past the kind of introductory material you could find online

It's a very interesting and important case as we look at the metastasizing of the ideology, and whether more and more Americans are being drawn to the narrative that al-Qaeda has espoused for many years and has grown more and more popular around the world.

• Juan Zarate (Senior Advisor, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC)

Written and directed by Ciaran Cassidy, Jihad Jane tells the stories of Colleen LaRose (the eponymous Jihad Jane) and Jamie Paulin Ramirez (Jihad Jamie), two forty-something white American women who were separately radicalised by Islamic extremists online and brought into an al-Qaeda plot to kill artist Lars Vilks. Dubbed the "new face of terrorism" by the almost comically ill-informed and sensationalist American news media, LaRose and Ramirez were ultimately revealed as two fragile and damaged women, each of whom had a history of abuse and were more interested in finding a sense of belonging than in politics. The film is a decent enough overview of the subject, but there's very little here that you can't find on Wikipedia, with Cassidy failing to engage with the more interesting sociological themes behind LaRose and Ramirez's stories.

In 2012, LaRose and her boyfriend Kurt took a trip to Amsterdam, where she met a Muslim man in an elevator, subsequently having a brief sexual relationship with him. Returning home to Colorado, where she and Kurt lived with her mother and his father, she started to spend more and more time watching YouTube videos of Israeli air raids on the Gaza Strip. In the comments, she would often converse with a user known as Black Flag, who invited her to join a jihadi chatroom. An Algerian whose real name was Ali Charaf Damache, Black Flag soon revealed (in unencrypted conversations) that he was the leader of an al-Qaeda cell based in County Waterford in the Republic of Ireland, convincing both LaRose an...