Sunday, September 4, 2016

Jihad Jane: A Special Prison Visit

Jihad Jane: A Special Trip To Visit an Islamic Woman in Prison who Threatened Cartoonists of Prophet Muhammad, Pbuh. 


On Saturday, May 7, 2016 I traveled to Tallahassee, Florida's Federal Correctional Institution to visit Colleen "Fatima" LaRose, also known as "Jihad Jane." She was sentenced to ten years for conspiracy to commit murder overseas, for her role in a 2009 failed plot to kill Lars Vilks, the Swedish cartoonist who mocked the Prophet Mohammad (pbuh). She spent four years in solitary confinement but now resides in general population in a unit containing 60 women.

Fatima was very surprised to see me, as she has not been receiving any mail for two months, ever since I sent her the article I wrote about her for New Trend. Oddly enough, the prison counselor never received my visitor request form in the mail either. Thankfully, he was very kind and expedited the approval process after I overnighted him a second form. Fatima has not received a visitor in years. She greeted me warmly with a long, tight embrace. The 52 year old convert to Islam wore a khaki prison suit with a white hijab. She was in good spirits and seems to be well-liked by the guards and the co-prisoners. The guard had joked to her laughingly, "Are you gonna behead me?" She calls the other women, most of whom are much younger than herself, "my babies." "I never had children before I came to prison," she laughs.

We shared a delightful 1 ½ hour visit eating cookies and drinking soda from the vending machine in a visiting room full of families sitting at round tables. There were also tables outside in the courtyard, but Fatima preferred to stay in the air conditioning. She had me cracking up, telling me a lot of funny stories about life in prison. For example, she likes to sneak food from the kitchen. One time she had a bra full of eggs and another inmate came up to her and gave her a big hug! She was later caught bringing a tomato to a cellmate, and lost her kitchen job. She is now relegated to the dishroom but occasionally sneaks into the kitchen to help her friends cook.

She spoke of her admiration for Br. Osama bin Laden. "You can see from his face that there is a light about him." She does not believe the news about Osama being killed by US forces and dumped into the sea. She hopes that he is still alive somewhere. I mentioned to her that he is likely to have died from kidney failure. Regarding 9/11, she said, "Osama explained to the Jews and them that the Muslims don't want your western ways and you need to get your troops out of our lands. He told them again and again. They were forewarned." She listens to the news and continues to be very interested in ongoing developments such as ISIS.

"I want to support them," she said, "But I think they've gone too far, burning that guy alive." I explained to her what I had learned from New Trend, that the man was a fighter pilot whose plane had gone down after he had firebombed people. "Oh, I never knew that!" she exclaimed. "In that case, he deserved it."

She said there are about 15 Muslim sisters in her prison, who attend jummah prayers. She is the only one keeping hijab. "They all call it 'high-jab!'" she laughs in her charming southern accent. She wears a black hijab to work and the white one other times.

Fatima has a very sunny disposition, she is energetic and friendly to everyone and seems to be respected and loved by the women in her unit. She has found a way to bridge the gap between Muslims and non-Muslims by staunchly refusing to back down from her own beliefs and values at the same time as graciously and lovingly accepting other people for who they choose to be - one of her favorite people to socialize with is a Spanish-speaking religious Jew who is also transgender. She introduced me to a pretty young black woman passing by. "Her husband is my baby." The "husband," Fatima's cellmate, is injecting male hormones and growing a beard.

"There's a lot of that going on in here!" she whispers, laughing cheerfully at the juicy gossip.

Fatima, who is expected to be released in Pennsylvania in 2018, is looking forward to becoming a part of a real Muslim community. Her interaction with the Ummah was almost entirely online. Fatima had become obsessed with jihad after learning about the situation in Palestine.

Fatima said people often asked her if she will do anything jihad-related again, once she is released but she says no. "They are not going to ask me to do anything else. I have already proved myself," she said of her mentors, whom she believes to be with al Qaeda. "I was very honored as a woman to be chosen for a mission. Usually they give those kinds of jobs to the brothers. I don't like that I'm in prison, but it's not that bad." She has always been very patient with the decision of Allah, even when she was in the Special Housing Unit (SHU) in solitary.

Regardless of what one believes about her choice of action, it says a lot about her character that she was willing to sacrifice herself in order to stand up for her brothers and sisters around the world, that she had never met, who had done nothing for her. Fatima's future plan upon release is to grow flowers and vegetables. For now, she is looking forward to fasting for Ramadan.

[New Trend urges readers to write to the sister.]

COLLEEN LAROSE
Register Number: 61657-066
FCI TALLAHASSEE
FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION
501 CAPITAL CIRCLE, NE
TALLAHASSEE, FL 32301

6 comments:

  1. Ah!
    The ZEAL of the convert and their utter IGNORANCE!

    JEWISH RABBI WHO CREATED ISLAM

    JEWISHENCYCLOPEDIA
    The unedited full-text of the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia
    SCHWARZ, JOSEPH:
    Palestinian geographer; born at Flosz, Bavaria, Oct. 22, 1804; died at Jerusalem
    Feb. 5, 1865. When he was seventeen years old he graduated as teacher
    from the Königliches Schullehrerseminar of Colberg, after which he joined his brother Israel at the University of Würzburg, where for five years he devoted himself to the history and geography of the Holy Land, and published a map of Palestine (1829; republished at Vienna, 1831, and Triest, 1832). It was his ardent desire, however, to study in Palestine itself the physical history and geography of the Holy Land, where his knowledge of Talmudic sources and early Jewish writers would be of more service. Accordingly he decided to settle in Jerusalem, whither he went in 1833. Schwarz then began a series of journeys and explorations in various parts of Palestine, to which he devoted about fifteen years.

    The results of his investigations and researches into the history, geography, geology, fauna, and flora of that country have placed him in the front rank of Palestinian explorers and geographers. HE IS THE GREATEST JEWISH AUTHORITY ON PALESTINIAN MATTERS SINCE ESTORI FARHI (1282-1357), the author of “Kaftor wa-Feraḥ.”

    (Be sure to Google this article:
    HISTORY OF PALESTINE
    614-1096 C.E.
    From the Accession of the Mahomedans to that of the Europeans.
    By Rabbi Joseph Schwarz, 1850

    Rabbi Shallum, son of the then Resh Gelutha, in Babel, aka Abu Bachr al Chaliva al Zadik. Abu Bakr, became the first Caliph, and was in fact son of the then Resh Gelutha, in Babel, who perceiving a dreadful predicament, sent Rabbi Shallum to Mahomed, and told him to offer his submission, friendship, and services, and endeavour to enter with him into a friendly compact. Mahomed accepted Rabbi Shallum’s proposition with pleasure, conceived a great affection for him, and took his daughter, Aisha, a handsome young child, for wife; he made him also a general in his army, and gave him the name of Abu Bachr al Chaliva al Zadik, literally:

    The father of the maiden, the descendant of the righteous; this means, that of all his wives, who were either widows or divorced women, this one was the only one who had never been married before, and then she was the granddaughter of the celebrated chief of the captivity; therefore, the descendant of the righteous. This occurrence induced Mahomed to give up his terrible intention to destroy the Jews in his country, and thus did Rabbi Shallum save his people.

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  2. THE MOTHER OF MOHAMMED, AMINA WAS OF JEWISH BIRTH:
    Von Hammer

    “Mohammed, who was the only son of Abdallah, a Pagan, and Amina, a Jewess, and was descended from the noble but impoverished family of Hashim, of the priestly tribe of Koreish, who were the chiefs and keepers of the national sanctuary of the Kaaba, and pretended to trace their origin to Ismael, the son of Abraham and Hagar, was born at Mecca, August 20, A.D. 570 …’

    At that period, there were many “Jews’ in that area. Again from The History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, volume 5, page 202:
    “Seven hundred years before the death of Mahomet the Jews were settled in Arabia; and a far greater multitude was expelled from the Holy Land in the wars of Titus and Hadrian. The industrious exiles aspired to liberty and power: they erected synagogues in the cities, and castles in the wilderness; and their Gentile converts were confounded with the children of Israel [Jews] …”

    Waves of Israelites went to Arabia bringing Judaism in various stages of development
    The traditional view of Arabian history centers on Yemen. It is assumed that a fairly developed civilization grew in the south of the Arabian Peninsula. For several hundred years it grew rich by exporting gold, frankincense and myrrh to the Roman Empire; as well as controlling the overland routes to India and the East. The first collapse of the Marib dam around 450 CE; the decline of the use of frankincense due to the Christianization of Rome; and the Rome success bypassing the desert by using a sea route led to the collapse of southern Arabian society. This in turn led to waves of immigration from the South to North, from the city to the desert.

    Dr. Günter Lüling proposes an alternative paradigm.[1] He proposes a “more historical picture of Central Arabia, inundated throughout a millennium by heretical Israelites”. He envisions waves of Israelite refugees headed, North to South, to Arabia bringing with them Judaism in various stages of development. Linguistic and literary-historical research in the Qur’an tends to support the notion of a more northerly origin for linguistic development of Arabic.[2] Here is a brief summary of three of these waves of Judaic immigration: Herodian, Sadducean and Zealot (explained in more detail

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  3. THE MOTHER OF MOHAMMED, AMINA WAS OF JEWISH BIRTH:
    PART 2

    KAABA BUILT BY JEWS

    During the time of Ptolemy, the native population of Cush originally inhabited both sides of the Red Sea: on the east, southern and eastern Arabia; and on the west, Abyssinia (Ethiopia-Eritrea). During the reign of Ptolemy VI Philometor (r 181–145 BCE), the Jewish High Priest Onias IV built a Jewish Temple in Heliopolis, Egypt and also one in Mecca, Arabia. He did this to fulfill his understanding of the prophecy of Isaiah 19:19, “In that day shall there be an altar to the Lord (Heliopolis) in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar at the border (Mecca) thereof to the Lord.” The border of Ptolemy’s empire was in Arabia.

    The first wave of immigrants came with the success of the Maccabean, later Herodian, Judeo-Arab kingdom. Romanized Arabs (and Jews) from the trans-Jordan began migrating southward. The Tobiads which briefly had controlled Jerusalem extended their power southward from Petra and established the “Tubba” dynasty of kings of Himyar. Yathrib was settled during this period.

    The second wave of immigrants came before the destruction of the Temple, when refugees fleeing the war, as well as the Sadducean leadership, fled to Arabia. Khaibar was established as a city of Sadducean Cohen-Priests at this time.
    The third wave of immigrants were mostly refugees and soldiers from Bar Kochba’s revolt – fighters trained in the art of war and zealously nationalistic – sought refugee in Arabia.

    This last wave of immigrants included people who are known in Islamic literature as the Aus and the Khazraj. Around 300 CE, they were forced out of Syria by the rising strength of Christian Rome, and the adoption of the Ghassan leader, Harith I, of Christianity. At first the Aus and Khazraj lived on the outskirts of Yathrib. According to Islamic sources, the Khazraj, headed by Malik ibn Ajlan, sought and obtained military assistance from the Bani Ghasaan; and having enticed the principal chiefs of Yathrib into an enclosed tent, massacred them.[4] Then the citizens of Yathrib, beguiled into security by a treacherous peace, attended a feast given by their unprincipled foes; and there a second butchery took place, in which they lost the whole of their leaders.[5]

    REFERENCES:
    1.”A new Paradigm for the Rise of Islam and its Consequences for a New Paradigm of the History of Israel” by Dr. Günter Lüling; Originally appeared in The Journal of Higher Criticism Nr. 7/1, Spring 2000, pp. 23-53.
    2.Hagarism, Crone and Cook
    3.See the authors essays “The Prophet Muhammed as a descendant of Onias III” and “From Bar Kochba to the Prophet Muhammed”
    4.See Katib at Wackidi, p. 287.
    5. “Life of Mohamet I”, by Sir Walter Muir, Chapter III, Section 6

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  4. LEONTOPOLIS

    Onias IV described in Jewish history as someone trying to fulfill the prophecies of Isaiah 19. He was son of high priest Onias III in the Jerusalem temple, who was humiliated and booted out by the Hasmonean Jews. Josephus says about his establishing a temple in Egypt:
    “Yet did not Onias do this out of a sober disposition, but he had a mind to contend with the Jews at Jerusalem, and could not forget the indignation he had for being banished thence. Accordingly, he thought that by building this temple he should draw away a great number from them to himself.”

    “LEONTOPOLIS: Place in the nome of Heliopolis, Egypt, situated 180 stadia from Memphis; famous as containing a Jewish sanctuary, the only one outside of Jerusalem where sacrifices were offered….According to Josephus, the temple of Leontopolis existed for 343 years, though the general opinion is that this number must be changed to 243. It was closed either by the governor of Egypt, Lupus, or by his successor, Paulinus, about three years after the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem; and the sacrificial gifts, or rather the interior furnishings, were confiscated for the treasury of Vespasian (“B. J.” vii. 10, § 4), the emperor fearing that through this temple Egypt might become a new center for Jewish rebellion.

    Josephus’ account in the “Antiquities” is therefore more probable, namely, that the builder of the temple was a son of the murdered Onias III., and that, a mere youth at the time of his father’s death, he had fled to the court of Alexandria in consequence of the Syrian persecutions, perhaps because he thought that salvation would come to his people from Egypt (“Ant.” xii. 5, § 1; ib. 9, § 7). Ptolemy VI. Philometor was King of Egypt at that time. He probably had not yet given up his claims to Cœle-Syria and Judea, and gladly gave refuge to such a prominent personage of the neighboring country. Onias now requested the king and his sister and wife, Cleopatra, to allow him to build a sanctuary in Egypt similar to the one at Jerusalem, where he would employ Levites and priests of his own race (ib. xiii. 3, § 1); and he referred to the prediction of the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah. xix. 19) that a Jewish temple would be erected in Egypt (“Ant.” l.c.). The Onias temple was not exactly similar to the Temple at Jerusalem, being more in the form of a high tower; and as regards the interior arrangement, it had not a candelabrum, but a hanging lamp.

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  5. LEONTOPOLIS
    PART 2

    In the Talmud the origin of the temple of Onias is narrated with legendary additions, there being two versions of the account (Men. 109b). It must be noted that here also Onias is mentioned as the son of Simon, and that Isaiah’s prophecy is referred to.
    In regard to the Law the temple of Onias (…, handed down in the name of Saadia Gaon as … ) was looked upon as neither legitimate nor illegitimate, but as standing midway between the worship of Yhwh and idolatry (Men. 109a; Tosef., Men. xiii. 12-14);”
    As you can see from the description above, this rogue high priest, Onias IV, who felt abandoned by Hasmonean Jews, constructed a temple on the border of Egypt, with a tower (pillar/ minaret), where he and his descendants performed sacrifices and dreamed of uniting his family with Egyptians and Assyrians, for the purpose of fulfilling the prophecy in ISAIAH 19. His temple was closed three years after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem (the Romans fearing it could become the center for a Jewish revolt). After that, there is no mention of the whereabouts of this family among Jews.
    On the other end, we have Muhammad, claiming to be described in the Bible, leads a revolt against the Romans, fulfills Isaiah 19, worships a Jewish form of God, with an altar and a high tower, no candlebrums, lamps hanging, performing sacrifices, circling the Kabaa etc like a Jewish priest, on the border of Egypt, ministering to non Jews (as prophesized in Isaiah 19) and belonging to a tribe that was founded by a man whose DNA is identical to the Cohens and who lived at the time when Onias Temple was shut down! I don’t think it is that hard to see the connection here. All it would have taken is for the Romans to bear down on the Jews, and this Jewish family, like so many others, would have moved south, but stayed along the border of Egypt and settled down in Mecca, where they could minister to the locals, as they had in Leontopolis and fulfill Isaiah 19. It does not seem that difficult to imagine.


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  6. With liberal backing, who needs enemies. Ms.Friedman, please let me know the moment you go undercover and explore the Middle East, and talk to other Muslims instead making your personal bias judgements on what DAESH is doing to others, (or not doing) including Muslims. If Muslims like Jane wished to stand up for the Ummah, they would use their brains, not weapons and violence. And for you to advocate this is one more reasons there is such negative cloud over Islam and Muslims. You are not helping by playing the victim and then turning around and being intolerant of others and I mean many others, you seem to have spite in your soul that allows you some grandiose thinking that you are above so many- playing the blame game, you are doing exactly what you accuse others of doing. Heaping blame to other religions and peoples is not the way, it doesn help. Try taking some responsibility for negativity that is crossing paths with Islam, you can't have it both way. Your ego surpasses your knowledge and true path, and you seem to think Allah is giving you his support for some of the rubbish you print, not understanding how far you residing outside of goodness and truth for others, it's self- deceptions, an inflated ego keen to keep this going, and having others reaffirming your worth, as though you speak the truth, is not a long-term way to think or for peace. Glorifying people that kill innocent buildings doesn't make you a good Muslim.

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