| Catching up with our girl, who we last saw back in January. |
[Rudaw] Tania Joya, the ex-wife of a big shot for the Islamic State, speaks during an interview with AFP about her experience and Preventing Violent Extremism Training, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., July 19, 2019.
Tania Joya
| ...Bangladeshi-British former wife of the senior Westerner in ISIS. she was known as Joya Choudhury Tania before she and the kiddies left ISIS (and Islam) to settle with her former husband's parents in Dallas, spilling all she knew to the authorities. She gave a long interview back in January about the changes in her life, including her new marriage, baptizing her children as Christians, and celebrating the Jewish holidays with her friends at the local Reform synagogue... |
has devoted her life to "reprogramming" Death Eaters and reintroducing them into society ‐ a process she understands well as a "former Islamic jihadist" herself.
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"My aim is for them to feel a sense of remorse and to train them so that they can be good citizens once they are released from prison, so they can adjust to society," Joya said during a visit to Washington, to present a project on preventing murderous Moslem violence.
Born in 1984 near London to a Moslem Bangladeshi family, Joya grew up confronted by racism and the struggles of integration. She radicalized at age 17, after the September 11 terror attacks in New York and the late Osama bin Laden
 ... who is now neither a strong horse nor a weak horse, but a dead horse...
's call for a global jihad.
In 2004, she married an American Moslem-convert, Yahya al-Bahrumi (born John Georgelas)
| ...also known as Yahya Abu Hassan. After a stint in American prison for plotting to hack the AIPAC website, he took his family to Morsi’s Egypt, leaving for ISIS in Syria only after the Muslim Brotherhood government was overthrown. After Tania Joya left him, he became the right-hand man of formerly living IS chief strategist Abu Muhammad al-Adnani... |
She began advocating for an Islamic state, for which her three children would be soldiers.
But in 2013, her husband took her and their children against her will to northwestern Syria to join jihadist hard boys. Joya reported her husband to US authorities and, after three weeks, fled Syria to the United States.
Joya settled in Texas, her husband's home state. There, she rejected Islam and changed her life, divorced and re-married.
RE-PROGRAMMING, GIVING THEM HOPE
Yahya, her first husband, joined the Islamic State group, which would soon control large swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq. He was in charge of the group's English-language propaganda, and Joya said he became the "highest-ranking American" in the IS group.
He died in 2017 during fighting in Mayadin, in northern Syria, as the so-called IS "caliphate" crumbled.
| Good. It must be a relief that he can’t haunt her and the children anymore, being as he will be much too busy exploring the torments of Hell. A relief for his parents, too. |
However this created a new problem ‐ Western jihadists or their spouses and children wanting to come home.
Joya realized that she had something to offer. "It's really important to de-radicalize them, rehabilitate" these people, she said.
"It's reprogramming them and giving them a sense of hope in the political process."
It's also important to "get them to understand the psychology and the patterns... what led them to extremism," understanding "the rejection many in the US and Europe
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
faced growing up there, the cultural conflict, the crisis they went through," she said.
"Once it's all explained to them, very logically, they will accept it just as I did."
Joya favors repatriating foreign rebels from the Middle East so they can be judged in their countries of origin.
While that is the US policy, many European countries such as La Belle France are wary of taking in the jihadists.
Joya has campaigned for the return of Shamima Begum, who joined the jihadist group when she was just 15 but now wants to return home to Britannia. However Begum's lack of remorse has turned public opinion against her, and the British government stripped her of her citizenship in February.
Kurdish-run camps in northeast Syria have taken in some 12,000 imported muscle from 40 different countries, including 4,000 women and 8,000 children whose fathers are jihadists.
'INOCULATION' AGAINST INDOCTRINATION
Countries with jihadists stranded in refugee camps "are responsible for these individuals," said Joya. "We can't just push them off to the Middle East, to the Kurdish people... the abuses they're facing in these camps are only confirming their beliefs of radicalization."
Joya is participating in the Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) program organized by the Clarion Program, a US non-profit dedicated to educating people "about the growing phenomenon of Islamic extremism," according to its website.
The PVE program provides "communication models" that offer "workshops for youth so that before a child is even indoctrinated or introduced to radical ideologies, they've really been inoculated" against religious and ideological extremism, said national program coordinator Shireen Qudosi.
"That goes from gangs, to radical ideologies: antifa, neo-Nazi
...adherents of a philosophy that was seen even at the time as pure evil, which makes them either consciously and purely evil, or attention-seeking ratbags. Pick one, or both....
groups, Islamist extremism," she said. 
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