From the NYT:
Muriel Degauque, believed to be the first European Muslim woman to stage a suicide attack, started out life as a good Roman Catholic girl in this coal mining corner of Belgium known as the black country.
…her story supports fears among many law enforcement officials and academics that converts to Europe's fastest-growing religion could bring with them a disturbing new aspect in the war on terror: Caucasian women committed to one of the world's deadliest causes.
There’s absolutely nothing funny about suicide bombing, but there is something completely, well, screwy about how the media, the public – pretty much everyone - goes bananas for tales of non-Arabs “joining the other side.” Asked about the so-called war on terror, any Bushite spokesman worth his missing WMDs will go to great lengths to explain that after 9/11 we DID NOT launch an endless crusade against any specific (non-Iraqi) race, people, or religion. But if that’s true, why the extra freak-out any time an alienated, angry psycho from Leeds or Belgium goes off the deep end while done up in Lawrence of Arabia drag? If we aren’t at war with a specific race, people or religion, it stands to reason we could theoretically be at war with anyone, including alienated deep-enders from Leeds or Belgium or even Anywhere, USA.
(Especially Anywhere, USA, even. You know how those white kids from Anywhere are about parent-disquieting fads. Look at how quickly they took to the hip hop.)
Still, we’re surprised when terrorists don’t look like, you know, terrorists. And as flummoxed as people are by these "aberrations" in general, there’s a particularly strong undercurrent of sexual hysteria to any report of a white woman losing her natural mind after mixed dating or marriage. Americans tend to think of European women as singularly easy, but it won't be long before our own white folks are searching their daughters' rooms for jihadist literature the way they keep an eye out for drug paraphenalia. You think it’s not happening? You think the pride of America’s loins is genetically shielded from jihadist temptation? Keep in mind that this is a completely crazy country, where mass murderers marry their doe-eyed, blond penpals in prison every other week. Of course there are white girls at terrorist training camp. I’m not saying a ton of them, but at least six. And god help them if they're busted. Not for nothing, but you’ll recall that no less a mythic personage than John Wayne was willing to shoot his own niece completely dead in The Searchers for the sin of laying with the enemy Indian. You can only imagine what extra, abu ghraibian (adj.) horrors a curdled creep like Donald Rumsfeld has in store for any poor girl caught attending terrorist training camp.
Muriel Degauque is a dubious, headline grabbing first, but adjusted for scale the gendered disquiet she induces is still fairly obvious. After some initial, Foxian fanfare, the story of John Walker Lindh – American Taliban! Dude pretty much comes with his own WWF-style theme music – was processed with marked ease by the collective unconscious, going down as the cautionary tale of a sensitive, thoughtful boy who believed in things a little too hard. The story of the distinctly duskier “gangsta jihadi” Jose Padilla went down just as easily but for entirely different reasons. Padilla converted to Islam in prison, and you can about hear the collective harrumph at the inevitability of his alleged betrayal. The feeling there is that when you’re a dark-tinted convict who lays down with Islamist dogs, in the joint, you can’t help but pick up terroristic fleas. (Too bad dude is likely the victim of a prosecutorial frame-up, but that’s another story.)
Say the words “caucasian women committed to one of the world's deadliest causes,” however, and the needle goes screeching off the record. The racio-ethnic sense of betrayal (I mean, I feel it and I’m not even white) is squared by the heartland's ancestral terror of the urban pimp. It’s like a global remake of Taxi Driver, except Jodi Foster’s been replaced by one (both?) of the Olsen Twins, with Osama bin Laden turning runaways out at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in lieu of Harvey Keitel.
We are a forgiving nation, though, or at least a forgetful one, and someday this war will be over. The lost girls who survive the war on terror (thems thats gots enough $, that is) may get a chance to rehabilitate themselves, to go home just like Jodi Foster’s Iris got to come home - or better yet, just like Patty Hearst did. Hearst was, of course, kidnapped and “mind-controlled,” but for a while during her 1974-75 run of outlawry it seemed likely that she’d end up shot to death for her troubles just like most of her SLA comrades were. Instead of a bullet, though, Hearst got a presidential pardon, which goes to show you can pretty much get away with anything if you’re rich and lucky enough – fire a machine gun at a sidewalk full of civilians, adopt a philosophy of violence, shack up with a whole liberation army. An heiress can do all that and more, and she'll still grow up to marry her hunky bodyguard. Sure, that was 30 years ago, but Halliburton pretty much did illegal dirt with Saddam's Iraq yesterday and they still got a huge piece of the reconstruction pie. This is America; Larry King will always be waiting to ask how it felt and why.