Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

An American Story: Tennessee Girl Discards Christianity, Becomes Climate Change Activist, Joins ISIS

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My latest in PJ Media:

Ariel Bradley wasn’t even the only Islamic jihadi from Chattanooga, Tennessee. On July 17, 2015, a fellow resident of the Chattanooga suburb of Hixson, Mohammad Abdulazeez, murdered four Marines at a Navy base in Chattanooga. This delighted Bradley, who wrote: “Gifted this morning not only with Eid but w/ the news of a brother puttin fear n the heart of kufar [non-believers] n the city of my birth. Alhamdullilah [thanks be to Allah].” By that time, Bradley was far from Chattanooga; she was living in the domains of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria, and was calling herself Umm Aminah, that is, Aminah’s mother, after her two-year-old daughter, Aminah Mohamad. Six years later, Ariel Bradley is dead, and Aminah is being brought back to a United States that is even more riven now by the divisions and confusions that drove her mother’s life so wildly off course than it was when her mother made her fateful choices.

Ariel Bradley grew up in Chattanooga as a member of the Pentecostal Church of God, and according to a man with whom she shared a home much later, her parents zealously endeavored to “keep her away from materials that would make her question Christianity,” even to the point of not teaching her to read until she was almost a teenager. Not unexpectedly, Ariel rebelled, running away from home when she was 15 or 16. Like so many Americans today, she ended up adrift, searching for an identity and a purpose. A friend characterized Ariel’s life as “a solar system without a star, without a sun.” She got pregnant and had an abortion. She got a lot of tattoos. She did a lot of drugs. She studied for her GED but never got it.

Ultimately she found the Left, and dived in wholeheartedly. According to a 2015 BuzzFeed profile, “When she wasn’t working, she was active in many social justice groups in Chattanooga, protesting and raising awareness of issues facing the city’s working poor and often traveling out of state to march in rallies for teachers’ rights or protests against America’s overseas military actions. In the biography of the Twitter account @LadyAppleSeed, which she created in May 2009, Ariel describes herself as an ‘activist,’ and friends say she considered that a huge part of her identity; they also said she called herself a feminist.” A photo of Ariel at a demonstration survives; she is holding up a sign emblazoned with the slogan “SYSTEM CHANGE NOT CLIMATE CHANGE.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

Comments

  1. In my opinion anyone who converts to Islam has a screw loose and is crazy to begin with.

    • Actually, in this story, blame the parents. Had they not been paranoid about her questioning Christianity but instead involved her in all discussions about religion and even introduced her to a theologian who could have addressed any other questions that were beyond even them, she would have turned out okay

      If Christianity was important to her parents, why didn’t they think she deserved to have been included in their religious environment?

      • I blame them for isolating her and not teaching her to read–unconscionable (also a lapse of the educational system)..

        But most kids who rebel against dysfunctional homes do not become Jihad terrorists. At some point this is on Ariel Bradley.

        • Gravenimage and Infidel,

          There is every possibility of a Christian slipping in faith with or without consciousness. The scripture is crystal clear on that.

          Questioning Christianity is fine and healthy too, because God doesn’t want us to be robots but to reason everything. I would say, that is the way to bond your faith in God.

          Isaiah :1 17 Learn to do good; Seek justice, Reprove the ruthless, Defend the orphan, Plead for the widow.
          18 “Come now, and let us reason together,” Says the LORD, “Though your sins are as scarlet, They will be as white as snow; Though they are red like crimson, They will be like wool.

          Those open rebels and brats have to face the consequences. Sometime they fall into the trap of proselytizing Muslims who are ever ready to harvest the souls for the devil. They are ever ready to steal the souls and it is not uncommon.

          I guess, I can list one of them right now, like: Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr who went on to become world renowned boxer.

      • A non existent imaginary entity cannot ‘want’ people to do anything. That no ‘god’ in any religion is interested in the lives of human beings is demonstrated clearly all the time.

  2. This is exactly the kind of history Islam depends upon for it’s converts… So confused they don’t know up from down. Parents so far out of touch with reality they open the door for the perversion that is Islam.

    Tragedy…She could have been just fine…

    • How did the parents get away without teaching her to read? If she was homeschooled the state is supposed to monitor them–clearly this did not happen here.

      Of course, Bradley did even worse with her own life. Insanity.

  3. An American Story: Tennessee Girl Discards Christianity, Becomes Climate Change Activist, Joins ISIS
    ………………….

    Good grief.

    The question now is whether Amina is savable. Hard to know.

    • She is dead, according to the story above, and her daughter is being brought back here, but under whose care? If it’s her maternal grandparents, then they’ve already shown what a bang-up job they did w/ her mom. She should have been given to her dad or someone from his family and left in Syria, where her prospects are better than in today’s US where she’d be taught CRT, woke history, how to hate her own country,… She’d be better off as a Syrian loving her own country than as an American hating her own country

      • Sorry, I thought you were referring to Umm Aminah. What a great naming system those people have – converts name themselves according to the identity of their kids

      • Yes, I don’t know who’s going to raising this kid–one of the few cases where I think the grandarents would be a poor idea. Since it looks as though her returning is a fait accompli, I hope she goes to some decent home.

        Incidentally, Muslimahs are almost never named “Umm ———” for girls–just for sons.

        • I read the full article – she’s being put up for adoption. She is 8, however, so dunno how islamically rooted she is

        • Thank you, Infidel. Hope they don’t adopt her out to a Muslim family–but I would not be surprised.

        • I thought that muslims are not allowed to adopt kids, as Mohammed decreed so that he could marry his daughter in law

        • Infidel, if Muslims can get children in the west adopted by Muslims they are happy–even though as you note adoption is forbidden in Islam.

          This is just like things like Muslims running for political office in the west, eschewing Muslim dress to get closer to victims, or otherwise temporarily allying with Infidels. It is an example of Islamic “necessity”–“Darura”–temporarily violating the tenets of Islam so as to spread Islam.

  4. Six years later, Ariel Bradley is dead, and Aminah is being brought back to a United States that is even more riven now by the divisions and confusions that drove her mother’s life so wildly off course than it was when her mother made her fateful choices.

    Why is Aminah being brought back: is her dad dead as well? And even if he is, why can’t she be adopted by one of his family members? Since her dad obviously wasn’t American, she could belong to either US or Syria: why does it have to be the US? And given how brilliant her maternal grandparents were in raising her mom, are they gonna be her guardians until she comes of age? If not, what’s the great idea in bringing her here?

    She would be better off in Syria, where they probably don’t teach CRT, woke history and all that, but being under an Alawite regime, probably teach Arab history from a non-sunni perspective, which would be good

    • I can see the logic of leaving Ariel Bradley’s daughter in Syria. The US is not obligated to adopt this child as a full US citizen. If the grandparents want the child, it would be a different matter. Perhaps, they have come to see the wisdom of educating children to think independently. That should be one of the main goals of education.

  5. Just to clear up some confusion in the comments section, the article reports that Ariel Bradley was killed in an American airstrike in Syria together with her husband and baby son. That is why the daughter Amina is being brought back to the States and put up for adoption. The article doesn’t specify the background of the husband. Just because they went to Syria to fight with ISIS doesn’t justify the conclusion that he himself was from Syria and would have relatives there.

    Ariel referred to herself as Umm Aminah soon after she arrived in Syria. It is typical for Muslim woman to take on the title “Mother of” for their firstborn child. If that child is a girl, the name is temporary, until a son is born, and after that she becomes known as “mother of” the firstborn son. That remains her honorific title, no matter how many more children she has. I’m guessing that Umm Aminah changed her name after her son was born, but we are not given any of her instagram or other social media posts from after her son’s birth.

    What a tragedy that parents who claim to believe in the Truth should be afraid to let their daughter investigate any rival claims to truth, and instead tried to lock her away from any explorations of those claims, The search for truth is inherent in human nature, and its suppression will ultimately backfire, as was the case with Ariel, sadly.

    May Aminah be drawn to the Truth that her mother was driven from.

    • Thanks, Mateen for the clarifying points. The mother, Ariel Bradley, was one confused teenager who become more confused and self-refuting as time when by, and she threw her life away on the most retrograde and most obviously false religion in the world. If she had had more education, she might have seen all the evidence that Islam is false.

    • And Mateen, I know that Muslim mothers generally retain the sobriquet “Umm [name of son]” even if the boy dies before they do. She was likely just “Umm Amina” before her son was born.

      Another instance of women–and girls–being erased in Islam.

  6. Nobody would question that Islam is head over shoulders when it comes to its leading position as a self righteous religion.

    But as a convincing number two in self righteousness I would put the cult of climate change, which has no qualms about telling us to live lives of frugality to reduce CO2 emissions. Currently it is about banning consumption of beef for the survival of the human race..

    Maybe the two cults can learn from one another? Islam is already very good at performing low emissions killing, but with modern technology it might be able to do even better!

  7. America does not need people who abandon Western values for something better, and choose Islam. Better for this girl to be adopted by a Muslim family in a Muslim country. Barack Obama is an example of what can happen when a Western woman raises her child to be a Muslim. He became a bad president whose loyalty was to leftism, and he pretended to be an American. But all his policies were against America. He was for mass illegal immigration and mass Muslim immigration, and policies against the principles of the constitution. He was true to principles of the leftist parties. They claim to be for the things they try to subvert, because they know people would not vote for them if they told the truth about what they want to do.

  8. People also go through the best public school systems in the land without learning how to read. People go to the best universities in the land, and profit not a whit from such an experience. Sooner or later, every teacher, whether a parent or other kinsman, or a supposed professional, comes to the stark realization that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink; and your only consolation is that sooner or later, most people do grow up. There is also the question of what people choose to put into their own heads.

    • Grimly true, Kepha–especially if the child is labeled “learning disabled” somewhere along the way. I taught adult literacy to some very bright people who had simply been shy in school, had moved around a lot, were midly dyslexic, or in one case, was still learning English when they first entered the school system. Once they would up in “special ed” classes there was seldom even an effort to teach them to read.

      Of course some were actually genuinely low IQ–but hardly all. Most of these latter students were able to learn to read fairly quickly with a bit of personal tutoring.

  9. A note to all who think that Aminah should not be brought back to the USA: Sorry, but the government of the USA is bound by laws passed by two Houses of Congress populated by members of both political parties and, now and then, an independent or two. Regardless of the stupid and evil choices Ariel Bradley made, she met the requirements for transmitting US citizenship to a child born abroad. What’s sauce for the refugee polygamous Mormon gander who fathered George Romney in Mexico is sauce for the radical climate activist turned Muslimah terrorist goose named Ariel Bradley who bore a child in ISIS-controlled territory. In Aminah’s case, the officials of the US State Department who found her, identified her, and handled her repatriation had no other choice.

    Further, none of us are in any position to know for sure whether Ariel’s parents’ failure to teach her to read until she was almost a teenager was due to their religious beliefs, their lack of skills as teachers, or something with Ariel herself. There are lots of dyslexic people out there with whom even the pros fail.

    Just curious: Did Ariel Bradley have any siblings, and if so, how did they turn out?

    My guess about this case is that the narrative our wise, unbiased, honest, fair-minded, and highly edgy-muckatid MSM reporters and editors are trying to put forth is how Ariel Bradley went from stupidly fanatical Christian **Ugh–fundamentalim to stupidly fanatical Islamic “fundamentalism”–and hence we must silence or jail everyone who does not want to celebrate LGBTQWXYZ+ or who home-schools a child rather than putting him through pubic school (bw, my own Ph.D. advisor in a state university home-schooled his kids in order to give them Latin and Greek along with everything else). What we will be studiously told to avoid examining will be Ms. Bradley’s embrace of adolescent rebellion, abortion, climate change fanaticism, and the sweet-talk of the guy who became her first husband; as well as the utter lack of discernment found in way too much of our “progressive” population.

    Aminah bint Ariel is not a hardened case. She is a traumatized eight-year-old child, even if her name is Aminah. Maybe someone here with a home situation and some money to raise a child could step in and offer to adopt, if the American kin are unable to do so. Since Uncle Kepha came away with another confused child’s autobiography with a bit of sympathy for a foreign, nominally Muslim step-father (see the O’s _Dreams from my Father_), his advice to all here is that when Aminah grows up and runs for office, don’t buy her sob story and don’t vote for her.

    • Kepha

      A kid would have to want to come here, or the nearest guardians would have to apply for US citizenship on her behalf. If Aminah lost both her parents, and assuming that her father was not Syrian, what exactly stopped US troops from handing her over to the Syrians, who could have put her up for adoption in either an Alawite or a Christian family (since muslims can’t adopt kids)? How exactly did this 8 year old pick the US to be the country she wanted to go? When I was 8, I had no idea about what countries were in third grade

      The laws – the way I read them – is that if a person tells a US embassy or consulate that one of their parents was a US citizen, then the US government is bound to process that. But doesn’t that person have to be an adult to do that? Or where did she find someone to apply for her, since both her parents were killed in the raid, and it’s not known whether there was anyone taking care of her after that

      • Who knows who informed the local US consulate. My guess is that someone identified the Syrian government that the child was that of an American, and, per consular agreements which most countries had with each other, the Syrian government informed the US government.

        Further, in Amina’s case, if Ariel Bradley was a US citizen who had spent at least five years in the US, two of which were after the age of 14, her child born abroad would be a US citizen by Jus Sanguinis. In this, it is not a matter of someone applying for the child. It is a matter that the child isdefined as a US citizen by US law. Having been a US Consular Officer, I understand a few things about US immigration and nationality law. If you had a child abroad and went to the US Consulate, you probably went to get documentation rather than citizenship per se. If the consulate gives your kid a Consular Report of Birth ABroad and a US Passport, that is the recognition that the child is a US citizen by birth.

  11. Gravenimage and Jim says: Remember, Islam, in its unmatched compassion, forbids adoption.

    • That’s because the male converts to Islam get themselves killed at alarming rates. snark

    • Daniel, many of these are instances of “love Jihad”–Muslim men who pretend love and convince them to convert. It was a similar case with Ariel Bradley.

      • Graven, not quite. In ‘love jihad’, the girls/women in question are not looking for muslim boyfriends/husbands, nor are they looking to convert to islam. If you read a lot of the ‘love jihad’ stories here about the sub-continent, you’ll see how muslim guys pretend to belong to the same faith as the girls, seduce them and try converting them only after they are either married, have kids or are discovered. In other words, the girls are hunted by muslims who want them, even if temporarily

        In Ariel’s case, it was different. She was rebuffed by a muslim earlier, who rejected her b’cos she was not muslim. That got her crazed and she slowly converted to islam, and then let the ummah pick a husband for her 4 years younger, even if she didn’t get the original guy she wanted

    • Daniel,

      It was Eve who was deceived first, the feminists are perhaps hell bent on “keeping up with the tradition”

  14. Perhaps they went a bit too far when they shut down the asylums for the criminally insane and decided to rely on medication, counseling and other passive approaches.

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