How Cathy and Jessie Became Muslim Terrorists

Two white liberal New York women arrested in 3 months over Islamic terrorism.

At the end of June 2026, Catherine Beth Washburn, a 37-year-old white woman from an upstate New York town, was arrested for sending $30,000 in crypto to a member of Islamic Jihad in Israel. Washburn kept texting him, encouraging him that, “you do not need equipment, you only need Allah” and showing off a picture of herself with hand grenades and a Hamas flag.

Now, in August 2026, Jessica Bowie, a 35-year-old white woman in Albany, New York who converted to Islam, changed her name to ‘Aisha Saif’, put on a burka, and began chatting with what she thought were ISIS terrorists and plotting to bomb the New York State Capitol by disguising the bomb in a DoorDash delivery bag. Bowie shared thoughts such as “blowing non-Muslim brains out is beautiful” and said she wanted to “harm the enemies of Allah.”

Cathy and Jessica lived around 3 hours driving distance away from each other in upstate New York. Both the Rochester and Albany areas have large Muslim populations and Rochester in particular has been an epicenter of Islamic terrorist plots including another Muslim convert who plotted to attack a bar on New Year’s Eve in 2015 for ISIS, a Muslim terrorist who wanted to shoot soldiers for ISIS in 2014, and Omar Mohammed’s bomb threats against Kodak in 2013.

But white women in their mid-30s were not the usual Islamic terrorist cohort. Until recently most cases of white women engaging in Islamic terrorism were coming out of Europe and involved the converted wives of Muslim men trying to move to Iraq and Syria to be with their husbands.

The recent shift is likely driven by social media and the more open embrace of Islamic terrorism by radical leftist groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) within the social justice movement. Bowie mentioned having “picked up some anarchist literature at the social justice center” while Catherine was a leader in a leftist group called Direct Action Movement for Palestinian Liberation (DAMPL) whose members called themselves “Action Comrades”.

After posting fairly ordinary family photos to social media in early 2023, two years later, Catherine Washburn was posting Jihadist propaganda cheering on Hamas and pictures of herself in a hijab. Jessica Bowie went from a tattooed goth look to shopping for bomb supplies at Home Depot while dressing in a full black burka after swearing an oath to ISIS.

Rather than being repelled by the bloody violence of Islamic terrorism, they were drawn to it and cheered it on, with Catherine declaring “I wish every day were October 7” and Jessica exclaiming, “praise be to Allah for September 11th.”

We don’t know the exact pathway that they followed, but both women seemed to spend significant amounts of time on social media, both began communicating with Islamic terrorists over social media and both eventually agreed to be involved in advancing Islamic terrorism.

And both women appeared to have been recruited in the aftermath of the social media wave of activism in support of Islamic terrorism after the Oct 7 attacks. Jessica described going ‘from a little girl waving an American flag after 9/11 to now having stickers of the falling towers’ while Catherine assured her terrorist friend, “I hate the Jews very much.”

While both Jessica and Catherine lived in areas with large numbers of Muslims, it’s hard to say for sure how much influence that had on their descent into supporting Islamic terrorism. Jessica Bowie lived in an Albany building that appeared to have other Muslims living there, and seemed reasonably acquainted with some of the basics of Islam, but it’s unclear how integrated she was into any Islamic community. Unmarried white women wearing a burka in America have almost always been groomed into it on social media by ‘Niqabi’ influencers of the kind that were being promoted by Vogue shortly after Saudi women were protesting by stamping on their burkas.

DAMPL was a social media movement started by a Muslim, aimed at leftists, that encouraged real-life vandalism. Like much of the pro-terrorist activism after the Oct 7 massacres, it helped fill an activism void left between the implosion of BLM and before the rise of mass anti-ICE protests. Online social justice activism had become so popular because it gave heavy social media users an outlet and a sense of purpose in lives that appeared to be going nowhere.

Millennial liberal white women like Jessica and Catherine in their late thirties were some of the most likely to be involved in social justice activism or social media cults because they were often heavy social media users who were looking for an escape and feeling stuck because they were unmarried or married with young children, and desperately looking for a new life.

And they found it.

Jessica and Catherine were certainly not the first Americans to become interested in Islamic terrorism, but two women living three hours driving distance from each other both being arrested over Islamic terrorism a few months apart is more than random chance: it indicates a trend.

The growing appearance of white women in Islamic terrorism in the United States may be due to the social sanction provided for it by the role of the DSA and other leftist groups in social justice movements. Women often need more of a permission structure than men do before committing illegal actions: that’s why men are far more likely to commit crimes than women.

Over the last three years, the infiltration of leftist movements into the Democratic Party and its associated liberal activist circles has created a permission structure for Islamic terrorism. And while some of it is expressed in support for Islamic terrorism against Jews, a phenomenon that is becoming mainstream with DSA candidates like Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, and Dariazila Avila Chevalier, while El-Sayed, Aisha Wahhab, the Afghan congressional nominee to replace former Rep. Eric Swalwell in California, and others campaigning with Hasan Piker have already normalized support for the September 11 attacks, but Jessica’s case shows it also normalized ISIS and domestic terrorist attacks against largely elected officials in America.

The DSA’s decision to normalize and endorse the Islamic terrorist attacks of Oct 7, and the Democratic Party’s decision to normalize the DSA as part of its ‘Big Tent’ are translating into growing support for Islamic terrorism across the spectrum by the Democratic Party’s base.

This isn’t just about Israel. Normalizing Islamic terrorism, against anyone and anywhere, also normalizes it in America and encourages Americans to support it and to join in the attacks.

Just ask Cathy and Jessie.