Professor Bennoune Comments on ISIS for CNN and U.S. News & World Report
Professor Karima Bennoune commented for media including CNN and U.S. News & World Report on the violent extremist group known as the "Islamic State" or ISIS.
On February 2, Professor Bennoune was a guest on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 for an hour-long discussion of ISIS, including its recruitment of as many as 20,000 foreign fighters, many of them apparently attracted by the idea of participating in what ISIS portrays as a holy war against the West. Bennoune pointed out that "The vast majority of the victims of Jihadist groups and Jihadist terrorism for many years have been Muslims and people of Muslim heritage," but the stories of these victims are rarely told in the media. "We need to tell the story so that young Muslims and people who think that they're going to help by joining Jihad will find other ways of doing that and will note that that is absolutely the wrong path."
In an interview with U.S. News & World Report, Professor Bennoune discussed ISIS's ability to recruit women, which has included about 550 women who have immigrated to its occupied territories in Syria and Iraq. Many such women have been subjected to rape, torture, and other atrocities, according to the United Nations. "Groups like ISIS believe they have a theological right to the bodies of women and girls," Bennoune states. "It's the most tragic thing you can imagine."
Karima Bennoune is an author, lecturer, teacher, and international law scholar as well as the first Arab-American to be honored with the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Section on Minority Groups of the Association of American Law Schools. She recently was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism, now available in paperback from W.W. Norton & Company.
Anderson Cooper 360 "The ISIS Threat" program transcript
Anderson Cooper 360 "The ISIS Threat" video (site unaffiliated with CNN)