Professor Bennoune Comments on ISIS Hostage Crisis for CNN

Professor Karima Bennoune was interviewed live on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 on multiple occasions as the news network reported on the terrorist group known as ISIS and its execution of a Jordanian hostage.

After initially asking for cash in exchange for the release of hostages, ISIS switched to demand the release of Sajida al-Rishawi, a failed female suicide bomber. "I think they're trying to position themselves quite wrongly as defenders of Muslim women" and seeking to undermine the solidarity of the international coalition that is opposing ISIS, Bennoune told host Anderson Cooper. "What has to happen now is that the international community has to stand together," she said.

After ISIS executed the hostage, releasing a video of him being burned alive inside of a cage, Bennoune commented on the atrocity. "It's truly horrifying when you watch the video and you see them really relishing in inflicting suffering deliberately on another human being, and in showing that suffering to the world," Bennoune said.

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.

CNN (transcript of interview on hostage demands)

CNN (article on hostage execution)