Professor Bennoune Comments on Women and Islamic Extremism for National Public Radio
Professor Karima Bennoune commented for Here & Now, a National Public Radio program produced by WBUR Boston, on the recruitment of women by extremist groups. Some 600 Western women and many more from outside of the West have been recruited by the so-called Islamic State for strictly gender-segregated roles, including serving as jihadi brides. The Islamic State has used very sophisticated propaganda to lure these women, Bennoune said, and more should be done to counter this misinformation.
The successful recruitment effort is "very worrying," Bennoune said in an interview. "And it shows a complete ignorance on the part of these women and girls of what Islamic State actually is doing to women on the ground and the large numbers of Muslim women and women of Muslim heritage in these frontline countries who are in the forefront of opposing these groups. We really need to think about counter radicalization, in terms of preventing the recruitment of women and of men."
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. In October 2015, she was appointed UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights.