Julie L. Kessler
lawyer traveler writer

News

The Shadowy White Widow and Morning Coffee.

The other day, at precisely 6:15 a.m., I was sitting in my kitchen reading The Wall Street Journal when my 17-year-old daughter stormed in and abruptly stated, in the way that only a teenager can, “Oh my God, I can’t believe she just didn’t join a NORMAL cult!”

 

Under “normal” circumstances I, of course, would have had no idea what she was talking about. However, it was at literally that same moment that I had just finished reading a WSJ article about 29-year-old British national Samantha Lewthwaite, who has become known in media circles as “The White Widow.” This somewhat odd moniker was given to her following her husband’s participation in the 2005 suicide bombings in London, which killed 56 people and injured more than 700. A few days after the Westgate Mall siege ended in Nairobi last week, Interpol issued an “international wanted persons alert,” also known as a “red notice,” for Ms. Lewthwaite, stemming from Kenyan charges in December 2011 for possession of explosives and conspiracy to commit a felony resulting from an alleged bomb plot in Mombasa that police ultimately foiled. Police also believe that Lewthwaite has links to Al-Shahab, the Somali militant group that carried out the attack at Westgate Mall. Lewthwaite  is also under investigation for alleged possession of a fraudulently obtained South African passport, and for a possible role in the Westgate Mall attack.

 

As it turned out, my daughter’s “normal cult” comment was in reference to Ms. Lewthwaite; she had read a similar article online about her before she came downstairs for breakfast. My daughter, who has spent nearly as much time abroad as she has in the U.S., and possesses native-tongue fluency in more than one language, was completely dumbfounded that a Western-educated Caucasian woman would opt for communing with militants who plan terror plots and, if the criminal charges prove to be true, would engage in participation in wholesale murder, on soil not even her own.

 

Needless to say, a rather spirited, caffeine-fueled early morning conversation ensued. About economics, displacement, disenfranchisement, religion, revolution, the London bombing, the Boston Marathon massacre, and, further back in history, the Symbionese Liberation Army’s Patty Hearst and Sara Jane Olsen, white supremacy groups the world over, and the more “normal” cults (to which my daughter was initially referring), such as certain ashrams in the Pacific Northwest. This led to a far more inclusive discussion than I had ever intended at that early hour; however, the common thread of the conversation was really about how it is that certain individuals can be swayed to engage in extreme conduct in which they perhaps would not otherwise partake. (In Ms. Lewthwaite’s case, she apparently became despondent at the age of 17 over her parent’s 1994 divorce and converted to Islam; she then married the man who became one of the four London suicide bombers. Thereafter, she moved to East Africa with her children, where authorities believe she commenced facilitating terrorist activities in operational roles.)

 

How does one even begin to explain to a young woman in her final year of high school, with university looming and a bright future on the horizon, what it would take to make a woman only ten years her senior, and with two young children in tow, engage in such behavior? What was it about Lewthwaite’s upbringing or background that made her uniquely vulnerable to starting down the road to extremist behavior? What were the triggers, latent or otherwise, that finally pushed Lewthwaite over the edge and changed forever the course of her personal history — and that of her children? And, of course, her victims?

 

This, of course, is not an easy conversation to have at any hour, much less long before significant amounts of coffee have been digested and have taken effect. But it is a necessary one nevertheless.

 

A common thread of discussion among parents of teenaged children who are about to go out into the world is how we have somehow managed (not volitionally of course) to present our children with a far more complex and frightening world than the one we faced when we came of age. (I won’t even bring up geopolitical issues such as global warming and economic ones such as the various financial and banking meltdowns around the globe, all of which together play a role, however tenuous, in the culmination of the impulses of the disenfranchised, the disappointed, the disillusioned and the dispirited.) While probably every generation since Adam and Eve has uttered similar phrases as its young sail off into uncharted waters, somehow, the problems du jour seem far more daunting and damning now than at any time in recent history. And it’s not just access to 24/7 news that makes me think that.

 

Interpol’s red notice will circulate to the organization’s 190 member countries and will, in effect, act as a global trip wire for Lewthwaite, who is now deemed an international fugitive. The rest of us will send out the next generation of young people into a world where the new normal is not a thing like the old normal. We will also hope against hope that, as they confront the enormous obstacles that face them, the idea behind Golda Meir’s statement, made in a completely different context in 1957 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., will one day take hold. While Ms. Meir was of course referring to the Arab/Israeli conflict when she said, “Peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us,” this statement can be altered slightly to have universal meaning, application, and appeal. That peace will come when our enemies love their children more than they hate us. It is indeed a very good place to start.

Date Posted:  Sep. 30 2013