Ep 53 | The Truth About Jihad – From A Woman Who Escaped It | Tania Joya | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Today's guest promises to be one of the most riveting guests we have had.

It was six years ago, the woman you're about to hear from dodged machine gun fire as she carried her three children while pregnant with a fourth across the Syrian border into Turkey.

Her husband, now the top-ranking American commander in ISIS, paid a human trafficker to take his family to a bus stop.

From there, they were on their own.

This story is very complicated.

This mother of four small children was radicalized at a very young age.

She believed in jihad in the name of Allah and it was her mission.

Her husband was an American from Texas.

He was her partner in terror and they traveled the world hoping to recruit radicals while they raised their sons at the same time to be holy warriors.

But something changed because while living here in America, he went to prison and a window opened.

Today's podcast asks several questions and attempts to have them answered.

What drives a young, intelligent, beautiful person to become radicalized?

And if it does happen, is it possible for that person to de-radicalize themselves and seek redemption?

This story is going to attempt to answer these questions.

It's not only a literal journey spanning multiple countries, multiple war zones, time zones, but it is also an internal journey of the mind and the heart as she grapples with breaking free of her radical ideology and extremist husband.

Today, she works with organizations to help counter violent extremists.

She uses her past experience to try to de-radicalize those that have become radicals.

She works in prisons, she works with U.S.

law enforcement.

Today's episode: The Islamic Terrorists' Wife.

So I want to get into your story from really the beginning.

But I have to address the elephant in the room first.

There are these ISIS wives, if you will, that we have seen that are trying to get back into their own country and be normalized.

And I haven't believed any of them.

I believe you,

but I haven't believed any of them.

Why should anyone

believe you?

I mean, that's your

journey is

night and day.

Why should they believe me?

Yeah.

I think

I mean, I think I'm an open book.

I definitely am.

And the fact that I do criticize...

Now, see, it's a long story, but

originally, like, I started off being a teenager at 16 who

was bullied at high school.

And I went through a mental breakdown with no therapy or counseling available to me.

And then I turned to religion.

So

let's, so then, so, because if I want to go through your story, and maybe the way to believe you is just hear your whole story.

So, so let's, let's, instead of giving a real quick recap, let's start at the beginning.

Tanya, you were born in Great Britain?

Yes.

You were born and lived in a family.

Tell me about your family, mom and dad.

Um, yeah, so I come from a Bangladeshi British family.

My grandfather moved moved to the UK in 1945.

Then he bought his, my mother over 10 years later.

They weren't, my parents, and then my dad came in the 70s, married my mum for a passport.

That's pretty normal.

It's pretty acceptable in a Muslim culture.

And

they weren't religious.

But what happened to me as a teenager was I had, from the results of being bullied at high school, I ended up turning to religion to cope.

And the only religion accessible to me at the time was Islam.

Okay, so wait.

Mom and dad, not religion.

Kind of culturally religious, forced us.

What does that mean culturally religious?

Like they would force us to read the Quran two hours every day in a language we don't understand.

It's like Catholics reading Latin and not knowing a word that they're saying.

And the way they could control us was teaching us,

they didn't want us to be too westernized because that was forbidden in Islam.

It would insult their culture.

It would be like things like wearing makeup, wearing heels, wearing jeans.

We would be slut-shamed.

But naturally, we wanted to be integrated, but our parents were the obstacle.

Was your mom.

Was your mom

did she buy into that?

Was she more of

a mom or a wife of somebody that was kind of keeping her under the thumb?

No.

The problem was,

I think

I'm going to be really candid here, but

my mom always wanted

a husband who...

would be a patriarch and a provider, the breadwinner.

But she had to take on that role because my dad was a bit of a troublemaker and

got himself in a lot of trouble.

I didn't grow up having a lot of respect for him and I always heard my mom complaining that he's not a good father, like he's not a good provider.

And so I

longed for patriarchy.

I longed to have that male role model.

who would, you know, protect the family, take care of the family.

um

and i didn't have that and i was missing in my life i also had a lot of issues with my dad because he

he wasn't the most uh law-abiding human being and got himself into trouble my mom so there was a lot of problems at home and it always stems from the home at the beginning especially with values i wasn't taught values like human rights, the law of the land, respect the law of the land.

It was like, haram halal.

You are controlled, you can't integrate, integrate, you can't be Western, that's satanic.

You've got to be, you know,

you've got to worry about shame, you can't date boys, you can't be like a normal Western girl growing up and learn how to have healthy relationships, you've got to have arranged marriages and things like that.

So,

you know, I had this conflict and then after having a

And it's really embarrassing for me to say, but I was practically schizophrenic at the age of 16 because I was so lonely.

And I'd been chased out of one town,

Harrow, which is northwest of London.

And then I moved to East London.

What do you mean you were chased out of London?

Well, they were like attacking me if I came outside my house.

And when I had a job, I was working in a closed door and they would come harass me.

It was

girls from my high school.

And

it it became too much that I was.

Wait,

was it a color thing, a a religion thing?

They just didn't like you, bullies, what?

Yeah,

they were the cool girls that I fell out, the cool girls at school who were popular and I fell out with them because.

And it was over silly things.

I was dating a boy that they didn't like me dating and it just so happened that the boy I was dating, he was a Sikh nationalist.

And I know that's not too commonly known in America, but

they hate Muslims.

And they say that that they grow their hair and they grow turbans and they say they're only going to cut their hair once they've killed off every Muslim, which is impossible.

So what happens is that these boys, Sikh boys, will intentionally date Muslim girls to abuse them.

And so I was in an abusive relationship from a very young age,

from 15 to 18.

And my dad wasn't present because my dad was actually running away from the law because he had been molesting a 12-year-old.

Oh my god.

It's so bad.

It just, like, it's really hard, I think, for any girl to grow up.

We long to have a close relationship with our father,

but there was nothing I could respect about him.

And so,

also, to move on further, I wasn't allowed to leave home unless I was married.

So it wasn't like, go to college, do well, and then you can get married and live freely.

It was like, well, once you get married to a guy, you're not our problem anymore.

So I understood that was the dynamics, and I really needed to leave that toxic environment of my family.

I was also, so once I left Harrow, which is northwest of London, I moved to Essex, East London, barking.

And barking was a breeding ground for terrorism.

If

like a lot of the terrorists who went driving their vans into people on the London Bridge and stabbings, they came from Barking.

So, once I was in Barking, you know, I

was searching for an identity and I didn't know what to do.

And, um, and these conservative Muslim girls that I was around now in this working class area, so there were two groups.

There were the Muslims who were very conservative Muslims, traditionalists, and then the English people were more on the BNP side and

the British National Party.

And then they evolved into the EDL, which is

something,

English Defence League.

So they were white nationalists.

And it's a working class neighborhood.

So everybody was like moving away from the center and becoming very tribal.

And so I had, I, you know, I wasn't the brightest girl.

I was a bit of a follower.

I wanted to follow.

I wanted religion.

I wanted God to love me.

So,

you know, there was no movement where nuns were revolting and like bombing

post boxes and things like that.

I would have loved to have joined that, but instead it was the

Muslim.

The Muslims were like aggravated, they had all these grievances.

And my cousin, Nabila Chowdhury, I idolized her and she was the first person in my family to go to Oxford University.

She was a normal, beautiful girl.

I just adored her.

She went to Oxford and she became radicalized.

And she came out even worse.

It's unbelievable.

Like, just like how the universities in England were infiltrated by Islamic movements, the political Islam.

And I was a few years younger than her, and I was like, I knew my family adored her, and I wanted to be like her.

So she, at the age of 17, she taught me about the caliphate.

So this is the first time I heard about the caliphate.

You never even knew about political Islam.

September 11th happened, and that was a huge turning point in my life.

I was just drawing.

I didn't want to believe that Muslims did it.

I also didn't believe Muslims were intelligent enough to

do something like that.

You know, because you just think of Muslims as like light years behind Judo-Christian communities.

They really are.

You know, like

we can go into that further about how they kill apostates and things.

It's like

those were rulings that were outdated 2,000 years ago by Judaism and still

continue today.

Right.

But I didn't know any better and I really was desperate to feel a belonging because I felt rejected by my family.

I felt rejected by society.

And I was a pretty girl, but I didn't know how to handle the cat calling that I got.

when I was a teenager.

And most of the time I was blamed from it.

I was blamed for

the way I look.

Right.

And you're living in a society that sluts shames.

Exactly.

So the solution was you cover up because it's your fault.

You shouldn't be tempting men.

Oh, my God.

It wasn't men should just control themselves.

And so

I felt like God didn't like me.

childish and I was like and I was desperate for God to be protected by God.

Because you had no one else in your room?

No one else, no father figure to protect me.

I had an abusive boyfriend, and only Islam actually made me separate from him.

Because of the abuse or because he was a Sikh?

Both.

And he wasn't healthy.

He abused me only because I was a Muslim.

So there's all this like within the Indian subcontinent communities, Hindus, Muslims,

Christians and Muslims, none of them get along.

There's no like shared values.

And plus, they're so traumatized from the separation of India and Pakistan during, you know, after the British left, and there was a lot of trauma.

And our parents, you know, they didn't get therapy and

they weren't pacifists, they didn't understand children have human rights, they were abusive, there were all these problems.

Plus, they got

a lot of their like rulings from Islam, which says things like, if your child doesn't pray at seven, beat them.

And it was very draconian, like very violent.

So,

you know, this was the environment that I grew up in.

And it wasn't until later that I realized that if you keep this cycle of violence and hate, it just continues.

I didn't want to do it.

Yeah.

So you're in your

cousin

is in Oxford.

She's been radicalized.

And September 11th happens.

And

you see Osama bin Laden?

Well I was I came home from school.

I was studying politics, government and politics, law, sociology, psychology at my A-levels.

And so I was already very politically driven.

And I came home, switched on from school and I switched on the news and I saw what happened.

I was like, I was devastated.

I was like, this is horrible.

This is inhumane.

I went to school the next day and I was in my government and politics class and I sat next to my best friend who was a Pakistani girl.

And I said, wasn't it terrible what happened?

And they're saying Muslims, why do they always blame the Muslims?

And she said to me, well, was it so terrible?

Was it so bad?

And I was like, oh, maybe she didn't understand what I just said.

And I was in shock by her response.

So I tried to reword it.

And she said, okay, come home after school and my parents will tell you all about it.

So that's how it began, the radicalization, not only from my cousin, but from my school friends.

And it's a new area.

And Barking, Essex, where I come from, is renowned for breeding terrorists.

What did the parents say to you?

My parents didn't.

No, no, no.

Her parents.

Oh, her parents told me it's an eye for an eye, a life for a life.

America has been intervening in the Muslim countries for far too long.

They attacked,

they used like propaganda from Osam bin Laden that I didn't, wasn't familiar with, but they said something like, America intervened with the war in Lebanon and they killed thousands of people.

So, you know, a life for a life.

They kill us, we kill them.

And

I can't say that I was, I wasn't a healthy-minded person.

I was a follower.

I was looking for leadership.

And so I was like, oh, I get that.

Yeah, I understand because my ex-boyfriend used to beat me up for being a Muslim.

And even though I told him I'm not really a Muslim, I don't care about the religion.

But

it's like it ended up where I just ended.

When people are like confronted about their identity and they don't know what their identity is, they end up just like going backwards.

And so

I was like, okay, no one accepts me as an English.

I'm not English.

I'm British, but I'm not English.

So, and my roots are not deep enough.

What does that mean?

In America, you're an American.

Yes.

Especially.

You're born here.

But even if you come here and you take the citizenship test, you're an American.

Yeah.

Not in England.

And in America, everybody has ancestors that were immigrants.

Even the natives were immigrants.

They came from Asia.

But it's not quite like that in England.

There's a lot of xenophobia and the Muslim community wasn't helping because they weren't integrating.

So I see from both perspectives.

So I

ended up just like, I really just like, I had this reputation where I had a boyfriend and my family were not happy with it.

And I was like, okay, I got to turn my life around.

I've got to be a good person.

Like, I have to be the equivalent of a nun but the Muslim version so I was like I'm gonna be a good Muslim girl I'm gonna be obedient I'm gonna hear and obey I'm going to find a Muslim husband and get away from this country that doesn't accept me okay so it's not at this point that you are

this is a big turning point in your life right this is the first real turning point to where you're you're seeing okay i can build a better life and it's not about killing people or anything else it's just about listening and obeying and putting these principles into play in your life for a better life.

Yeah, and because I thought God would protect me from being unlucky.

But yeah,

I learned that I define my future.

I determine my fate, not God.

But I didn't know that at the time.

So my friends were getting married very young, and I was kind of just following their footsteps.

And

so, going back to my high school, I came from West London and I moved to East London.

And it was a big culture shock.

I spoke differently, I walked differently, I talked differently from them.

They had a very strong Essex accent, I had a northern accent,

I had boyfriends, I was like, and then I had peer pressure, like you can't be this, it's not Islamic, are you ashamed of your roots so I felt the pressure and being the weak-minded airhead that I was and I'm very ashamed I really was I I was all made mistakes and we were all stupid when we were young also I was the fourth daughter so I had three older sisters and I was used to just following their following being a follower because my parents weren't they were busy working my sisters practically look after me and

and as girls, we weren't wanted.

So as the fourth unwanted daughter, and my parents made it very clear to me that they didn't want me.

So my education was not a priority.

They didn't care if I went to school as long as the house was clean.

So I became the cleaner and the servant.

We had to clip my dad's toenails,

take his socks off after work.

I can't even believe that I had to do that back then.

And then also knowing things like

a girl is worth half of a boy.

When we're born, we have this sacrificial ceremony where we kill goats.

It's so sad.

But, you know, goats are lambs or whatever.

And a girl gets one animal, one animal sacrificed, but a boy gets two.

So a girl's worth half of a boy.

And our testimony is worth half of a man.

So if we're in court, you need two women witnesses is equivalent to one man because our deficiency in our mind.

How did you not, how did you,

how were you raised in England, which doesn't have that system, and not understand, not see the two and go, oh,

this one's better than that one.

How did you not see that?

Yeah, at the time, I,

because of my Muslim upraising, I wasn't allowed to drink, I wasn't allowed to party, I wasn't allowed to have relationships with boys.

And

we were just told, yeah, isolated and told that that's all evil and you're evil if you do it, and then and this suspicion that Satan is around, completely possessing us.

Also, after the bullying, I turned to my religion because I felt so unsafe that I felt like only God can protect me.

So I went into,

I delved into Islamic research not with a healthy mind,

feeling like I brought it on myself because I hadn't been a good Muslim.

Before the bullying, I couldn't care less about my religion.

I didn't even want to be a Muslim.

I was so embarrassed of being a Muslim, I wouldn't even tell people.

But like the backlash between like the BNP and EDL and then against the Muslim community, I saw this with my family even.

They became more and more religious after September 11th.

That's when I, it's like everyone became very tribal.

And so that's where it stemmed.

And I wasn't allowed to leave home.

My family dynamics were toxic.

Like I said, my dad was a huge problem.

And my mom was a problem.

She was very abusive.

And I needed to get away from her because she was a bully.

And so I knew the only way I could get out was to get married.

So while I was at a march for Stop the War in Iraq march in London, it was like a million man march, it was very historical.

Some Muslim guys came up to me with a piece of paper saying

www.muslimmatrimony.com.

And I just looked at it and I was like, they saw me with a hijab and I was like, okay, fine.

I realize that the only way I can get away from my family is if I get married

kind of like a male order bride

I'm not proud of but that pretty much was how I became I met John Georgelis online and John

an American who came from a military family his dad was a general in the Air Force a doctor so he he

he lived the life that I wish I had been born into.

You know, who doesn't want to be a white American upper-middle-class family with a great legacy?

But I met him and we had a lot in common.

That we had

problems

in our homes, with our fathers.

and felt rejected by society, but we were most welcomed by the Muslim community.

Because the Muslim community will embrace everyone, anyone.

You can be the most retarded

anyone, like psychopath, murderous person.

You're welcome as long as you come in and join the group because they need everybody.

And so it's almost like a gang culture.

But it gave me some belonging, which I didn't have anywhere else.

And

so it that was my initial stage with

in England.

Yeah.

And so when you met him online, how did that transpire?

What attracted you to him?

What

did he promise?

Very superficial.

And again, in Islam, you can marry people for four reasons.

You can marry a man for his wealth, for his status, for his piety, or his looks.

I went for status.

And I went because his parents came from a good family.

And

I, like I said, I wished I had come from that kind of background.

Like when I was a child, I used to wish, like, I wish I could be adopted by a white family and middle class and get away from my parents.

But it's sad to think like that, you know, because I felt so rejected from the age of five.

I was running away from home.

And John, I don't know exactly why.

John's dad was absent in his life.

His dad worked really hard as a doctor and in the military.

So he didn't spend spend much time with his son.

But when John's dad did spend time with John, my ex-husband,

there wasn't a good relationship.

John didn't meet up to Tim's expectations.

Tim is tall, he was athletic, he played

football at West Point.

You know, he had achieved so much, but John, on the other hand, had a drug addiction at the age of 11.

Oh my.

Yeah and

it never really got dealt with.

He didn't go to therapy.

He didn't get counseling.

He should have probably gone to a military camp or some boot camp or something.

But none of that happened and

his rebellion against his parents just

got out of hand.

And

so with John

I'm going off a bit.

No, no, no, that's fine.

So like after September 11th,

you know, so I'll go back to my story and then I'll explain what happened to John.

After September 11th, I went to school.

I was in my politics class and I said to my friend who is a Pakistani girl, she's now graduated from Queen Mary's University and is a lawyer.

But I spoke to her and I said, wasn't it terrible what happened?

And I think they think it's Muslims.

And she was like, well, was it so bad?

You don't think they deserved it?

And I was like, and I was like, hang on.

Let me ask you that again, because I didn't think she understood my what I was she said come home after school and talk to my parents and they'll they'll explain to you the history of the Soviet Union and how these mujahideen these glorious mujahideen had defeated communism and they are heroes

problem is those so-called warrior heroes sought asylum in England and they got asylum and they influenced us and they influenced like a lot of groups the hizbat tahrir which is a banned group in England, they were calling for a caliphate, which my cousin had learned from in Oxford and she taught me about.

And then there was another group called Al-Mahajroon by Omar Bakri.

They're banned now and they wanted to make England a Islamic state, which was a complete joke.

But so I wasn't really with any of them, but I had lots of friends and they were all from different groups who all supported jihad in different ways.

Hizbat Tahrir Ht,

they said they were non-violent, but only up until a certain time.

They're like, we don't do jihad now, we do it later.

And it's the same with the Sufis.

They're like,

now is not the time to fight.

We'll fight at the end of days when Christ returns to Damascus and we'll kill off all the Jews.

And I was like, whoa, okay.

And I had never met a Jewish person.

So I was like, okay,

the only references I have to Jewish people are from the Quran.

And as far as I know, God curses them, God hates them,

all this stuff that is the most anti-Semitic book.

I mean, if there's any book full of hate speech, it's the Quran.

And that's where I learned it from.

I didn't have to learn it from any group.

You just have to read any translation and it's there.

The misogyny, the

barbarity, the war booty, all this stuff.

And

I was like, okay, these are my values because I was like

I was so willing to be led

and

and how did John get there John got there

so he was first a I would describe a Christian fundamentalist he was part of the Orthodox Greek church who he had been raised to actually hate Muslims because of the Ottoman Empire and what they had done they had enslaved the Turk or the Greeks and

they didn't do much good anyway.

They were really into pedophilia and all those things and making it legal.

So I could understand

why Greeks don't like the Turks, but then they generalize and make all Muslims as if they're all Turks.

And that's how he was raised.

But then

something about his

him feeling rejected by his father made him more inclined to research this monotheist religion.

He also had he had trouble understanding the Trinity because he was like, it's not monotheist, it's illogical, it doesn't make sense that, you know, the God impregnated Mary and

was

born.

And then when he's dying, he's praying to a God saying, God, why have you like forsaken me?

And, you know, it didn't, and then when he went to his priest, because he was a devout Christian, he wanted to be a priest, his parents weren't happy about that.

They wanted him to be a lawyer or something.

But, and so, when he spoke to his priests about it, they were like, Oh, no one really believes in the Trinity.

We just go along with it.

It doesn't make sense.

You don't have to have

you don't know how it doesn't make rational sense.

You just have to have that leap of faith.

That wasn't good enough for John.

He was also experimenting with terrible amounts, high amounts of LSD.

And I don't,

I've never taken it but he was like

he said that he would see things

like light spirits in the cave he was in Colorado Springs and he was with his friends and they could all see these spirits these these beings of light and they and then later on he thought oh they must have been jinns after reading the Quran

It was just a chemical reaction in his brain, but he didn't know because he was a young boy.

So he becomes Muslim, you go online,

you start talking about

hijra and jihad.

Two concepts that I want to eradicate

in Islam.

What are they?

The first one is...

Jihad is

different levels.

There's jihad of yourself, where you just like deprive of yourself from being a human being and having human desires.

And then the jihad like defensive or offensive it's the physical jihad and these are things that we couldn't deny because they were actions of the prophet muhammad and in the quran we're told imitate him we have to imitate muhammad because he's perfect And we're told we're not allowed to question because only we're told you there's a verse in the Quran.

I haven't read the Quran since 2009, so it's too traumatic for me.

But it was like, you do not question God, God questions you.

And then other things like, imitate Muhammad and imitate Abraham.

Well, these two guys, okay, Muhammad was a pedophile.

Muhammad was,

you know, like, from my understanding of my readings, after I read Hugh Kennedy's

book called The Caliphate, and I could clearly see Muhammad had an inferiority complex to Jews and Christians because they had moved on from polytheism to monotheism.

They were moving ahead.

And so he wanted to catch on.

I guess he felt some sort of shame about the polytheist ways of Arabia.

So

these connections didn't come until later.

I'm jumping from.

But John never saw it.

And then

a bit of like imitating Abraham.

In Islam, the scriptures are, they've been changed from the Old Testament.

And things like,

you know, you've got to imitate Abraham.

He's the father.

Abraham wanted to sacrifice his son.

And he was willing to do it until God stopped him.

That meant we, Muslims, will take that as meaning that we have to sacrifice our children for God.

to prove ourselves.

But then there's like no human rights.

And children don't know who have human rights but they don't believe in human rights because it's not from god

so you guys hit it off we hit it off at the beginning i didn't really like him i think it was a little bit autistic because i was saying i didn't realize that i married him as a stranger i married him three days after meeting him

I know it sounds crazy we we wrote to each other we emailed each other for two months we were only 19 when we got married and we I understood that I never felt at home in England not the way I do in America and I never picked up on English values probably because it's too tolerant to bad ideas and cultural abuse

But also just feeling like I'm not allowed because it's against my religion and I'll go to hell if I act like them.

And so

I met John, and we got on great, and we were like, oh, we were dreaming about a caliphate, we were dreaming about jihad, you know, this is all in our imagination.

And

then I had children, and then

it was slightly different.

And then it wasn't until I had my second child that I so John went to prison for three years.

He had been, he had,

um, was charged for hacking into APAC's website because he worked for a company called Rackspace, which web hosts

a lot of pornography and APAC, their website.

So it made him really angry because Islam makes you angry about everything, right?

You know what I mean.

And then

so

he was actually talking to an undercover CIA agent from Canada and he didn't realize it.

His friends warned him it's a trap but he didn't listen to me, he didn't listen to his friends.

So he ended up selling for this website he had unspun, he started doing IT work programming for them and selling Osama bin Laden propaganda which was the stupidest thing.

I didn't really know about it.

And another thing in Islam is that there's two times you can lie.

You can lie you can there's um taqiyya i think it's called it's when you lie when you you don't want to say you're a Muslim to save your life and you can lie to your wife so my husband took advantage of that and he lied to me a lot because he didn't want me nagging him

and so he didn't tell me everything but he went to prison for almost three years at Seacoatville in Texas it was a

it was a detention center it was low security

during that time I was able to breathe a little bit I resolved.

First time alone.

First time alone.

So he wasn't in charge.

I didn't have a...

Family or brothers or mom or dad?

Just me and my child, my first son.

And I started unveiling slowly.

Like, I would wear the headscarf, but I put on a colorful one.

I took off my veil because he made me wear it.

Hated wearing the veil.

You cannot breathe under the veil.

It's like wearing a sack over your head.

And I tell every man who says that it's righteous and everything I'm like put a bag over your head you know and you'll know what it feels like

but then they say oh our mothers don't say it feels like that their mothers are lying

because it does feel like especially when you're pregnant and it's hard to breathe and and they're always making us pregnant and they they treat us like baby-making machines just so that they can subdue us Because I had this problem that I always wanted to accept my independence and say, like, I want a job and I don't want to just be at home and you know I want to do what other 20 year olds do because I was in my 20s at the time but

he thought that was

too feminist over and too American yeah so while he was in prison I got to have some freedom and he came back and the night it's crazy because I always say I was married to John for 10 years.

The best time, the best years of my marriage was while he was in prison and while he was on probation for three years because I had a foot over him on his neck for the first time.

This is before it was the other way around.

And so if he stepped out online, he knew I would report him to his probation officer who I got along with really well.

It really helped having a relationship with the FBI.

for that duration because they could also see the control John had over me and they could see me trying to fight it.

So like

they were concerned.

They understood there was some manipulation.

There's manipulation going involved and you know they

were caring.

I don't care what anyone says about the FBI, but they saved my life.

This government saved my life.

And I owe them my loyalty and my love and my life.

And so do my children.

And I remind them of that every day because we would be in those camps in Syria right now, or we would be dead if it wasn't for the US having a heart, you know, like having sympathy on us.

And you know, of course, the FBI agents saw it and they were concerned for me, but there was only so much they could do.

Um,

and so what year was this?

Um, so it started, so they arrested him in 2006,

and then he was off probation 2011

and the plan was

so in 2011 October

2011 he said we have to leave we're going we're leaving we plan to go to Libya first because I actually liked Gaddafi

he was good for his people even though he was a socialist but you know like he was better than all the other dictators of the region there's a difference Americans have a hard time hearing things like that but we don't live in the Middle East and

the Middle East is

is a warrior kind of area they need the state they need

yeah they look for the strongman they need autocracy because I don't think like a four year like in America they look every four years in their terms

it's very hard to look in the future far ahead like let's say China where they look, you know, like, how is everything going to still function in 40 years?

And that's how the dictators in the Middle East think, very much so.

So yeah,

they're not used to democracy and they're not ready for democracy.

And they are like, I lived in Egypt when

I moved to Egypt in 2011.

John wanted us to move there.

I didn't want to move.

He said in 2008, there was a recession.

He scared the living lives out of me.

He said, the country is going to have a civil war.

We're going to be attacked.

We're going to be the scapegoats because we're the Muslims.

And being a stay-at-home mom, I wasn't allowed to leave the house without his permission.

I didn't want to leave the house even because I hated wearing the hijab.

It's hot.

It's Texas.

We're crying out loud.

Who wants to wear it?

And also, I knew that no one was going to harass me.

Like, it's not in like in England when I was growing up in England.

You know, there's all this cat calling, all these drunk people, there's pubs everywhere that you get harassed constantly.

So, and I used to see women in America jogging and freely and no one's harassing them.

And I was like,

I don't have to be afraid of men here.

They're going to respect me.

They're not going to care.

And so that was an issue.

I was like, John, I don't have to do this.

You know, I don't have to be so uncomfortable and feel stigmatized and polarized when I go outside because no one, more people look at me when I'm covered than if I was uncovered.

But he didn't care.

He thought I was becoming too Americanized.

He didn't like it.

He didn't like me questioning him.

He wanted me to be more submissive.

And it was hard for me when I had children to be that submissive because I knew I was putting my children a risk.

So by the end of the day, I was financially dependent on him and I had no family.

I didn't want to go back to my parents.

My parents didn't want me.

They never wanted me to begin with.

I always argue with my mum, like, why didn't you use contraception properly?

You know, like, that's how bad our our relationship is.

Like, if you didn't want me, why didn't you take the right precautions?

Instead, I was raised like a servant.

You know, I didn't, they didn't care if I went to school.

I just had to make sure the house was clean, you know, and take care of my brother because my mom had to work and my brother was too young to go to school.

So, I'd skip days of school to look after my brother.

All my sisters had to.

Even when my sisters went to university, they were working jobs to provide for my parents because that's the only reason why these that community

from that very third world mentality region thinks of children like as if

like okay, so I can explain it like

if people work on a farm They have children so that the children can work on the farm to help them So it was very much the mentality of we have children so that they can look after us and provide for us

So that's what I saw my sisters sisters go through and I saw how depressed they were and basically I wanted out.

And I thought, and my parents weren't too religious then.

They were just like culturally Muslim, didn't really care.

And so I got married to John.

They were happy with me marrying John because, sadly, because he's white.

a white convert, American passport, and from a military educated family.

So they're like, oh, if they have any problems, they'll take care of her.

Because

they didn't want me.

So

you take off the hijab and I take off the jahab hijab ten years later after I divorce John.

After I leave John.

No, but when he is in prison,

you start unveiling.

Yeah, the robes and the face veil.

I kept the colorful hijab, if he didn't like it.

And

But when he gets out, you still want to raise your kids as warriors.

Yeah.

You still...

I was still indoctrinated because at that time

I was still...

So in Islam, I don't know how it is with Christianity, but your thoughts,

if you have a thought that contradicts the Quran or Muhammad, it's a sin.

So it's really hard to...

So do you know what the word Israel actually means?

Yeah, to to

wrestle.

To wrestle.

To wrestle with God.

I want to be Jewish.

Yeah.

I'm trying.

It's a long process.

I'm going to study it this year actually because I love Judaism very much.

So

you actually go to recruit people, don't you?

I didn't recruit anybody.

I was a stay-at-home mom looking, homeschooling my kids.

And that was hard for me.

Like, I was homeschooling my kids but so I started doing this when I when John came out of prison he wanted a child I wasn't ready and this is my second child I got pregnant straight away had a baby but then I came across this program called Your Baby Can Read and Your Child Can Read and it's a great program.

So I taught my

second son, his name's Laith.

I taught him how to read at nine months old.

And by the age of two and a half, he could read English, French, Italian, Greek and Arabic.

Holy cow.

And I was, that was like the most I had achieved in my life.

Like I was so proud of him and he made me like the proudest mother in history.

And I just said to John, he is not going on the front lines.

Like I would like get sleepless nights and nightmares about losing this precious child.

And I was like, I want so much more for him.

I want him to give to the world.

I don't want him to destroy the world.

And so my mentality completely changed.

Also, he took me to Egypt thinking that

if

Tanya goes to Egypt, she won't care about wearing the hijab because everyone

wears the hijab.

But in Cairo, it's only half half.

Half the women do and half the women don't.

And when I went to Egypt and I saw what a broken country it was with like no, the government does not function whatsoever.

And I was like, I do not want to be part of this.

I would rather live in the enemy land of America, you know, the satanic America, because life functions there.

If there is corruption, it's not so blatantly in your face.

And I couldn't stand all the bribery and all the

it's a disgusting country.

Egypt is disgusting.

You know,

I'm very candid.

But, you know, I thought, oh my god, it's almost as bad as Bangladesh, where I came from.

And so he thought being in Egypt would change me, but it made me resent

Arabs and Islam so much more.

And I just, he, I wanted to get away.

And I wanted, and so I would have John write to Homeland Security asking them, please let my, please let my wife and her children back because

she can't handle being here.

But they would reply, no, because of your reputation,

we won't.

right

so that was really hard for me i couldn't go back to england my family would have just told me to go to a homeless shelter and um so they were i was stuck with him and at this point i was very suicidal um i was trying to suffocate him and it's i like i i i used to tell him

with the abuse and just feeling so trapped and not having

like any choices of my life no like it was suffocating me, and suffer, like, if anything, my consciousness was suffocating

because,

like, things that I just hated, things like child marriages and

like the treatment of the Dimi class, the Christians and Jews, and how they would be demonized.

I guess my Western upbringing in England made me feel like, well, they're still humans and they shouldn't be treated like that.

And they wouldn't treat us like that.

My husband and I were always bumping, you know, hitting heads.

And then I'm like,

and

I always felt like all these Muslim scholars in history, they're all men

because they're the ones who have access to education.

And they're talking about women's issues, which they have no understanding of.

They don't know what it's like to have a child.

They don't know what it's like to be a daughter-in-law or anything like that.

And

that used to frustrate me.

So I would encourage John to talk about women's rights online.

When he was in his speaking forums, he had a following online.

It was called We Hear and We Obey.

And

even that title comes from the Quran because there's a very anti-Semitic passage that says that the believers say we hear and we obey, but the Jews say we hear and we disobey.

So, and you know, even in the first, the very first verse of the Quran, Al-Fatiha,

it says, you know, something on the lines of, God do not curse us like the Jews and do not be angry at us with the Christians.

And you have to use the explanation of the Quran.

to understand the passages.

And you're saying that five times a day.

So it makes you, it's just like this religion of fear.

You're just like scared all the time and paranoid that there are jinns,

these genies whispering in your ears.

But really, that's your consciousness warning you.

It's a siren.

You have to suppress that.

And it's really hard.

So I would...

My point was, you know, so we're always bickering and he found me very difficult.

He wanted a different wife.

He wanted more wives.

He wanted...

So when, at what point

did he say, I want to go to Syria?

Okay, so that was

that was, so he wanted to go to Syria during 2011, and I wasn't ready.

I was like, there's no way I'm going to go with my kids.

I have all these health issues.

How am I going to have access to an electric toothbrush?

Or, you know, like all my toiletries and all these things, like my lifestyle.

I was selfish, but I was like,

you know I love Syria it's holy land the Levant in the in the Islamic scripture it's where the Messiah returns to kill the Jews which just sounds horrible but that's what it says and then I was like I just don't want to be part of it I just want to be like I want to be a grandmother one day I want to see my children do well I want to you know just live life, you know.

Was Egypt a middle step for him?

Hoping to get you to Syria?

Well,

Egypt was a place, since there was no government for one year, so that so 2011 happened, there was no government.

There was anarchy in Egypt.

No one obeyed any single law.

There was like no traffic laws, nothing.

It was completely broken.

He loved it.

He thrived in it.

No one was watching him as far as he was concerned.

He was free.

So that's where he could ramp up his rhetoric of jihad and also mistreat me and know that I have no probation officer or anyone to turn to.

I did ask his parents for help and I used to complain.

They never believed me.

They didn't want to believe that their son was a monster because, honestly, they didn't raise him to be that way.

There's a little bit of misogyny, you know, like it's like old school relationship traditional with the father and the mother, but it wasn't,

they just didn't want to believe me.

I was the outsider at the end of the day.

So I was alone and I was dependent on him.

And then so Syria came along where

when the coup happened, the military coup happened, and Morsi went, and there's even stories about Morsi where there were like people from Europe coming over to us.

They revered John because he had this website called the strangers, goroba.info.

And it was, it had laid out all the criteria for who should be a caliph.

Because John was one of the very few people that had studied this, the caliphate, and

wanted to implement the caliphate.

And he knew that it was necessary.

And under Islamic scripture, it is necessary.

You can't have a body, like you have a community of Muslims.

We're a body, but you can't have a body that's decapitated.

So you have to have a head.

It's interesting because I know all of this.

And

while you were probably

here and then on the way to Egypt, that's what I was being mocked.

Everyone said there was no caliphate and you were talking to your sister about one 10 years before, 11 years before.

It's always been a plan.

It's always the agenda and the agenda is world domination.

Right.

And it's, you know, it is,

you know, right now I always have this problem with some Muslims and I'm not anti-Muslim.

I feel like Muslims have all been manipulated equally as much as I have by this doctrine.

We've been duped by this ideology of hate.

And it's from Muhammad,

a man who

suffered some sort of illness.

I was on the Piers Morgan interview once and I...

I suggested that maybe he had epilepsy.

Maybe that's what made him see these visions.

You know, we don't know because back then they didn't even have science.

You know, they they were still into medieval beliefs, you know, so what what you can we really trust if if a man is walking on the street and collapses and has a dream and says he sees God and gives him a message, I'm not gonna believe him.

I don't know him.

He could be a criminal.

But back then they did.

You know, um, so

it was tough.

Um so you go to Syria.

Yeah.

Unintentionally.

He took me there.

We weren't supposed to go to Syria.

He wanted to go to Sudan to study, to teach English and Arabic because he was fluent in Arabic, fluent in a lot of the ancient scriptures.

He had memorized the first Arabic dictionary, the very first grammar dictionary.

And I didn't realize he was autistic at the time.

So because he didn't look it.

So he like...

He made me feel inferior because I just thought, oh, God, I must be like a complete bimber because he memorizes books and I don't mainly because I don't have the time I've got to focus on my kids education but um

so we wanted to go Sudan but we needed money to escape because at the time in Egypt during the coup

CC was arresting anyone all the foreigners and if you were non-Islamic he was ex he was saying charging people for being uh spies for America or whatever.

And then if you're Islamic, he was saying, oh, you must be Muslim Brotherhood or al-Qaeda, even if you're neither.

And I was living in Nasser city right there when the helicopters came and were shooting at the protesters.

I

lived like around the corner was the mosque.

I forgot the name of something, like Rabia.

And it was burnt down with people in, protesters were in there seeking sanctuary and the CC government burnt the place down and it was horrifying you know like

but other things disturbed me in Egypt while I was there I used to see children going through garbage cans

trying to pick things out and I would just like

burst out crying I couldn't handle it and John thought it was embarrassing but I was like these children should be in school.

Why are they picking up trash for their parents?

I couldn't handle the whole culture.

It was a complete culture shock for me.

It was unbearable.

And, you know, at that time, John was like, I'm going to get another wife.

I've had enough of you.

Just like go back to your parents.

I was like, yeah, like, that's easy.

You know, three kids.

Yeah.

And then,

and three kids with no reproductive rights.

There's no,

in Muslim scholars, reject the idea of marital rape, even though it's very real.

John knew very well I didn't want any more children with him.

And still he impregnated me and I didn't want it with my fourth child.

And then he went and left me with, you know, in Syria while five months pregnant,

just make it on my own.

you know, because there's a verse in the Quran that says that your wives and your children are the biggest fitna, which fitna means like temptation, problem.

Like, so he

didn't want the responsibility of us.

He wants.

Okay, so he becomes a commander in ISIS.

He kind of follows in his father and his grandfather's footsteps, except with the enemy of the United States.

And that's what he wanted to do.

He wanted to follow.

He was like, he had some sort of pride.

He was like, my grandfather fought in World War II.

My dad was in the Air Force.

I'm going to be in ISIS.

Well, I used to say to him, and guess what's going to happen to your kids?

Like, because I'd learned the history of the Russians and the Chechnyans.

Chechnyan fathers would abandon their fathers and the children would join the Russian army.

Now my kids want to go to West Point and join the military, which I pray to God that they will, you know, because they really want to make their grandfather proud and they want to prove to America that you know that their loyalty is for here and I

so tell me about your time in

as an ISIS bride I mean you were there he was a commander okay so to make it clear I left ISIS I sorry I left Syria six months before ISIS declared a caliphate okay

I am the luckiest mother and wife who got out in time because I could have been one of those women trapped in those prison camps

with the Kurds.

I'm the only one who has made it back to America, de-radicalized, and

not had to face prison or be in those camps or be dead.

But you...

There was a chance you were going to be dead trying to get out.

Yeah.

Tell me how you got out.

I wasn't expecting that.

Like, I wasn't prepared.

It was entering Syria.

So, like, first, it's a long story how we got there.

We were never planning to go to Turkey, but we needed finances to leave Egypt.

But the only people, the only person we could get money from was his dad.

And his dad was like, no way, I'm not sending you to Sudan.

That's just a crazy idea.

I didn't want to go to Sudan.

It's too hot.

And the people are lazy because it's hot.

And then John was like, Philippines.

And I was like, The Philippines is fine.

But I looked at pictures and I was like, I don't want to live on stilts with like snakes underneath.

And I was like, I want a real home.

And

so

I wanted to go to Greece.

But then John's parents were like, No, you can't go to Greece with a hijab.

They're going to think you're a refugee or a gypsy and they're not going to treat you right.

I was like, well, I'm happy to take my hijab off.

But John wouldn't allow it.

Seriously, I did not want to wear the hijab for so many years, and I was locked in my house because of that.

And so

Turkey was the compromise.

So we were in Turkey, Istanbul.

I was so happy.

I was like, oh, it's clean.

It's not filthy like Egypt.

And it's like more like Europe.

And I was so happy.

But he was like, it's too expensive.

And I'm not going to learn Turkish.

We've got to go to the eastern side where they speak Arabic.

And I was like, okay, fair enough.

How bad can it be?

I've never been there.

I went there.

I was horrified.

It was full of ref Syrian refugees and I was really panicking and hormonal from being pregnant and I was freaking out every moment.

And

he was like...

We were waiting for money to be transferred and the money didn't come and then we ended up getting on a bus because we were sleeping on the streets because we couldn't get a hotel room.

All the hotels, the Syrians were given priority over hotel rooms.

So the only place we could stay that night in Ghazliantap was a Syrian hostel.

And I refused to stay there because I was like, ah, like, I haven't,

I have, my kids and I are allergic to

bed bugs, like, really badly.

And it was filthy.

And I said, I'd rather sleep on the streets with my kids, pregnant.

And we were there at two o'clock in the morning on the streets.

And a bus bus came to the Syrian hostel for the refugees and let them off to go stay there.

John went and spoke to them.

I didn't speak because I wasn't allowed to have interaction with men.

And so, yeah.

So like 10 years of having

no interaction with the opposite sex, which is difficult, right?

And so he went to talk to them.

He said, get on the bus.

because he knew we were exhausted.

And I was like, oh, I can sit down and sleep.

I didn't know where the bus was going and it ended up driving to the checkpoint of the Turkish-Syrian border and there we got out and I was like

having a meltdown and John was like don't make you know women aren't allowed to

we're not even allowed to speak loudly in public we have to keep quiet I was like it's only two weeks it's only two weeks I reassure you it's only because we don't have the money

and then he said as soon as we get the money we'll go back to Turkey because that was the plan to stay in Turkey and help the rebels

from Turkey, because there's a lot of that happening.

There was no mention of the caliphate at the time, because at the time, I didn't really even thought, I didn't think I would see a caliphate in my lifetime, but I thought maybe my children would.

And then,

so we ended up going into Syria.

The Turkish border guards didn't care.

They didn't question me.

They didn't question my friend who's an Irish citizen.

Because women, they didn't want to talk to us.

John lied.

So at this checkpoint, there are Tunisian foreign fighters.

And, you know, you can see them.

They've got the big beards.

They've got the kalashnokoffs.

And they just said to John, just say your passport's on the other side.

And he did.

And he passed.

They didn't care.

They let us through.

As soon as we got there, then

the militia, the Islamic militia, questioned John.

They said, who do you know?

He gave them some references.

They called up the references.

The people said, take care of this guy.

Take care of his family.

So they put us into an abandoned general's home.

It was like a mansion.

But the windows had been shattered.

There were gun bullets.

There was holes.

The water tank at the top had been broken.

We had no electricity.

It was...

really hard.

So I was there for, like, they they kept moving us, but it was a military base, so it's where the militia would come and have meetings.

So we could only stay there for a week.

And then so for, I was only in Syria for three weeks.

And John didn't have a cell phone at this time that worked in the Syrian location.

He had a cell phone that worked in Turkey, but it didn't work in Syria.

So we kept moving.

And then as soon as John got a cell phone,

I called his mother and I said, John did exactly what he said he wouldn't do because he promised me and he promised his mother he would not take us to Syria.

He said we were going to stay in Antioch, in Turkey.

But he ended up taking us to Gaziantep and from there to Syria.

And I called her up and I said, please call the FBI.

Tell them that I'm so desperate to get out of here because if we don't, we're not going to just have one terrorist, American terrorist, but he's going to make my children terrorists.

And I didn't want to see that.

That was the biggest problem to me and John is that I really wanted my children to have a fulfilling life.

I wanted them to live and be educated.

And all he cared about was an Islamic primitive medieval education.

And it was a huge problem.

And, you know, and the differences arose from,

strangely, from the internet.

So like using Facebook.

I was...

So prior to Syria, we were in Egypt and we would speak in political forums with Jews, Christians, atheists and John was a Muslim and we would debate and I loved these debates and it made me realize how much I love Americans too because their principle I fell in love with Americans I fell in love with John even his American side but I loved American people

and

so he you know, this opened my mind a lot like just hearing their arguments and their debates and not and feeling more of an affiliation to them than I did with the Muslims.

The Muslims were so nihilistic and the Muslims didn't care about things like I cared about saving the bees.

I cared about like, you know, pollution and things.

And for them, they were like, it's the end of the world.

Jesus will take care of it.

God will take care of it.

Whatever.

And I was like, well, you know, we can help, you know, with these problems.

But we just had different priorities altogether because at the end of the day, their goal was to die to live an eternal life in paradise.

Because to them and my husband, my ex-husband, this life is a dream.

It's not real.

And then, so, the hadiths say, when you go to paradise, you look back at this world, and it's just like a dream.

Dreams are insignificant.

And so, that's how lightly they

take this world, and that's how much they depreciate life.

They don't value human life, not for their families, not for their children.

And that's why it's so poisonous.

When you came across the border to leave Syria,

how did you get back across?

So that was really rough.

I was five and a half months pregnant.

So I had waited three weeks until the fighting had stopped so that the borders would be open for me to cross.

And the Syrians were like, malesh, malesh, they would say, like, oh, that's Egyptian.

You're like, this is no problem.

It's easy.

I thought...

I was under the impression it would be as easy to leave as it was to get in because the Turkish border guards didn't care

but it wasn't uh Syrian the Syrian guards were on these posts shooting at us we were running I didn't I was so scared my kids were frightened we had to run through barbed wire we had to get onto a human trafficking truck john paid the human trafficker he crossed the border with us to turkey he could have come with us but he wouldn't he said i'm not going to i begged him on my hands and knees while pregnant crying please take me to the airport because I'd never been alone in my life.

I said, please take me to the airport.

And he said, no, because you've reported me to the FBI and they're going to arrest me.

So it's your fault.

So he wouldn't take me.

So he left me with this human trafficker that left me.

He drove up, you know, took John's money, drove up, left me in the middle of nowhere in Turkey.

I didn't know.

I didn't speak Turkish.

It was a dirt road with just grass and fields and hills.

And I was sobbing.

I didn't know which way, left, right, anywhere.

Everybody else in the truck just

scattered like cockroaches in their own ways.

And I was just there alone, crying and sobbing.

My poor kids had to see me.

My kids were just...

carrying the luggage and I was pushing a stroller and then a guy came on a motorcycle and saw us, how distressed we were.

And he said, he couldn't speak Arabic, he couldn't speak English, he spoke Turkish.

And the only word that that we could get across was mektab or like station.

I need to get to the bus station.

So he said,

I will take one child at a time, a luggage, and take them to the station.

And I was so afraid.

Yeah, I bet.

Because they have organ trafficking, drug trafficking, sex trafficking in that region.

It's so dominant.

Even in Egypt, it's so prevalent.

Kids go missing all the time.

So what made you decide to take him up on the offer?

I put my trust in God.

I didn't have any other option.

So I didn't know what else to do.

So he went, he took my eight-year-old and a luggage bag and then he came back.

Then he took my four-year-old and a luggage bag and went back.

And as a Muslim woman, I wouldn't have sat near him on a bicycle motorbike because it's like too close proximity.

So I walked with the stroller and I had two racks, pregnant, six months pregnant,

dehydrated.

I forgot to bring water with me.

And I get criticized for that, not bringing drinking water, but I was like, my hands were full.

I thought John had water.

He thought I had water.

We didn't have water.

My kids had infections.

I had an infection.

We were sick.

But this man was very good and he took my kids to the bus station.

He came and he drove slowly while I pushed up the hill.

It was like a two-mile walk and then I got to the bus station.

I saw my kids were safe.

And then John had arranged another trafficker, Syrian trafficker, who I could tell was a real radical.

He had shaven his beard and everything, but he wouldn't look at me.

He looked at me with disgust because I wasn't covered up.

My face wasn't covered.

My body, you know, I didn't wear the robes like his family does.

So he wouldn't even talk to me, like, like I was not even human, like something disgusting.

I was like, okay, I've got to work with him regardless.

And then him and his family, I gave them 60 euros.

They drove me to Gazientep Airport.

And from Ghaziantep Airport, John's father had

booked tickets for us to go to

Istanbul.

And then by the time I got to Istanbul, I had to go to the emergency room because I nearly had a miscarriage.

Jeez.

And I had to leave my kids in a hotel room alone, which really frightened me because that's like three kids.

I got an eight-year-old, a four-year-old, and a one-and-a-half-year-old staying in a hotel room by themselves.

While you're having a baby.

While I'm getting like fluids put into me because I was so dehydrated.

And the Turkish, the ER people were horrible.

They just...

They didn't show an ounce of kindness to me.

And they were wondering why I was mad at them.

so I like at one point I was just so mad I was like I was tearing out the IV and I said just I want to go back home I need to go to my kids went home I went back to the hotel found my kids asleep sound asleep this is like six hours I was in the hospital and then they were sleeping and there was like this

a male hotel guy sitting there but I kind of freaked out because I would have preferred a woman to be watching my kids I would have got paranoia but I was like I know what happens in hotels and I know what kind of business they run.

It's not shady sometimes.

But, you know, he didn't harm my kids, but I was a very over-protective mother.

And so he left.

Then my mother, my former mother-in-law, John's mother, called my family in England and said, please help Tanya.

She's in hospital.

She's in the hotel.

She had to leave.

John abandoned them.

And my family said, no.

They were like, no, we're not going to help her.

And then she basically had to beg.

And so one of my sisters, my parents told one of my sisters, please go help.

So she came, picked us up from Turkey, because they were familiar with Turkey.

They're Muslims.

They go all over the Muslim world.

They're fine with it.

They won't come to America, though, because they're anti-American.

But they they picked us up from Turkey.

I was in a wheelchair.

And the American government said, we can't save you from Syria, but if you cross the border and come to the UK you have to come back to the US within two weeks because we have to record everything you saw in those two weeks

and I was like I'm more than happy to help you like

America saved me

it goes back to before I went to Syria where I was a stay-at-home mom

I was, you know, homeschooling my kids, which is really tough work.

And I would watch things like Fox News Business.

I would listen to

Judge Andrew Napolitano.

I would listen to Ron Paul.

They taught me about the U.S.

Constitution.

This was enlightenment for me.

It was...

You said that when you read the Declaration of Independence, you had never read anything like that before.

Freedom of thought, freedom of thinking, rights for humans?

It's incredible.

Like,

as Muslims, we have to think the word of God is perfect.

We're not allowed to disagree.

But I was like, hang on, this is a value system that is so much more humane, so much more merciful to human nature than a 14th century angry Arab God.

And who's also misogynist and homophobic and hates everyone who's not a Muslim?

And I was like, you know,

I was like, I found something more beautiful.

And,

you know, of course, John didn't appreciate that.

But I fell for it.

I fell in love.

I was like, this is what I need.

This is what my children need.

This is what the world needs.

You've read Thomas Paine?

I love Thomas Paine.

Yeah, I read

The Age of Reason,

Rights of Man.

I got you.

What did you think of that?

Okay, so I went to Facebook headquarters once and I had to go discuss with them their responsibility for spreading terrorism

with the groups, the foreign groups.

But that was why I went there with the group, the Parents for Peace.

But I had to thank them because I was like,

I read a meme and the meme said,

A cruel God, I don't have my bag here, but I had a notes, but it was something like, the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.

And when I read that meme, it's so powerful, a small meme, it struck me so hard.

And I was like, no one has expressed what I was, I've been feeling so clearly because I knew it and I felt it every single day.

And

he had the freedom as a non-Muslim to put it into words because it's blasphemy to say such a thing in Islam.

But it was true.

And I remember saying to John, John, Thomas Paine says all these amazing quotes and you know I didn't rate I wasn't raised with the American founding fathers or anything so I was like this is so incredible he said he said yeah I read Thomas Paine while I was in prison he's good but you stay away from him

and I was like oh I'm fine but once John was out the picture I could read every material I wanted

you know I started studying humanism I started just reading everything I could like philosophy, psychology.

I wanted to make sense of why my life was the way it was.

Like, because even I was like, this is too crazy.

I need to make sense of it.

So

are you, you're not Muslim?

No way.

Yeah.

And...

I don't want to be a slave.

And that's what I got to say.

Islam is enslavement.

It's enslavement for men, women, children, minorities.

and if you're not a slave, you're going to be killed.

I know it sounds Islamophobic, but it's legitimate.

It's a legitimate reason.

Even the Crusades, like the Muslims, and everybody wants to criticize the Crusades or how they attacked the Middle East and everything.

But if you look at the secular history of it, the Muslims were invading Europe and killing far more Europeans

than

in comparison to what happened to the Crusades.

The Crusades was like a very minor You know battle compared to the invasion of the Ottomans and the Arabs of Europe that had been going on for so long

So like I was without John without my husband being my God telling me what I can and can't think

I could see the picture clearly

And it was enlightening and so

you probably think that Thomas Paine

atheist?

No, he's a deist.

Isn't he?

He believes in God.

Yeah.

I just want to show you something.

Okay.

Thomas Paine was

known as

he went over to help free the people of France.

And he got into a real bad argument.

with George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, who was like his father.

And

he said, you don't you see it?

That's it's liberty.

But when he got over there, they started beheading everybody and it turned into just a bloodbath.

And the reason why, he said, this he started to get into trouble with them because he said, wait, this didn't happen in America.

But what he noticed was they were rejecting God.

And that's when he wrote

books that you have read.

And he was trying to explain to the French, but the Americans read that and said, you're rejecting God.

Most people leave the story at that, and most scholars leave it at that.

This is Thomas Paine's letter to Benjamin Franklin.

That's his I love Benjamin Franklin.

This is

that's his letter.

And in it, he talks about how

I was trying to express to the French who have lived through

horrible, horrible religious persecution

where the churches were just organs of the state and it wasn't about God.

And I was trying to tell them that.

They need God, but I understand how they feel about the church.

This is beautiful.

This is amazing.

And my handwriting is very similar.

It is it.

I'm not a writer, but I'm good at handwriting.

Let me show you one more.

One more.

One more thing.

Oh my goodness.

So this is the actual document that Thomas Paine wrote to Benjamin Franklin.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

It's pretty amazing, isn't it?

It is.

And it goes on page.

I know.

I wish I could read all of it.

Yeah, well, I'll leave it with you for a few and you can read it.

This I thought you might enjoy as well.

This is the QAN.

But this is the first American printing of it.

This was...

Can you say it's edited?

It's not edited.

Oh, well, I'm going to have to go in there and scrap out every misogyny, homophobic, every...

Well,

actually, I think what's interesting is

this

came, Thomas Jefferson said, when they started the Barbary pirates, the war with Barbary pirates.

It was our first war, and it was a war against Islam.

And

Thomas Jefferson, he fought it,

but he didn't snuff it out.

And so he said, everyone in America should read the Quran.

And so they printed the entire Quran.

He didn't edit.

He didn't take it out of context.

But what he did do is they added

to the reader.

and

it says here that you have to read this and you will not believe the absurdities of how many people in the world believe that this stuff is true and it comes with a warning that

if we don't understand this book they will never stop this is a book of jihad it's a manual for jihad and you can interpret it to believe believe anything you want.

The apologists can interpret it however they want.

But Muhammad took it literally, the book.

He didn't interpret it.

He heard and he obeyed.

And every ruling of jihad is in that book.

It's a dangerous book.

But it can easily be refuted too, because

it's inhumane, it doesn't apply to modern times, it can't be changed.

And it's just unscientific, even.

Like Muhammad, for example, he was a merchant.

I think the closest he knew to like the embryology was

goats killing, you know, goats having miscarriages or whatever, because he talks about the fetus.

He talks about how there's not a heartbeat until like three weeks into

the process.

And

so you can, in Islam, you can have an abortion within before 21 days.

And

I know in the Bible it says life

starts at contraception, but science says it's with the zygote and then it becomes a baby.

But

those are the things that fascinate people.

Also, like another unscientific thing that Muhammad said is that he said that sperm comes from the ribs of man.

Then what is the scrotum for?

He was a merchant who was illiterate.

He didn't know science.

So tell me,

how come you're not dead?

I don't think anyone cares.

They're killing me.

Thank goodness.

They got bigger fish to fry.

But, you know, I mean,

I've sat with Ayan Hersey Alley.

I don't know if you know her.

Yeah, I admire her.

Incredibly brave.

And

so intelligent.

And she had a security person.

right off the side of the camera.

How come, I mean,

you have said several things that...

You said the Quran is a terrible book.

Yeah, you've said several things that would mark you.

Yeah.

Is your ex-husband, John, is he dead?

He's probably dead.

He died in 2017 in the Battle of Meyadin.

It was the Russians and the Syrian government attacking an entire city.

They blew it up.

And, of course, there's no evidence.

They can't.

So no one can investigate and find the DNA because the war's going on.

Until the war's over, then they can go to these areas and find the parents.

Are you close to his family?

I love his mother.

His mother

was a better mother to me than my own mother.

And I know that's because she's got a very good Christian heart.

My children are Christian, Orthodox Christian.

I love his mother.

We're very close.

His dad is a very staunch military type of man.

Very proud.

He has every reason to be proud.

He did everything by the book.

He was very successful, you know, quarterback in West Point.

He's a doctor.

I mean, I can but

we don't we're from two different worlds.

It's almost like I wouldn't h never have anything to do with them if it wasn't for John and my children.

So we don't get along too well, but he loves my children and And

that's, I mean, I couldn't ask for more, you know, like my children are privileged.

I don't always say the right thing.

Like, sometimes I flip out and say, well, at least you're not in an orphanage or at least you're not in a boarding school.

But those aren't the right things I say, I should say.

But they are loved.

You know, most people in the world would die for to be in their place.

And they know that.

That's drive you nuts hearing people talk about America.

Yeah, I hate a lot of things that I hear, like the inequality.

I'm like, you have no idea what you're talking about.

And the racism, people talk about America being racist.

I'm like,

this isn't true.

America is not racist.

I've lived in Europe and they are very hostile.

I had to live with racism most of my life there.

And then when I came to America, I was like, people are so nice.

And, you know, a little bit of...

We have our problems, but

everybody does.

The history is bad everywhere in the world.

There's always genocide.

There's always this competition of survival of the fittest and who has the stronger weapons.

And I get it.

Even with Israel, I understand now,

you know, a much better picture.

Now that I know Jewish people, I understand I'm studying the history of Israel.

what Israel has done, you know, the Jewish people have done for that land and they had nowhere else to go.

And it wasn't even developed by the Palestinians.

The Palestinians weren't even a thing until like

the Philistines or the Palestinians in the Bible, they're not the same people that live today.

These are, the Palestinians are, you know, they probably have,

you know, hereditary Jewish lines in their family, but a lot of them are Egyptians, you know, and they never made Israel a democratic country the way that it is.

It was empty land.

It was just desert with nomads.

And these nomads are the most primitive human beings you can imagine.

They don't have any concept of science or recycling or human rights.

They don't know.

They just, all they know is their poetry, songs, and drinking tea.

And

I sound crass.

I'm sorry.

But it's from my experience, I've seen it all.

And I know Israel helps the Palestinians, and the Palestinians do not, they don't shed light on it.

They just completely, it's all like they're the victim.

And that's the problem with Muslims.

They always play the victim.

Well, how about thinking about for 1400 years, how many people were victimized by jihad?

Millions of people's lives were ruined.

You know, you get genocides from every part, you know, from anyone who wasn't Muslim.

You surrender or you die or you pay the jizya and you're humiliated.

What are you going to do now?

Well, for the last four years I've been really trying hard to work with NGOs to get into prison systems to do a de-radicalization program.

I want a mandatory education for these people.

I want them to learn exactly what I learned.

What did I study?

I studied American history.

I studied human rights.

I studied things like YouTube channels, like Crash Course History and science.

So educational and it's free.

I did Coursera courses.

Are you familiar with Coursera?

So they're like Ivy League schools who do classes online.

You can pay for certificates or you don't pay.

It's free.

But since it's free, these things taught me how to be

a good citizen.

Like, you know, it reprogrammed me.

I needed it, but I was open to it.

I wanted to relearn because I wanted to survive.

I mean, I wanted my children to survive.

One thing I cannot understand about the Muslims who are still stuck in that mentality is that they really don't believe this life is real.

They're delusional.

They're living in a fantasy world.

And I was there once.

We need to break that free from them because

that's an oppression on them even.

Even they've been exploited.

But as a, you know, they've been exploited and then they spread tyranny and then they think they're the victims.

I just want them, like, okay, if we imprison them and they're

under house arrest, they need education because education is enlightenment and they will get that.

You know, if we do comparative studies of different value systems, it's really important.

If I can learn, and I'm telling you, I was never a very bright child.

If I can learn, they can learn.

But not enough people support it because they don't have the heart to

invest in helping these extremists, even like neo-nat neo-nazi rate you know neo-nazi is there a lot of familiarity

and is there a is there a so much in common so much in common so much in common and the main point is using violence to achieve a political means if we could just teach them look you don't have to turn to violence you have to do it through the political process due process it takes patience it takes teamwork but you don't have to kill people for it if you have to kill people for an idea guess guess what?

It's a bad idea.

You know, and they need logic.

But when they're in this collective mindset and they're like trapped in these camps and things, they're not hearing my voice.

They're hearing only each other's voices.

And right now in these camps, the Kurdish camps, the extremist women are bullying and killing women who don't want to be affiliated with ISIS.

The 14-year-old girl got killed the other week because she didn't want to cover.

She just didn't want to wear her face veil.

And women who talk to reporters, they get poop thrown at them.

Their children are beaten up.

I just can't understand.

There's 70,000 people in a camp.

We have lots of money to go to war, but we need to go into these camps and separate...

the dangerous people from the harmless people.

It's really important.

These harmful mothers who are still brainwashed by ISIS are child abusers.

They are they are not good.

They have should not have rights to their children.

And I know it's cruel to separate your children, but even I needed separation from

my own children to grow as a human being.

I needed an identity.

I needed to re-educate and reprogram myself to survive for my children's sake.

And it's the only way.

It's just like there's not enough people who care about those people in the camps because it's far away.

But if we don't do something about it, the Kurds are suffering.

They can't cope with

the amount of people.

They don't have the resources to feed these people even.

And they're going to let them go.

And ISIS are waiting.

ISIS are determined to come back.

And I just want to end it.

If I feel like if we could just educate these people and make these people see that Islam is something of the past and it should stay in the past.

But we have enlightened, you know, there was a stage of enlightenment thinkers, which was the best thing ever.

And now we have things like the, you know, the

scientific methodology.

We understand how that works.

We've grown.

We live in the age of knowledge and they're in the dark ages.

Well, we've got to get them out.

And especially the American children.

There are American children there.

They don't deserve to be there.

Tanya?

Yes, sir.

Thank Thank you.

You're welcome.

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