Dying for God?
On how Dutch media influences the imagery of ‘IS women.’
‘We have an insatiable desire for classification, for through it we create the world. Power, true power, is held not by those with the largest bank accounts or the strongest military, but by those who give us the words with which to view the world.’ (Whitley 2016)
With this statement scholar Thomas J. Whitley aims to highlight the importance of narrative around terrorist acts, claiming that leading narratives have a strong influence on how we perceive the events these narratives are about. In the West, it is especially the narrative of the media by which we attain ‘knowledge’ about certain terrorist events. In line with Whitley, it would hence mean that the media has a strong influence on how we perceive these events (Whitley 2016).
Thus, it is important to at least research this possible influence of the media. This is especially relevant when considering cases like that of the Dutch women who have joined ISIS and are now trying to return to their homeland. Within the Netherlands, the question of whether the Dutch government should allow these women back has indeed become a topic of popular debate. These women were part of an organization that is categorized by the Netherlands as terrorists, but does this make these women terrorists or a danger to Dutch society? As stated above, the media could have a big influence on how we think about this dilemma and therefore also have a big influence on both the lives of these women and their kids, whose faith is usually bound with that of their mothers.
Therefore, my aim for this paper is to answer the following research question: How does Dutch media influence the public image of Dutch women who are or were part of IS? I answer this question by using the first section to give an outline of the situation of the so-called ‘IS-women’ and the response of the Dutch government to the IS-women who want to return to the Netherlands. This section takes a sociological perspective and aims to give background information that is relevant to the remainder of my paper. However, academic research lacks a specific discussion on how media influences the imagery of women who are part of ISIS. Therefore, I use the second section of this paper to analyze existing research about the broader relationship between ISIS and the media in general. This section is mostly from the perspective of the communication sciences. Lastly, I use the third section to analyze Dutch media which have written about ‘IS-women’ and apply the background information of the first section and the broader research of the second section to this analysis. By doing this I conclusively give an answer to the question of how Dutch media influences the imagery of women who are part of the IS movement.
Ultimately, I argue that the narrative of the media creates a notion that many people take to correspond to reality. What I mean by this is that we all have a certain image of what it means to be a woman who is part of ISIS and tend to believe that this general image corresponds with all the women who are, or were, part of ISIS. As the quote with which I opened states, our words determine how we perceive reality. This general image, and the fact that we think this image corresponds to reality, is in a big way influenced by the way the media writes about these women.
- ‘The Dutch dilemma’
Who are the Dutch IS-women?
In June 2014 the ISIS caliphate was proclaimed. In response, a small group of individuals residing in the West chose to migrate to this new caliphate due to their alignment with the interpretation of Islamic teachings by members of the Islamic state. Mostly, this interpretation refers to a version of Jihadism, which can be defined as a particular version of Islam which argues that violence has to be used to spread the teachings of the Islam.[1] Among them there were also women who can be defined as follows:
A female jihadist is considered a girl or woman who has either considered (and is registered as such by the police) or attempted to travel to ISIS territory; who facilitates or recruits others for travel or marriage to jihadists; has returned from ISIS territory; or has committed acts of violent extremism. (Gielen 2018, 456)
These women can also be ascribed a certain agency because they knowingly and willingly traveled or considered traveling to ISIS territory. This is also shown by the fact that they actively contributed to the recruitment of others. A rapport of the AIVD[2] shows that most of these women are between 15 and 30 years old and are known to be converts with various ethnic backgrounds. However, minors who were taken by their parents are not covered by this definition because of their lack of agency (Gielen 2018, 456-458).
Subsequently, to understand these women it is relevant to understand the process by which they are recruited. This process can be proactive, which means that (vulnerable) women are actively manipulated to join ISIS, and reactive, which means that recruiters wait until the women show interest. One must also consider other influences outside this recruitment process, like love, online group chats, and peer pressure within social media. It is also common that these women already had peers involved within the jihadist network. These relationships were further enhanced by social media whereby recruiters anticipated certain push and pull factors (Gielen 2018, 459). An important pull factor is that one can be motivated because of personal or idealistic reasons (Jacques and Taylor 2009, 506-507). Also, it is important to acknowledge the feeling of sisterhood and romanticized narratives as important pull factors (Saltman and Smith 2015, 13-17). Romanticized, in the sense that these narratives are often constructed to paint a perfect picture to overshadow the more negative aspects of joining the Islamic state. As will become clear, this disillusionment regarding the romanticized narrative becomes an important factor in why people want to leave.
Push factors would be revenge or certain key events that motivate these women to join ISIS (Jacques and Taylor 2009, 507). Examples of this are: isolation, the search for identity, having a sense of belonging, a feeling that the Muslim community is being oppressed and persecuted, and aggrievement at the (perceived) lack of international action (Gielen 2018, 458). However, one of the most apparent push factors is the troubled life histories of these women. Studies have shown that 60% of the foreign fighters within ISIS have had psycho-sociological problems and 20% had psychiatric problems (Gielen 2018, 458).
Additionally, research exists about the push and pull factors for women leaving ISIS. Pull factors are often positive alternatives such as the desire for a normal life or having family obligations. One of the most important push factors is dissatisfaction with other group members, leaders, or the ideology of IS. These push factors can be further divided into three categories. First, there is the ideological category that concerns disillusionment with the ideology. Second, there are the social factors to be understood as dissatisfaction with extremist peers. Third, you have practical factors that ‘revolve around the personal life situation, such as feeling isolated, stigmatized or externally pressured to participate in extremist groups’ (Gielen 2018, 459).
The Dutch reaction
What these women also have in common is that authorities know about their affiliation with ISIS and therefore certain measurements are undertaken. These women were first portrayed as victims and this resulted in the fact that many European countries did not prosecute them nor offer ‘exit programs’. These exit programs normally aim at deradicalization and reintegration, but due to the assumption that women were the victims this program was not deemed necessary for their situation (Gielen 2018 454-456).
However, according to Gielen, recent studies have shown different imagery of these IS-women. Research of the AIVD[3] stated that IS-women often are heavily armed and are trained to use these weapons. Next to that, IS-women seem to have an active role in recruiting other girls and women online. IS-women thus seem to have a much more active role within ISIS than previously thought. It follows that it is critical to have an effective policy to deal with these IS-women. This is especially critical because a growing number of IS-women are aiming to return to their home country due to the decline of the IS-caliphate. The need of such an effective policy is especially important for the Netherlands because they have relatively many women who migrated to the Middle East to join ISIS. 100 Dutch women have migrated to this area and at least 80 of these 100 women have actually joined ISIS (Gielen 2018, 455).
II. Media and ISIS
Now that there is an outline to work with, we are one step further in analyzing the influence of Dutch media on Dutch women who have joined ISIS. However, as remarked in the introduction, it is relevant to first analyze the broader relationship with ISIS and the media in general. This is important as there exists no scholarly literature that specifically focuses on Dutch media. Accordingly, this lack of a theoretical framework needs to be complemented by first giving a more general overview in order to apply this theory to the case of Dutch media. I shall give this overview by firstly analyzing two relevant publications, the first being from Moran Yarchi and the second from Archi Mehdi Semati and Piotr M. Szpunar. Secondly, I shall formulate my own reaction to the insights given by these publications.
Using media as a weapon
According to Moran Yarchi the media plays an important role in the war against ISIS. She states that, alongside the actual military confrontation, an ‘image war’ exists to support one of the main goals of terrorists: to attract attention and to spread fear. Publicity in the media is one of the key ways to achieve these goals. Therefore, many terrorist organizations actually make use of this by considering how the media would portray their actions. Based on this, Yarchi supports the claim of B.M. Jenkins[4] who stated that terrorism is a theatre: the people watching are far more important in a terrorist attack compared to the actual victims (Yarchi 2019, 53-54).
Additionally, Yarchi claims that this ‘image war’ within the media has its roots in the fact that, in general, conflicts have changed recently since the War on Terror. This is because the rise of this conflict is connected to a couple of major changes. The first major change is that contemporary conflicts are mostly fought between state and non-state actors. The second change is that conflicts gain much more attention through media compared to other means. The media coverage has come to play an important role in conflicts because media influences political actors and these in turn influence other fronts, like public opinion. Hence, the media becomes the weapon of modern warfare because terrorists can influence public opinion (Yarchi 2019, 53-54).
Next, Yarchi states that terrorist organizations and especially ISIS have numerous methods of how they aim to influence the public. To understand their methods, we have to keep in mind that these organizations are usually less powerful compared to the states they wage war against. Consequently, by ‘promoting’ their violent acts and spreading fear within the media these terrorist organizations aim to reverse this public image of an asymmetric power relation. In other words, they aim to appear as evenly powerful as their enemy (Yarchi 2019, 55). Next to that, organizations like ISIS try to gain more support from other Muslims by glorifying the war. Both aspects are especially relevant now that ISIS is losing power; they still want to come across as a powerful foe and at the same time hope to make up for their loss by trying to influence Muslims to joining them (Yarchi 2019, 63-65).
Beyond the spectacle
Likewise, Mehdi Semati and Piotr M. Szpunar agree with the importance of media within the conflict between ISIS and ‘the West’. They, however, disagree with the statement that it is purely ISIS that tries to weaponize the media. For this, they refer to an earlier publication by Barbie Zelizer who states that the U.S. media and ISIS propaganda share a journalistic style: both frame ‘the conflict in a simplistic us/other binary’ (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 3). Thus, despite being very different, both try to construct an insurmountable divide between the U.S. and ISIS (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 3).
Zelizer also states that some aspects of ISIS are ‘hyper-visible’. According to Semati and Szpunar she argues that: ‘much of the conflict remains unseen, with any information gaps filled in through phantasmagorical, speculative and imaginative registers’(Semati and Szpunar 2018, 3). In other words, only a part of the conflict is shown in the media, but it is portrayed as the main part of the conflict and thus given more visibility compared to other aspects. Due to this, many people come to understand these aspects as being the whole conflict, with the aid of their ‘speculative imagination.’ She claims that both sides are using this tactic so that they can portray the conflict as they see fit (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 3).
Semati and Szpunar illustrate this point by referring to the work of Rebecca Adelamn who states that Western media uses the weapon of imagery to ‘locate and contain the phantom enemy of the war of terror’ (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 3). What she means by this is that the media is being used to construct the idea of ‘the other’ as the enemy. The reason for the U.S. to do this is that by framing an image of the enemy they hope to control how we perceive these terrorists. However, ISIS uses this technique against them by aiming to portray the West as evil in (local) media. Thus, while both try to create a distinct ‘other,’ they do so by applying the same tactic and thus being more alike than they make it seem (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 3).
However, according to Semati and Szpunar, ISIS does not create a ‘spectacle’ by only reinforcing its violent image. Here they draw on the arguments of Maran Kraidy, who claims that ISIS also tries to promote the ‘good life’ within the caliphate. Semati and Szpunar contrast this with the radical position of Francois Debrix and Ryan Atrip who make a distinction between reality and non-reality. According to them both ISIS and the U.S. use media not to present truths, but rather a simulation, a non-truth (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 4). This is in line with the research of Friedrich Kittler, who states that ‘states create their own terrorists.’ (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 5). What is meant by this is that people from ISIS paint a more positive picture on what we would call terrorism, instead claiming that these actions make you a pious Muslim. As such, this non-truth is also used to create a romanticized narrative in order to gain more followers.
Nonetheless, Western media focuses much on the violent aspects of the IS-caliphate and therefore much of the public attention goes to this aspect of ISIS. This shows that how we perceive ISIS is very much influenced by how they appear within the media. Such appearances can however be nuanced according to Semati and Szpunar. Some claim, for instance, that ISIS is ‘a ‘transnational multiethnic state’ that moves beyond racism in a way that America never could (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 7). This shows the ambiguity surrounding narratives around ISIS and therefore Semati and Szpunar invite readers to keep problematizing Western narratives by keeping into account different narratives concerning these conflicts (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 6-7).
Discussion
To conclude this section, both articles have important insights that I will use for the next section and ultimately answer my research question. Yarchi argues that the aim of terrorist organizations like ISIS is to spread fear through the media because they aim to influence the public image into thinking they are as powerful as their enemies. Semati and Szpunar add that the West also uses a similar tactic because they aim to control the perception of the conflict and to create a further divide between ISIS and the West. The media does this by focusing on one part of the conflict and ignoring other parts. Hence, they create hyper-visibility, which is thickened by the speculative imagination of the public.
However, I do want to criticize these articles by claiming that it is unjust to the situation to only focus on the responsibility of ISIS and the U.S. What this overshadows is that the media is its own entity. Of course, the media is influenced by the courses that ISIS and the U.S. take. Despite this intertwinement, we should not underestimate the individuality of the media. Hence, we should not only look at how the West and ISIS influence the media but also the other way around. Therefore, I am now to approach the relationship between Dutch media and IS-women by considering this individuality and how the media influences the West and ISIS.
III. Dutch Media and the women of ISIS
The perspective of the Dutch media
After having undertaken this more general analysis concerning the relationship between ISIS and the media, it is now time to apply these theories to the way ‘IS-women´ are being portrayed in Dutch media. As a start I want to give an enumeration of headlines:[5]
- To get IS-children (and their mothers) back or not?[6]
- ‘IS women are very happy.’[7]
- Yezidi community afraid of the return of IS-women.[8]
- IS-women from Syria want to return to the Netherlands.[9]
- These are the two IS-women who have returned: ‘Prove atrocities are hard to find.’[10]
- They want to return to the Netherlands, but how dangerous are the women of IS?[11]
- IS-women helped fighters rape our women.[12]
- Two returned IS-women in the Netherlands: May be difficult to prosecute them[13]
- How dangerous are the Dutch IS-women?[14]
- Should we pick up ISIS women and children or not?[15]
This selection is made by simply googling ‘Nederlandse IS-vrouwen’ (‘Dutch IS-women’). What this selection makes clear is that almost every headline seems to imply that they do not write or talk about specific cases but about ‘IS-women’ in general, with the exception of a WNL video (WNL 2019) and an RTL article (De Goede 2019),
This also seems to be the case when taking a closer look at these articles. Let’s take, for instance, the 2019 video of Nu.nl. Within this video, people talk about the dilemma surrounding IS-women and how some people in the parliament think it’s too dangerous to let these women return. Others in the video think it is safer for these women to be judged in the Netherlands. Within the rest of this video, two activists, who both claim to have talked to IS-women, make their say. These activists claim that ‘they’ (the ´IS-women´) have chosen to be a part of the dangerous IS-organization. Hence, these women should not be allowed to return (Nu.nl 2019).
The most prominent argument for this statement concerns the crimes that IS-women committed against the Yezidi women, whose homes were conquered by ISIS (Nu.nl 2019). These crimes especially became apparent during an NOS interview with a Yezidi woman and her family. This woman claims that she has a hard time seeing ‘them’ (women who joined ISIS) because they reminded her of the gruesome things these women have done to her and her people. Hence, she and her family claim that these women should not be allowed back in the Netherlands under any circumstances. According to this Yezidi family, the women were worse than the IS-men (NOS 2019a). This is also claimed by another 2019 NOS articleand by some people within the 2019 Dutch EO-documentary translated as: Should we pick up ISIS women and children or not? According to both, ‘IS-women’ helped the ‘IS-men’ in beating and raping Yezidi women.
Some of the media articles and videos do however conduct interviews with individual Dutch women who were part of ISIS. Despite this, general claims are still being made. For instance, in a 2016 interview by the Telegraaf,an ‘IS-woman’ claims that all ‘IS-women’ are still happy within the caliphate. In the previously mentioned EO documentary, a mother states that she cannot accept that her daughter might be allowed to return. According to her, all ‘IS-women’ are terrorists. In the same documentary, a journalist states that all women from ISIS are innocent and that their only task was cooking. A Dutch CDA[16] politician reacts to this, claiming that it does not matter and that ‘they’ (IS-woman) all tell lies. According to him, all IS-women are guilty of collaborating with ISIS (EO 2019). According to a 2019 article in Het Parool, the Dutch state indeed claims that they do not intend to bring back women from ISIS. These women have chosen their own fates and the state does not see them as any less dangerous than their husbands.
Some media articles and videos do, however, try to take a more positive stance against this dilemma. A 2019 article by RTL Nieuws claims that the migration of IS-women can perhaps be explained due to a bad childhood and as an attempt to give new meaning to their lives (RTL 2019). A NOS article of the same year claims one can make a divide between women who had active and passive roles within ISIS (NOS 2019a). However, the first article ultimately claims that women did know what they got themselves into. According to this article, these women must have known beforehand about the beheadings and other crimes committed by ISIS. They chose to maintain this system (De Goede 2019). The second article also warned that we should not underestimate these women (RTL 2019).
Thus, what all these media articles and videos have in common is that all of these make general claims about ‘IS-women,’ regardless of which normative stance they take. They constantly refer to ‘them’ and make statements such as ‘they are all dangerous´ and ‘they should not be allowed to come back to the Netherlands.´
The simulation of the Dutch spectacle
In line with the article of Semati and Szpunar, I claim that this trend is problematic from an epistemological point of view. What I mean by this is that all these articles make claims based on induction. Based on an enumeration of singular events, they make general claims by stating that all women of ISIS are applicable to these events. Even when articles claim that not all of these women are the same, they all still make general claims in the end. In other words, conflicts are made up of singular events and certain actors who acted in these events. It is therefore problematic from an epistemological point of view to claim that all of these women were active in the conflict, that all of them are terrorists and, therefore, ought not to be allowed to return to the Netherlands. By doing this, the abstract notion of ‘the IS-women’ that is being fed by the media becomes the leading influence in how people think about IS-women in general. Instead of considering each case individually, the media let many of us think that all the women of ISIS have the properties that are written or talked about in the media.[17]
Moreover, in line with Semati and Szpunar I claim that this kind of journalism causes a ‘simulation’ which is made up by the generalization of the media and the reactive speculative imagination of the Dutch people. What I mean by this is that the media lays a big focus on certain aspects or properties surrounding the situation of IS-women and makes it seem as if these are all applicable to every woman of ISIS. For instance, however horrible the crimes committed against Yezidi women are, the claim that all ISIS women are guilty of this cannot be known. Due to this statement, it is, however, very easy for the speculative imagination of the reader to create a false narrative that indeed all of the women are guilty. This is also strengthened by the fact that these news items use the general label of ‘IS-women’ instead of talking about (particular) Dutch women who joined ISIS.
However, one can argue that the women who did not have an active role in these crimes, have still had an indirect role in them by maintaining the caliphate and, therefore, making these crimes possible. But when we analyzed the media, we have seen that some of these articles or videos claim that ‘IS-women were worse than the men’ and ‘IS-women’ helped rape the Yezidi women.’ This makes it at least seem as if all of these women had an active part in these crimes. And despite that, the first and second sections of this paper both showed that assuming these women had full agency is problematic.[18]
As a final remark I want to highlight that this paper is not a critique of the policy of the Dutch government. By no means am I trying to argue here that we should or should not allow Dutch citizens who joined ISIS to return to the Netherlands. Instead, the point of my paper is that the general statements by the media can very easily influence people into agreeing with this generalization and, therefore, ignore much of the reality of the conflict. As Semati and Szpunar have shown us, the conflict has much more ‘reality’ than what the media portrays. Next to that, the first section has shown that not all Dutch women who joined ISIS are doing so because they want to be terrorists. Instead, research by the AVID has shown that numerous complex sociological (push and pull) factors exist and thus the motivation for Dutch women to join ISIS can vary per person.
However, the media is the main way by which we gain ‘knowledge’[19] of these events, as stated in the introduction of this paper. This could prove to be problematic because we live in a democracy and people can choose our government and the government decides how to deal with the women who joined ISIS. It is very likely that these votes are being influenced by fallacies fed by the media. Hence, like Semati and Szpunar claim, we should keep problematizing this narrative. This is because not only the lives of these women depend on it, but also the lives of their children whose current faith is intertwined with that of their mothers.
Of course, one can aim to counter this generalizing narrative by looking at more in-depth media coverage concerning IS-women. However, I argue that this would miss the more important insight that language itself has a generalizing tendency. In the 20th century, philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida already argued that our discourse about the world has certain epistemological limitations that cannot be overcome by language itself.[20] Consequently, they argued that we should acknowledge that there is a part of existence that transcends our understanding of the word. Put differently, existence is too complex to fully be encompassed by our linguistic framing of the world: there will always be something that escapes our words. What their point makes clear is that it is perhaps a better solution to acknowledge that we can never fully understand the situation of IS women, instead of reproducing our generalizing understanding at a more in-depth level.
Some might think that this kind of ‘thinking’ would amount to a standstill, which in philosophy, we would call an aporia. However, as early as Plato, such a standstill is not seen as wholly unproductive. In Meno, this take on the aporia becomes clear when Plato writes about a discussion between Socrates and Meno concerning the idea of knowledge. At a certain point, Socrates argues for the benefits of an aporia:
‘Socrates: So he is now in a better position with regard to the matter he does not know?
Meno: I agree with that too.
Socrates: Have we done him any harm by making him perplexed and numb as the torpedo fish does?
Meno: I do not think so.
Socrates: Indeed, we have probably achieved something relevant to find out how matters stand, for now, as he does not know, he would be glad to find out, whereas before the thought he could easily make many fine speeches to large audiences about the square of double size and said it must have a base twice as long.
Meno: so it seems.
Socrates: Do you think that before he would have tried to find out that which he thought he know though he did not before he fell into perplexity and realized he did now know and longed to know?
Meno: I do not think so, Socrates.
Socrates: Has he ten benefited from being numbed?
Meno: I think so.’ (84 b-c)
Here, of course, being numbed referred to how Socrates’ questioning caused someone to arrive at a state of not-knowing [aporia]. What this dialogue tries to teach is that it is sometimes better to question everything one thinks to ‘know’ in order to arrive at truth as separated from knowledge. As such, the unknowable transcendence within our world can be seen as an aporetic truth that cannot be aligned with our knowledge of the world. Perhaps further research could instead indicate that it is precisely by not speaking that we can have a more open stance toward the transcendent existence of IS-women. As Levinas and Derrida would claim, it is only then that ethics could begin.[21]
Conclusion
Summarizing, in the first section I have given background information surrounding Dutch women who joined ISIS. Here we saw that a complexity of push and pull factors exist that explain the motivation of these women. In the third section, the article of Yarchi showed that ISIS in general uses the media to spread fear and to reverse public opinion around the asymmetric power-relations between ISIS and its enemies. The article of Semati and Szpunar has shown that both ISIS and the West use media to control the public image of their conflict. They do this by letting the media focus on certain aspects of the conflicts and making these hyper-visible. However, I argued that we also should account for the individuality of the media and thus should not only look at how the West and ISIS influence the media, but also the other way around.
That is what I analyzed in the third section. I started my section by analyzing some media videos and articles which took IS-women as their topic. Based on this analysis I argued that all of these articles made general statements about these women and thus did not consider their singularity. I argued that this is problematic from an epistemological point of view because you cannot make general claims without considering the singularity of each event and the person who participated in these events. I closed this section by stating that this paper does not function as a critique of the policy of the Dutch government, but simply is a critique of how the media uses false statements to influence public opinion on Dutch women who joined ISIS. Therefore, we should always keep problematizing these statements. Thus, let me respectively restate and answer my research question: How does Dutch media influence the (Dutch) public image of Dutch women who are or were part of ISIS? My answer is that the media uses general statements about ISIS women and therefore influences us into thinking that every Dutch woman who has joined ISIS is the same, while in reality, ‘they’ are not.
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[1] Jihadism refers here to the Islamic term of Jihad which bears the meaning of ‘making an effort’ to achieve a goal. Accordingly, the Jihad is split into two versions: the inner Jihad, mostly referring to the personal struggle to keep up the teachings of the Islam and the greater Jihad, referring to the goal to convert people to the Islam. When people talk about Jihadists, one often refers to this greater Jihad. However, the connection to violence is not a necessary definitional aspect of this term.
[2] The ‘Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst’ (AIVD) translates as ‘General intelligence and security service’ and is a secret organization that aims to protect national security.
[3] For the research see: 1. AIVD (2016) Life with ISIS: the Myth Unravelled. The Hague: AIVD. 2. AIVD (2016): Annual Report 2015: A Range of Threats to the Netherlands. The Hague: AIVD. 3. AIVD (2017): Jihadistische vrouwen, een niet te onderschatten dreiging. 17 November. The Hague: AIVD.
[4] Jenkins, B. M. (2006). The new age of terrorism. In Kamien, D. G. (Eds.), The Mcgraw hill homeland security handbook (pp. 119). New York: McGraw Hill Professional.
[5] I will immediately give the English translation. However, for each translation I will give the original Dutch in the corresponding footnote.
[6] IS-kinderen (en hun moeders) terughalen of niet? See: (Nu.nl 2019).
[7] ’IS-vrouwn zijn heel gelukkig.’ See: (Telegraaf 2016).
[8] Jezidi-gemeenschap bang terugkeer IS-vrouwen. See: (NOS 2019a).
[9] Rosman, Cyril. “IS-Vrouwen uit Syrië willen terug naar Nederland. See: (Het Parool 2019).
[10] Dit zijn de twee teruggekeerde IS-vrouwen: ‘Bewijs gruwelijkheden lastig te vinden.’ See: (De Goede 2019).
[11] Ze willen terug naar Nederland, maar hoe gevaarlijk zijn de vrouwen van IS? See: (RTL Nieuws 2019).
[12] ‘IS-vrouwen hielpen strijders bij het verkrachten van onze vrouwen.’ See: (NOS 2019b).
[13] Twee teruggestuurde IS-vrouwen in Nederland: ‘Mogelijk lastig om ze te vervolgen.’ See: (WNL 2019).
[14] Hoe gevaarlijk zijn de Nederlandse IS-vrouwen? See: (Argos 2019).
[15] Moeten we IS-vrouwen en kinderen ophalen of niet? See: (EO 2019).
[16] Christian Democrats.
[17] Next to that, this generalization is problematic from a juristic perspective. Legally, we cannot judge them all in the same manner. Instead, the judge has to consider the complexity of each individual case. Thus, it is too easy to just say that none of these women should be allowed to return.
[18] In line with this, we can also ask ourselves to what extent citizens, in general, are responsible for the crimes of their government. Should the person who voted for Bush, Obama, or Trump be held accountable for the war crimes committed by presidents? But more importantly, do we think differently about these questions if they question the crimes committed by our own government?
[19] As I have argued, no real knowledge but rather a simulation.
[20] See, for instance, Derrida’s Violence and Metaphysics and Levinas’s Totality and Infinity.
[21] Further elaboration on this alternative is beyond the scope of this paper as this paper mainly concerns itself with the problem of media.