Thinking out loud about Hoda Muthana

News junkies know the story by now: Twenty-year old Hoda Muthana, born in New Jersey about 2-months after her father left Yemen’s diplomatic service, left the United States and joined ISIS in Syria. While in Syria she became the wife of an ISIS fighter, bore a son, and urged violence against westerners. She has since grown disillusioned and would like to return, with her son, to the country of her birth.

Well.

The First Felon’s thoughts about the matter are very definite.

I have to admit to deeply mixed feelings about this case, and what follows is merely thinking-out-loud — not an argument.

Her citizenship

An exception is made to “birth citizenship” for the children born of diplomatic personnel serving in the United States; they are considered to be under the jurisdiction of the parent’s country. Muthana’s father, however, left Yemen’s diplomatic service about 2-months before Muthana’s birth, ending the application of that exception. Our State Department accepted the documentation of her father’s departure from the diplomatic service, and issued Muthana a passport; later, her passport was renewed.

In other words, our State Department has twice affirmed that Muthana is an American citizen. So, too, I should think, is her son. I’m hard put to understand Secretary Pompeo’s declaration that she is not a citizen, then. It has the look, frankly, that he is exploiting an oddity to summarily punish her without the aggravation of due process.

Another thing: Does the First Felon have the legal right to deny admission to the United States to an American citizen? I really don’t know, and will accept it if somebody competent tells me he does, but it sounds hinky. I say that because, if so, it enables exactly what appears to be going on here — the ability to screw-up somebody’s life just because the President doesn’t like him or her.

Treason

By any sane reckoning, Muthana gave aid and comfort to, and adhered to, America’s enemies. Her conduct certainly looks like treason to me. But how is her case different from that of John Walker Lindh, that stupid California teenager who went to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban and who is scheduled to be released from prison just a few months from now?

Assuming she is a citizen — and there is no reason to think otherwise — why shouldn’t she be permitted to return to face trial and, almost certainly, imprisonment?

Who is Hoda Muthana?

Ms. Muthana seems to have been a naive, sheltered fool.

The daughter of Yemeni immigrants, Ms. Muthana grew up in an ultra-strict household — no partying, no boyfriends and no cellphone.

When she finished high school, her father gave her a phone as a graduation gift. It soon became her portal to the world of extreme Islam, she said.

[ … ]

“I was crying because I thought I was making a big sacrifice for the sake of God and I was giving up my family, my home, my comfort, everything I know, everything I loved,” she said. “I thought I was doing the right thing.”

That last bit sounds believable to me, because it is exactly the kind of thing I have heard Southern Baptist preachers demand; Jesus first, and everybody else can have the leftovers. Were her parents, especially her father, sometimes critical of America’s protracted war on terrorism? Was she the target of anti-Muslim animus? There is enough of it around.

And I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that, once she made contact, the radical Islamists did exactly what evangelical youth groups are doing this very day — targeted a naive, confused, lonely kid who didn’t fit in with her peers and love-bombed her.

This story is unsettling from beginning to end, from a naive American woman, living in the land of the free and chicken-to-go, lured to join a depraved terror organization, to the summary declaration by high officers of the American government that she is to be denied the due process and trial that appear to be her birthright. I don’t see much to like about Ms. Muthana, and being a naive fool who lives in a romantic fantasy-world does not excuse treason. I don’t see much to like in a government that appears incapable of behaving better, though.