South Africa detains teenage girl en route to join Isis

[Surya Gayatri]

Source: The Guardian

South African authorities have detained a 15-year-old girl who was travelling to join Islamic State, the state security ministry has said – the country’s first known arrest linked to the militant group.

The ministry said it was investigating whether Isis had a recruitment network in South Africa.

The teenager was stopped at Cape Town airport on Sunday after evidence was found in her bedroom indicating that she had been in contact with Isis recruiters, the ministry said.

“We can confirm that she was planning to leave the country with the intention of joining IS, and had been actively engaged with social media networks,” the state security minister, David Mahlobo, was quoted as saying in the Star newspaper.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/07/south-africa-detains-teenage-girl-isis

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The epidemic of misguided, youthful ignorance is spreading.

The propaganda masters of these IS crazies should be hired by somebody's political campaign. They really get their message across.

SOUTH AFRICA? REALLY? Just the flight from there to Turkey costs an arm and a leg.

[romanic]

1. Let these misguided youths join ISIS.

It'll thin the head of idiots within mankind.

[PeteSelman]

2. I'd say "let her go" but 15 is too young to have any real idea about anything.

15 year olds are idiots. Absolute fools who think they know everything but know exactly nothing. I couldn't let a kid like that go over there to be gang raped and worse by those animals. She'd be crying for mommy on the first day.

Some lessons are just too harsh.

[Surya Gayatri]

3. A silly teenager 'searching' for her identity.

[FarrenH]

4. It was inevitable

There are large Muslim minorities in the Western Cape, Kwazulu-Natal (KZN) and Gauteng provinces. They're quite distinct communities - in the Western Cape Islam was largely imported from Malaysia in the era of slavery, while the KZN community is mostly Indian in origin and the Gauteng community is mixed AFAIK.

South African Islam leans to liberalism and strong interfaith relationships. Some mosques here pioneered women-led prayer. During the Danish cartoon controversy the Muslim editor of South Africa's Mail and Guardian, a prominent left-leaning offspring of Britain's Guardian, chose to publish the offending cartoons and a Muslim judge similarly denied a request by the Jamiatul Ulama to prevent the publication of a cartoon depicting Muhammad (framed I think in terms of our hate-speech laws) by well-known cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro. The publication of a book slamming Ghandi (who cut his political teeth in South Africa) by a Muslim anti-Hindu activist in KZN elicited as many furious rebuttals from the KZN Muslim community, who saw it as needlessly divisive, as it did from Hindus.

So not great recruiting grounds for ISIS, but there are always some disaffected youth who are vulnerable to such groups.

[Surya Gayatri]

5. Thanks for the informative read, Farren.

[FarrenH]

6. My pleasure n/t

[FarrenH]

7. Fun bonus fact

Just because I find this fascinating.

The Dutch-derived language Afrikaans was the de facto language of Apartheid, which was primarily engineered by white Afrikaner nationalists (not to say that my English forebears didn't for the most part give it their support). The language evolved out of so-called "kitchen dutch" commonly used between the Cape Dutch and their slaves and is the home language of many mixed-race South Africans in addition to slightly more than half of white South Africans. As a result, while primarily Dutch in origin, Afrikaans also has other European- (German, English, French), Indigenous- (Khoisan, Abantu) and Malaysian-derived words and grammatical forms.

The bit that fascinates me, especially given the Calvinism that was so central to white Afrikaner nationalism, is that among the earliest examples of written Afrikaans are Islamic teachings, some of them written in Arabic script, and a Koran. The diversity of influences in the former texts, written in a Middle-Eastern script using a language with origins in Europe, Africa and the Far East, reflects the central role the Cape once played in global trade networks.

[Surya Gayatri]

8. Earliest examples of written Afrikaans are Islamic teachings...

Who knew?

'...central role the Cape once played in global trade networks', starting 500 years ago.