At the end of last year, Mr. John Zmirak of “The Stream” put me in contact with Tania Joya, an ex-Muslim and, more notably, ex-ISIS wife. I interviewed her and wrote it up, at length. That piece published yesterday (Saturday, January 11, 2020).  Here’s the link.

Ms. Joya has been interviewed dozens of times.  The vast majority of journalists who did so know little to nothing about Islam. The lone exception was probably Graeme Wood. Mr. Wood, famous for being honest enough to admit that ISIS was (and still is) actually Islamic, does know quite a bit about Islamic theology and how that translates into jihad. (Although he was nine months behind me in figuring this out–see my Sects, Lies, and the Caliphate, pp. 21-31; an essay originally published on my old Mahdiwatch site in June 2014.)

However, Mr. Wood never questions the truth claims and veracity of Islam itself–just its “extremist” groups. In this article I delve into that issue with Ms. Joya. Her conclusion? “If you’re properly deradicalized, you’re not even going to want to be a Muslim.”

Read it all.

And here’s a photo courtesy of Wikipedia (public domain), “Niqab.”

No, it’s not from Yemen, ISIS territory or Iran. It’s from Monterey, California. (Where, incidentally, I learned Arabic at the Army’s Defense Language Institute in the 1980s. I’d be willing to bet this is a relative, perhaps wife, of an Arabic instructor there.)