It is peculiarly horrible to die in some grotesque manner at the hands of Islamic murderers who kill in the name of Allah – as, it is reported, Kayla Mueller probably did. She was an American woman who went to the battlefields of the Middle East to”help” people, some of them Islamic murderers who kill in the name of Allah.

She was a member of an organization called the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), whose mission is described by Discover the Networks:

• Radical, anti-Israel organization that recruits Westerners to travel to the Holy Land to obstruct Israeli security operations

• Justifies Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians

• Supports the Palestinian “right of return”

• Supports boycott, divestment and sanction campaigns against Israel

• According to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, some ISM activities are carried out “under the auspices of Palestinian terrorist organizations”

• A senior IDF officer says ISM is “a pro-Palestinian organization, set up by Palestinians, funded by Palestinians and linked to Palestinian terror”

• Co-founder Huwaida Arraf has acknowledged that ISM cooperates and works with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

 … From its inception, ISM realized that if any of its volunteers were to be arrested, injured, or killed in the course of their activities in the West Bank or Gaza, such events could be exploited as major propaganda victories for the PLO. As ISM leader George S. Rishmawi once put it: “When Palestinians get shot by Israeli soldiers, no one is interested anymore. But if some of these foreign volunteers get shot or even killed, then the international media will sit up and take notice.”

One of ISM’s most well-known activists was the late Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old volunteer who, in March 2003, was crushed beneath an Israeli bulldozer in Rafah when its operator failed to see her trying to block the destruction of a tunnel through which Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists were receiving smuggled weapons.

Another high-profile casualty was Tom Hurndall, a British-born ISM volunteer who was shot in the head by an Israeli solier during a firefight between the IDF and Palestinian terrorists on April 11, 2003. Hurndall’s life was initially saved by a four-hour emergency surgery, but he spent the next nine months in a coma and then died on January 13, 2004.

Both Corrie and Hurndall were lionized as martyrs by pro-Palestinian activists and media outlets. …

For comment on how misplaced such lionizing is, see our post, No, the name’s not Rachel Corrie, March 10, 2010.

In 2004, ISM operative Abe Greenhouse said that the International Solidarity Movement was using Gaza and the West Bank not merely as venues for its anti-Israel activism, but also as training grounds for anti-American campaigns that the American Anarchist Movement was planning to stage along the U.S.-Mexico border.

A Front Page article traced the connection between ISM and the London bombings of 7/7/2005:

Among the less publicized details of the July 7th London bombings is the connection of …  Muhammad Sadique Khan to the preeminent group of the pro-terrorist “solidarity” movement, the International Solidarity Movement.

Israel National News reports on the life and death of Kayla Mueller:

The myth that she was a wonderful altruistic young woman should be exposed. This is another Rachel Corrie propaganda story in the making, and the western media is falling for it again, or embracing it on purpose.

Kayla Mueller was a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) who spent at least two years working with that terrorist support group. She was involved in demonstrations against the Jews in Sheikh Jarrah (part of East Jerusalem) after a 20 year long court decision recognized the Jews’ legal rights to homes they were chased from in earlier wars launched by the Arabs. She also participated in demonstrations to interfere with the IDF demolishing the homes of terrorists and suicide bombers after the courts okayed the demolitions.

Just as with Rachel Corrie, the press tries to paint Kayla as a selfless volunteer helping poor Arab refugees. She may have helped injured Arabs in “refugee” camps, but she was working to support the goals of Palestinian irredentists and to interfere with the IDF on behalf of terrorist groups.

As an ISM activist she was a tool for the worldwide jihad. …

First, she lived and rioted with other ISM activists with an Arab family that refused to vacate a home they were squatting in after a legal case that took 20 years established it was stolen from the Jewish owners. …

She was also a human shield in support of terrorists. …

Another ISM strategy is to try and disable Israeli security tactics. One of the newer ones is to try and suggest that when the IDF uses tear gas to avoid lethality in controlling weekly Arab rioters, the gas is really deadly and must be stopped altogether. The real reason for this inversion about tear gas is the Palestinians and their ISM lackeys hope they can make it impossible for the IDF to control the weekly riots such as in Bi’ilin, riots Kayla was a part of.   

[She wrote:] ” … The nature of impermanence is our greatest ally and soon the rules will change, the tide will turn and just as the moon waxes and wanes over this land so too the cycles of life here will continue. One day the cycle will once again return to freedom.”

Freedom? For whom? Another Arab dictatorship. Arabs who are Israeli citizens are free, but Kayla wanted the “free” Palestinian-state-to-be from the “river to the sea” as a good ISM activist. Her writings suggest the classical thought processes of pampered American student “radicals” and “revolutionaries” who can’t get enough of supporting dictatorships and terrorists overseas as liberation movements, the complete opposite of what they are.

“Oppression greets us from all angles”, she wrote. “Oppression wails from the soldiers radio and floats through tear gas clouds in the air. Oppression explodes with every sound bomb and sinks deeper into the heart of the mother who has lost her son. But resistance is nestled in the cracks in the wall, resistance flows from the minaret 5 times a day and resistance sits quietly in jail knowing its time will come again. Resistance lives in the grieving mother’s wails and resistance lives in the anger at the lies broadcasted across the globe. Though it is sometimes hard to see and even harder sometimes to harbor, resistance lives. Do not be fooled, resistance lives,” Kayla concluded in her letter.

This certainly doesn’t sound like a tireless “aid worker”. Instead, it connotes a supporter of Palestinian Arab terrorist groups. …

Kayla Meuller made it clear she was involved in the weekly riots in Bi’ilin. She wrote of … several members of the same [Arab] family whom she roomed with dying. Rachel Corrie did the same thing, creating a story for the ISM of protecting an Arab family from IDF bulldozers. One family daughter Kayla guested with died in her own home, not at a demonstration. The fact was the woman was very ill, with leukemia and other internal infections. As in good ISM tactics, her corpse then became another propaganda tool. But like any good ISM activist, Kayla Mueller didn’t let this stand in the way of her propaganda letter home:

“And now just today, the daughter of the Rahmah family, Jawaher, has been asphyxiated from tear gas inhalation. Jawaher was not even participating in the weekly demonstration but was in her home approximately 500 meters away from where the tear gas canisters were being fired (by wind the tear gas reaches the village and even the nearby illegal settlement often). There is currently little information as to how she suffocated but the doctor that attended her said a mixture of the tear gas from the IDF soldiers and phosphorus poisoned her lungs causing asphyxiation, the stopping of the heart and death this afternoon after fighting for her life last night in the hospital. The following is a clip from today showing hundreds of Palestinians, Israelis and international activist carrying her body to her families (sic) home where they said their final goodbyes.”

The IDF doesn’t use phosphorous in the West Bank. The ISM always claims it does. It’s good for propaganda. …

Kayla Mueller came from Prescott, Arizona where she once volunteered at a women’s shelter. … She chose to take the ISM’s revolutionary path and to embrace part of the worldwide jihad and she died for it …  She sought “freedom” working to support fascist groups that provide just the opposite for their people and she paid the ultimate price for that choice.

We think it is appropriate to quote (as we have had occasion to do before) some lines from Joseph Conrad’s scornful portrait of privileged women in his story The Informer. (What he says applies equally well to men from the same secure Western backgrounds.)

For all their assumption of independence, girls of that class are used to the feeling of being specially protected, as, in fact, they are. This feeling accounts for nine tenths of their audacious gestures. …

She had acquired all the appropriate gestures of revolutionary convictions – the gestures of pity, of anger, of indignation … 

She was displaying very strikingly the usual signs of severe enthusiasm, and had already written many sentimental articles with ferocious conclusions. 

Perhaps she thought the jihadis would love her. Should love her. Should be grateful to her. It was not fair that after all she’d done for them, they killed her.

Why had she not discovered that the ideology of Islam, which holds that it is good and right to subjugate women, cut off limbs, stone adulterers to death, burn up fellow Muslims, throw homosexuals from high buildings, decapitate prisoners, keep slaves, bury children alive, has nothing in it that would prompt its devotees to value a stranger’s self-sacrificing service given with a friendly smile in a spirit of sweetness and light?

Could it be because intense moral conceit makes the mind it conquers impervious to reality?