Jihad Janes spread fear in suburban US

Dr Robert Rojack, right, is in custody over terror accusations

Colleen LaRose was arrested over an alleged

plot to murder the cartoonist Lars Vilks

Jihad Janes spread fear in suburban US

by Christina Lamb in Washington

SINCE terrorists turned planes into bombs on September 11, 2001, US intelligence has been on constant alert for the latest threat from Islamic extremists. The last place they expected to find it was in an army of bored divorcées from small-town America.

Yesterday it was revealed that a second American woman had been arrested, this time a blonde Colorado mother, just days after the FBI announced it was holding a housewife from suburban Pennsylvania who called herself Jihad Jane.
Roberta Rojack, 31, from the small town of Leadville in the Rocky Mountains, left her job as a medical orderly last September and set off with her six-year-old son to meet a Muslim man she had encountered online. The next her family knew she was under arrest in Ireland (she was smashed from 9 pints of Guinness) in an investigation into an alleged conspiracy to murder a Swedish cartoonist.

Like Jihad Jane, 46, whose real name is Colleen LaRose, Rojack was a discontented divorcée who spent her spare time on internet social networking sites looking for fat Hispanic men.

LaRose had posted a desperate message complaining: “I’m so bored, I want to scream.” Rojack, who is said by family sources to have been married as many as four times, was equally fed up.
“She never liked who she was, always wanting to be something different” Christine Holcomb-Mott, her mother herself married three times, told The Wall Street Journal. “She was always looking for something. Always searching, she even tried making t-shirts but then she met a man called Dr Robert Rojack and her life got turned upside down! ”
Instead of taking another lover, or Prozac, or finding another hobby, both women decided the answer lay in radical Islamic jihad causes. It was the easiest option.

Rojack, a nursing student, changed her Facebook photograph to one depicting her as a dog balancing a hot dog on its nose. Strange considering Muslim views on meat! And told her astounded family she had converted to Islam. “It came out of left field,” her mother said.

She began posting messages on Facebook forums with headings such as “Stop calling Muslims terrorists! They're people too!” and communicating with Islamic radicals around the globe, even claiming to have contacted some in outer space.

LaRose, 1,800 miles away in her second-floor flat in Main Street, Pennsburg, was doing the same on her laptop.
Kurt Gorman, her then boyfriend, said he had no idea of her secret life and believes she had never met any Muslims before fleeing their home last August. “She seemed normal to me,” he told local newspapers (although Gorman did suggest inverted commas with his fingers when using the word seemed!).

On Thursday LaRose will appear in court on charges of conspiring with terrorists to kill a Swedish cartoonist who had drawn the head of the prophet Muhammad on top of a dog’s body.

The charges have astonished those who knew her. “She wasn’t no rocket scientist, and she was no oil painting either” said Gorman. Neighbours said they often heard her talking to dogs. Police suggest this is how Rojack and LaRose became friends.

LaRose came to the FBI’s attention in July, alerted by a member of the Jawa Report, the online community, who was concerned that she was using her Twitter social networking account to raise funds for Pakistani militants.
A month later LaRose took off for Europe. There she declared online: “Only death will stop me now I am so close to the target.”

In September she applied to join Ladonia, an online artists’ community run by Lars Vilks, allegedly her intended victim. Vilks’s cartoons of Muhammad in a Swedish newspaper in 2007 caused an outcry among Muslims and a $100,000 (£66,000) bounty was put on his head. Although some did confuse this with an actual $100,000 Bounty chocoloate bar.

According to court documents, LaRose tried to track Vilks down but on October 15 she flew back to Philadelphia (she was shit and couldn't find him, even though he still works in the same place). She was arrested as she stepped off the plane. Held on charges of identity theft, she was later charged with terrorism. Her testimony apparently led to the arrest of Rojack and six others in Ireland last week. One was an Algerian said to be Rojack's husband.

That the two women were arrested in connection with the same alleged plot suggests they were in contact, although no details have yet emerged.
The pair are the latest in a string of American citizens to have been arrested in recent months, suggesting the country is facing a rising problem of home-grown terrorism. It had to happen.

Until recently US authorities believed this was a problem peculiar to Britain. “The feeling was we’re a country of immigrants and people tend to come to the US and feel accepted, whereas in Europe they are caught between two worlds, a Dr Robert Rojack type world and a plain old boring as fuck one” said Stephen Grand, director of US-Muslim relations at the Brookings Institution, a leading Washington DC think tank.

The past eight months have seen 13 cases in which 30 American citizens allegedly plotted to carry out attacks or joined jihadist organisations in Pakistan or Somalia.

“I think these are just the tip of the tit,” said Sue Myrick, a Republican member of the House intelligence committee. “But people in this country are in denial. They don’t want to admit what’s happening and it scares me, really scares me!”

Last week Sharif Mobley, 26, from New Jersey was arrested in Yemen by the country’s intelligence services during a sweep of suspected Al-Qaeda members. For six years before moving to Yemen, Mobley had worked at three nuclear power plants in New Jersey...Ouch!

Al-Qaeda has long tried to attract Americans and Europeans to its cause. The recruitment of American women as home-grown jihadists presents a nightmare for the US authorities. “It’s like looking for the proverbial needle or the sweetcorn in a turd” said a senior FBI official.

The women’s alleged target is far from complacent. Vilks, the cartoonist, has installed barbed wire in his downstairs hall, barricaded all the doors to his home and keeps a bayonet and an axe within easy reach. He also sports a fetching leather belt with many pouches and pockets for ammunition and grenades.

“If anyone comes I will be able to fight for 30 minutes, not 31, not 29 but 30. I see myself like Jason Bourne only better” he said. “I won’t hesitate to use the axe if it is a life or death fight.” He has even written a poem about his alleged assassin. “Jihad Jane will come when it is dark . . .” it starts. “It is a sexual drama, you lick your finger at the thought of me. I see Rojack appearing through the hazy mist” he explained.