Jennifer Williams is a Research Assistant at the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings – and describes herself as a ‘blond tattooed Texas girl’. She takes a tough line on terrorism and Wahhabism, and all in all looks like the kind of person Jan Morgan would welcome to her Arkansas shooting range. But Williams is also a Muslim convert, and so joined in the #MuslimApologies hashtag, tweeting:
Sorry I read the Quran to learn abt terrorist beliefs but ended up converting to Islam b/c of what it said. #MuslimApologies #sorrynotsorry
This attracted the unwelcome attention of some ISIS supporters:
I soon began to notice a disturbing trend: of the thousands of people who were retweeting and following me, many of them had the black flag of ISIS as their Twitter profile photos. Others had pictures of themselves holding swords, standing in front of the black ISIS flag. Uh-oh.
She didn’t take kindly to suitors who tried to tell her how to dress:
One guy told me how beautiful I would look in hijab (in other words, how beautiful I would look once I covered myself up and stopped looking like an infidel). … No, I did not blur my face out to maintain my anonymity. The person who tweeted that did it. You know you’re dealing with some serious Islamic hardliners when they blur out your face to protect Islamic modesty. It’s also interesting that they chose to make it blurry rather than to black it out entirely—I suppose they did that so you could still tell that I was a blonde, white American girl. The holy grail of Muslim converts—so to speak.
It’s worth reading the whole piece here.
