'Tattooed, Blonde, Muslim Texas girl' fighting to distance herself from ISIS supporters

Last week, a single tweet took Jennifer Williams -- an unassuming "blonde tattooed Texas girl" -- from relative obscurity to Twitter stardom.

The problem is that a “healthy number” of her enthusiastic new followers may be Islamic extremists.

“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),” she wrote on the blog Lawfare about her growing Twitter fandom. “Another just straight up asked me to marry him.”

Williams is Brookings Institute researcher who spent years studying religious extremism and the Middle East before finally realizing that she’d never actually read the Quran. So she took the plunge and unexpectedly found answers to the questions about morality and belief that she’d had since childhood. She converted to Islam three years ago and is now finding that she constantly has to defend her faith from the extremists who twist it to justify violence.

Didge wrote:Wow how did she learn about morality where women are seen and taught as second to men?
Again this sums up my views of the abrahamic faiths where clearly people are avoiding or glossing over aspects of the works found in religion.
Clearly to me many religious people are searching for something, but looking in the wrong direction, because myths may bring some sense of relief but never answer any fundamental questions.

Ben_Reilly wrote:

Didge wrote:Wow how did she learn about morality where women are seen and taught as second to men?
Again this sums up my views of the abrahamic faiths where clearly people are avoiding or glossing over aspects of the works found in religion.
Clearly to me many religious people are searching for something, but looking in the wrong direction, because myths may bring some sense of relief but never answer any fundamental questions.

I think a lot of people are too intimidated to look outside some ancient faith for the answers to moral questions. The idea of deciding what you think is right and what you think is wrong is just a bit too much for some, and it can be scary at times but it's also really empowering.