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Eight faces of ISIS in America

These are the stories of a few of the 58 men and women arrested in the United States so far this year on charges of providing material support or other assistance to the militant Islamic State group in Syria.

6. Noelle Velentzas and Asia Siddiqui: Why go abroad?

Jane Rosenberg/AP/File
In this courtroom sketch, defendants Noelle Velentzas (center l.) and Asia Siddiqui (center r.) appear in federal court with their attorneys on April 2, 2015 in New York. The two women were arrested Thursday on charges they plotted to wage violent jihad by building a homemade bomb and using it for a Boston Marathon-type terror attack.

Noelle Velentzas, 28, and Asia Siddiqui, 31, both of the Queens borough of New York, were arrested in April for allegedly plotting to construct a bomb to carry out a terror attack in the US.

The criminal case is based on statements overheard and recorded by an undercover federal agent. Both defendants are US citizens.

Court documents filed in the case track their research and discussions about which kind of bomb to build. They considered building a car bomb like the one used in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a fertilizer bomb like the one used in the 1995 attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City, and a pressure cooker bomb like the one used in the 2013 Boston Marathon attack.

After hearing news of the arrest of Air Force veteran Tairod Pugh for allegedly attempting to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State group, Ms. Velentzas told the undercover agent “that she did not understand why people were traveling overseas to wage jihad when there were more opportunities of ‘pleasing Allah’ here in the United States,” according to an FBI affidavit filed in the case. 

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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