Babies not bombs are what the Islamists want from their women

Sally Jones was a waste of space. The principal purpose of the former British punk rocker turned Islamic extremist was to titillate the British tabloids, who dubbed her the ‘White Widow’ and gleefully reported her juvenile threats to bring death and destruction to the streets of her native London. She did no such thing before she was apparently killed in a drone strike in June. And where’s the evidence of the role attributed her by the international Counter Extremism Project, who declared that Jones ‘was responsible for training all European female recruits in tactics including suicide missions’? Perhaps she didn’t have time as she was too busy threatening to behead infidels ‘with a nice blunt knife’.

Others also got carried away with the hype. Azadeh Moaveni, author of Lipstick Jihad, described Jones as one of Islamic State’s ‘most iconic recruiters’, who was ‘really important in terms of projecting the idea that Isis could get into the very furthest reaches of British society.