Terrorism and teddy bears

ACCLAIM Cavanman’s documentary ‘Jihad Jane’ in cinemas

There are stories, award-winning documentarian Ciaran Cassidy says, that come simply from “seeing a headline and wondering what really did happen in that apartment in Waterford”. The Cavan man’s latest big screen offering - Jihad Jane - is one such remarkable tale, where pulling the thread of curiosity took him and his crew on an eye-opening 14 hour-long drive across America with one of the most infamous persons to be convicted of crimes relating to the US ‘war on terror’.
In 2014 ‘Jihad Jane’, a blonde, blue-eyed woman from suburban Philadelphia, real name Colleen LaRose, was convicted of conspiracy to murder a Swedish artist Lars Vilks. The cartoonist had been marked as a target by Islamic terror groups after drawing a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad for a newspaper.
Cassidy’s documentary shares the focus between LaRose and the story of another American woman, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, aka ‘Jihad Jamie’. Both became radicalised after watching YouTube clips, and while talking via online Jihadi chatrooms, they also encountered Ali Charaf Damache.
The Waterford-based Algerian-born Irish citizen himself had claimed to be the leader of a Jihadist group, and both LaRose and Ramirez separately contrived to join his terrorism cell. However, soon after arriving in Ireland, LaRose became disillusioned, and contacted the FBI who flew her back to the States where she was later convicted, serving eight of a ten-year sentence, before her release in July 2018.
Ramirez was also later convicted, serving seven of an eight-year sentence before release in March 2017.
The third person, Mohammad Hassan Khalid, has Asperger’s and was 15 when he became embroiled in the Jihad Jane plot. The youngest person ever to be charged with terrorism inside the US, he was sentenced to five years imprisonment.
“I’d seen the headlines at the time, the news stories everywhere about a terrorist cell in Ireland,” Cassidy tells the Celt. “I kept coming back to the same question: how do these people, one in Philadelphia and somebody in Colorado, and someone else in Baltimore, all end up as part of a terrorist cell in Waterford, and together plan to kill a cartoonist based in Sweden?” 
Cassidy initially covered the story of Jihad Jane as a radio documentary in 2013 before seeing its potential in a more visual medium.

Psychological
The journey to radicalisation though, Cassidy admits, is a difficult one to translate. 
“It’s psychological, a very internal process, so it’s hard to visualise. The reality is just people sitting at a computer eight-hours a day staring at a screen and reading material for six months. It’s not like doing a documentary on a car chase or a bank robbery.”
Cassidy, whose past works includes the celebrated short film The Last Days of Peter Bergmann and closer to home a radio documentary on the orphanage fire at Cavan’s St Clare’s Convent, feels the Jihad Jane story is very much a story “made from that moment”.
“Ten years on I think we’re more aware than ever that there is a lot of strange stuff happening on the internet,” he remarks. “As much as it’s great as a tool to link humanity, there is a lot of darkness. I think this story highlights that. I think it would have been impossible for something like this to have happened in the ‘60s or ‘70s, because for one, these people would never have been able to connect.”

Contradiction
A common theme Cassidy and his crew did find was those involved had suffered trauma in their lives - in LaRose’s case horrific abuse as a child before running away from home when she was then prostituted before marrying a client aged 15.
When LaRose and Cassidy first met, it was on the day of her release from FCI in Tallahassee, Florida.
“She was being presented as this ‘new face on terror’”, remembers Ciaran. “Then you sit down with her, and the first thing you notice when she gets into the car is she’s clutching a bag of soft toys. She herself was aware of the contradiction, a terrorist carrying round a bag of teddy bears. Beneath it all she really was quite vulnerable. She was very social, very likeable. That’s how it all started.”
While there has been a major crackdown since 2010 on all social media networks on the spread and dissemination of terror related material, Cassidy notes that questions are once again been raised, this time in the wake of mass-shootings such as that which took place in Christchurch, New Zealand.
“Yes videos have been taken down but some of these channels still have the likes of white nationalist videos up. For someone who might search something once, the algorithms that work behind the scenes keep drawing a person to more and more extreme stuff. 
“I don’t think there’s any kind of silver bullet, but I do think there is definitely a case to be made for greater responsibility of how this material is put out there,” says Cassidy.
‘Jihad Jane’ is now on national release following its official premiere at the Irish Film Institute last week.
Separately, ‘The Racer’- a cycling film set during the 1998 Tour de France - directed by Kieron J Walsh, and the screenplay for which is written by Cassidy, will premiere at Sundance Film Festival later this year.