The so-called “ISIS bride” Hoda Muthana – which is a romanticized label for someone who declared her allegiance to a terror group; just because she got married three times should not sugar-coat that fact – wants to come back to the United States, and her family is suing to have her passport restored.

For those who don’t remember all the details, Hoda Muthana was born in the United States to a Yemeni diplomat. She left the country – with an American passport – in 2014. In 2016, the Obama State Department declared that since Hoda Muthana was born to a diplomat, she was not entitled to birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment (children of diplomats are considered to not be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” since their parent is in the service of another country), and so her passport was invalid, and she was not an American citizen. When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Trump stated this via press releases and Twitter, they were only reaffirming what the Obama State Department had determined.

But now that Hoda Muthana has a toddler (by her second husband), ISIS is in disarray in Syria, and she’s stuck in a Kurdish refugee camp, she would like to come back to America now. Like so many ISIS fighters before her, she found out that the jihad isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Muthana’s family is suing to have her passport reinstated so she can return, and the case is being heard today. The family (plus CAIR) is arguing that her father was no longer a diplomat when she was born.

The lawsuit in U.S. federal court contends that Muthana, who was 20 when she left, enjoys an equivalent right. It seeks to compel the Trump administration to recognize her citizenship, which the young woman’s attorneys say she acquired at the time of her birth in Hackensack, N.J., and to “accept Ms. Muthana and her son back into the United States and to use all available means to do so.”

Her son, of course, has never set foot on U.S. soil, but if she is found to be a citizen, then her citizenship would automatically extend to him.

But documents provided by Muthana’s lawyers indicate that her father had been discharged from his diplomatic position by the time of her birth on Oct. 28, 1994, by which point her mother had also gained permanent residency status. When the government revoked the young woman’s passport in January 2016, it stated in a letter that she was not a birthright citizen because her father’s termination had not been officially documented until February 1995 — a claim disputed by the family’s lawyers, who point to a notice from the United States Mission to the United Nations dating the end of his service to Sept. 1, 1994.

The notice, signed by a U.N. official, was used by Muthana’s father when he was applying for a passport on behalf of his daughter, then a minor, in 2004. The government issued the passport in January 2005, and the travel document was renewed before she left for Syria more than four years ago, when she disappeared after telling family she was going to a school event.

What has always made me scratch my head is exactly how the wife of a Yemeni diplomat got “permanent residency status,” and then exactly how did her father manage to stay in the United States after he was terminated from diplomatic service? Shouldn’t the whole family have returned to Yemen at that point?

Honestly, the whole citizenship question should be rendered moot because Hoda Muthana took up arms with ISIS, and forfeited any claims to American allegiance or citizenship at that point. I say “should be” because the idea of stripping anyone of citizenship for taking up arms with a terrorist group ended before it could begin when John Walker Lindh was sentenced to 20 years in an American prison instead of being left to rot in Afghanistan.

But back to Hoda Muthana. She’s sorry, everyone! She just wants to return to Sweet Home Alabama!

However, MEMRI would like to remind everyone that Hoda Muthana was telling everyone exactly what she thought over social media for a long time – and they compiled quite a list.

The Muthana dossier was prepared by MEMRI’s group of U.S.-based researchers, analysts and translators who watch Twitter, Instagram and other social networks, as well as extremist media channels on such apps as Telegram.

MEMRI has been tracking Ms. Muthana, 24, since she emerged in 2015 as a prominent Islamic State social media cheerleader, joining thousands of imported extremists who committed widespread atrocities in Syria and Iraq.

“The most troubling aspect of her time in Syria was her becoming a high-profile advocate for ISIS, tweeting regularly from Syria in late 2014 and 2015, urging Americans to come join the jihad and to ‘wake up u cowards,’” MEMRI Executive Director Steven Stalinsky told The Washington Times.

“Many U.S. media outlets have published sympathetic images of her with her child” since she issued her public repatriation request, Mr. Stalinsky said.

Some news stories’ first paragraphs describe her as an “Alabama mother.”

The nonprofit Terrorism Research Initiative reported in 2015, the same year Ms. Muthana became active on social media, that 555 women from Western countries had come to Syria and Iraq to live the Islamic State’s caliphate lifestyle. They looked for both love and war.

“No extremist group has been able to attract so many female Western recruits so far and their numbers continue to grow,” the Terrorism Research Initiative article said. “For many teenage girls, participation in jihad seems very romantic, as well as being married to ‘holy warriors’ and living in the idyllic ‘Muslim Disneyland.’”

Ms. Muthana now describes herself as having been brainwashed by the same type of online Islamic State propaganda she later spewed as a jihadi. She disenrolled from the University of Alabama in 2104 and used her rebated tuition to fund her journey, via Turkey, to the Islamic State’s promised land.

The MEMRI report said she quickly married Suhan Rhaman, an Australian, and took the online name Umm (a common Islamic female alias) Jihad.

Rhaman was killed a few months later. Her second husband was a Tunisian who ended up getting killed in Islamic State-occupied Mosul. They had a son, Adam. Ms. Muthana then married a Syrian.

A small group of like-minded female jihadis formed the Al-Khansaa Brigade. Their war effort revolved around posing in photos wielding AK-47s and issuing threats to the West.

As Umm Jihad, Ms. Muthana became a prolific tweeter, expressly calling for mass killings of Americans, according to MEMRI. She began posting on Instagram in 2017 as “Muth1438.”

Some examples of Ms. Muthana’s posts:

• “There are sooo many Aussies and Brits here but where are the Americans, wake up u cowards.”

• “Terrorize the kuffar [a slur of non-Muslims] at home.”

• “Men and women altogether. You have much to do while you live under our greatest enemy, enough of your sleeping! Go on drive-bys and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over them. Veterans, Patriot, Memorial etc Day parades Kill them.”

• “The whole world doesn’t seem to understand that simple equation. The fact that we don’t love, or even like this world or anything in it. And we are hastening to the Next. We’ve given up everything to live in harsh conditions for Allah’s sake, why? Simply because it’s the only place we as Muslims are allowed to live in. Syria is ugly I’m not going to lie. But we are here only for Allah and we pray for patience and perseverance and we are willing to give everything even our lives for His sake.”

• “We have men (and women!) who love death as ardently as you love your lives! I was watching an American documentary on a battle in Afghanistan and the Americans are such cowards. Crying and shaking on the battlefield and saying, ‘our aim is to get everyone home where they belong.’ While our men’s aim on the battlefield is to reunite with our Lord. Our honor is in jihad, either victory or shahadah [martyrdom]. These men cry for their lives while we cry for our death (shahadah)!”

• A brigade member and Ms. Muthana’s close friend, Umm Abdullatif, tweeted: “Our husbands die in frontlines but that doesn’t stop women in the west from sending their husbands to kill kuffar Kill kuffar in alleyways, stab them and poison them. Poison your teachers. Go to haram [banned by Islamic law] restaurants and poison the food in large quantities.”

Women have been active participants in the ISIS campaign of terror. Muthana may have left “for love,” but she used social media to promote ISIS, and seeing her as some kind of pawn or helpless “bride” undercuts the real danger involved in admitting her back into the country.

will @nytimes acknowledge that she incited the murder of american patriots and veterans by renting a truck and driving all over them? pic.twitter.com/c1JfkJB7le

— ⚡️777⚡️ (@NANODCLXXVII) February 24, 2019

Hoda Muthana’s citizenship status is now in federal court. If she is found to be a citizen and returns, then she should face treason and terrorism charges. If she isn’t, then she can either stay where she is (I think spending the rest of her life working to restore the Yazidis might be penance enough) or she can go to Yemen, if they will take her.

But Hoda Muthana simply saying, “I’m sorry, I was young and stupid, my bad” isn’t enough.

Featured image: Hoda Muthana in CBS interview (screenshot via CBS This Morning on YouTube)