ATLANTA — Georgia State University Professor of Communication and Middle East Studies; and Transcultural Conflict and Violence Faculty Member, Dr. Mia Bloom, who’s latest book Veiled Threats: Woman and Global Jihad which released early this year; has done the Page 99 Test for her book.
“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” –Ford Madox Ford. The Page 99 Test blog dedicated to unveiling this in books, posted the findings of Bloom’s ‘Veiled Threats.’
If readers opened Veiled Threats to page 99, they would read both about how ISIS abused and exploited Yazidi sex slaves as well as whether ISIS should be charged with the crime of genocide because it engaged in ethnic cleansing of Yazidi areas, but also the capture of women during combat, requires the implementation of the Geneva accords, that they would be protected from predation. In fact, ISIS did quite the opposite. Page 99 describes the process of selection, where the female prisoners were separated from the men, the combatants separated the old from the young. ISIS terrorists treated the women like chattel, as ISIS evaluated them based on age, eye color, and even breast size.
— excerpt from The Page 99 Test
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Veiled Threats challenges the idea that women in violent terrorist groups lack agency. Too often, women are assumed to be controlled by men: their fathers, husbands or some other male relative. Bloom contests this narrow understanding. Although extremist groups often control different aspects of women’s lives, from their religious obligations or dress, Jihadi women have asserted themselves in myriad ways. The author interrogates the prevailing perceptions about women’s involvement in violent extremism exclusively as victims: manipulated, drugged, or coerced. Following her pioneering work on women in Bombshell, Bloom lifts the veil of the secret world of women in Jihadi groups to provide a nuanced and complex explanation of motivation and challenge misperceptions about women’s agency.
Veiled Threats explores the range of roles of the women involved in Jihad—not only across secular and religious groups, but within affiliated religious groups—and how these extremist groups have used rape as a weapon of war. Bloom explains how women are used and abused, deployed and destroyed, and the many ways in which their roles in terrorism have evolved over the past three decades.
Veiled Threats: Woman and Global Jihad is available now. Published by Cornell University Press, readers can expect to learn more on a “topic that is often discussed in the news but less so academically.”
Blooms other books include
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