What do Tashfeen Malik, “Lady Al-Qaeda,” Maryam Jameelah, and the Boston Bomber’s widow all have in common?

A number of journalists initially claimed that a woman was behind the San Bernardino massacre, and that Tashfeen Malik radicalized her husband Syed Rizwan Farook.

Anyone who has studied Islamic terrorist killers and radical Islamic culture knows that this is very unlikely.

Samia Labidi, a French-Tunisian dissident and former Islamist, describes how Tunisian Islamist men infiltrated her family “very softly, by means of marriage.” They also infiltrated universities by promising men to “restore their masculine dominance.” Docile wives and polygamy in a post-feminist age might seem very attractive.

Radical Islam appeals to many men for this reason, among others.

According to Labidi, once an Islamist penetrates a single family, “the next step is to marry off the remaining sisters to Islamists.” As a girl, her brother-in-law had Samia, her sisters, and their mother face-veil and subjected them to nightly at-home “political” meetings based on the Qu’ran. They were indoctrinated to believe that Islamic law “takes care of women and protects them” and that “what is good for Western women is not good for Muslim women.”

Chillingly, Labidi writes that when such Islamists were exiled from their countries of origin they entered Europe and the internet to continue their work on a “global scale.”

Labidi views the Western feminist embrace of a woman’s alleged “religious” right to the burqa as a “betrayal” of feminism.

I totally agree. In my view, whenever burqas, heavy face veils, and dark, Iranian-style head, shoulder, and shapeless body coverings appear in the West, we must consider this as a symbol of radical Islam–or of Islamic Jihad.

Katherine Russell, an American convert to Islam and the widow of one of the Boston bomber’s, wears very heavy head and body coverings as well as dark glasses.

Female Jihadists themselves are often heavily head-, shoulder-, and body-covered, if not face-veiled. Pakistani-born Aafia Siddiqui, “Lady Al-Qaeda,” was a neuroscientist and wore dark head- and body-coverings; Pakistani-born Tashfeen Malik, studied to be a pharmacist. Her hijab is dark, heavy, and decidedly unfriendly.

Perhaps the most interesting (and most mentally unstable and dangerous) female Jihadist was American-born convert Margaret Marcus (Maryam Jameelah), who fled to Pakistan to become a propagandist and translator for Maulana Abul Ala Mawdudi, who adopted Maryam. She helped him as an editor and translator in his influential work which argued the case for militant Islam against the West and which justified Sharia law. Maryam wore an Afghan-style burqa.

Daniel Pipes has argued that the West should ban the burqa for reasons of security, which include crimes committed by men wearing burqas. I have argued for such a ban on the grounds that the burqa and niqab are sensory deprivation isolation chambers and, as such, violate the wearer’s human rights. In addition, the increasing appearance of heavy hijab, niqab (face veils) and burqas on Western streets, psychologically rattles infidel and secular women. First, they cannot free these women—who also function as a warning: If radical Islam succeeds, this can happen to them.

While I don’t think that women are the masterminds behind male Jihadists, I do think that our myths about female pacifism or passivity are dangerous. Women suicide killers and human bombs have a long history of killing civilians, including children, for nationalist and Islamic religious purposes.