'These People are Traitors' - Pundit on Daesh Bride Hoda Muthana

A lawsuit, filed by her father, a former diplomat to the UN from Yemen, argues that his 24-year old daughter Hoda Muthana is an American citizen by birth and that her citizenship should be recognised. The family is demanding that Muthana and her son be accepted back into the United States after she allegedly escaped Daesh and was captured by Kurdish forces. Media reported that she was born in Hackensack, New Jersey in 1994.

Michael Shannon, a political commentator and Newsmax and Cagle Syndicate columnist, as well as the author of the book "A Conservative Christian's Guidebook for Living in Secular Times" has commented on the returning jihadists in the US.

Sputnik: In your view, why has the Trump administration been so reluctant in letting Hoda Muthana come back into the country to hold trial?

Michael Shannon: I think it establishes a dangerous precedent to welcome a traitor back into the US. She made her choice to ally with a savage, barbaric organization, an Islamic terrorist organization who had declared war on the United States. She called for the murder of US citizens here within the United States. I've seen a picture of her on the web with her holding a knife to the throat of a captive. I fail to see how inviting her back into the country would really add to the quality of life here in the United States.

Sputnik: How high are the chances that her father will win in the court?

Michael Shannon: Judges don’t necessarily follow the law when they issue judicial rulings, so there’s really no telling. 

Her father was a diplomat from Yemen at the UN and under US law, immigration and naturalization law, children born to diplomats are not granted birthright citizenship. In other words, when they’re born here, even if it’s within the territorial confines of the US, they’re still considered citizens of the country for which their parents are serving as diplomats. Now, her father contends that he had resigned his position with Yemen prior to her birth here in the US, but we contend, we being the United States government, that they were not officially notified until after her birth. Her father brandishes this UN document saying that he was no longer a diplomat. Well they're missing a consonant in that, a UN document is not the same as a US document and until it’s officially recognised, it doesn’t exist.

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Sputnik: Mike Pompeo rejected the lawsuit filed against the Trump administration, how much ground is there for Muthana's case in court if it takes place?

Michael Shannon: Well it’s going to hinge on when the US government recognises that her father was no longer a diplomat. The entire case hinges on that, because if she wasn’t a citizen because her father was a diplomat, then her son is also not a citizen because he was born to her when she was serving ISIS (Daesh) overseas. So the only possible claim her son would have to being a US citizen is if his mother was a US citizen and, as I stated earlier, the government contends she’s not because of the date of her father's resigning from the Yemen diplomatic service.

Sputnik: Changing the topic slightly, how could this incident affect birthright citizenship in the United States and could it be used as a pretext to make changes to this right?

Michael Shannon:  It won’t affect it at all because they’re just arguing over a date on a document. Birthright citizenship was actually a mis-decided Supreme Court case in Wong Kim Ark and that concerned two Chinese diplomats who were in the country illegally and they had a child and they were here on a green card. They weren’t serving in the Chinese diplomatic services and the judges misread English common law and ruled that their child was born in the US. But that ruling there does not apply to illegal aliens, and that's where it's been used most frequently, because they aren’t here recognised by the US. The only reason why it is granted to illegal aliens is because the State Department in the 1960s unilaterally decided without consulting Congress, the judiciary, or the American people that illegal aliens would have birthright citizenship. I wish someone would take a case like that to the Supreme Court.

You may recall, back in November of last year, President Trump said he was going to issue an executive order banning birthright citizenship, well evidently that order has been buried under the plans for the wall because nothing else has been heard of it. But had he issued the order, they would’ve of course gone to court to block it, and so the citizenship of illegal aliens would’ve eventually been decided by the Supreme Court.

Sputnik: There have been cases recently with Daesh fighters attempting to return to their countries. In your view, what should the governments of these countries do to ensure national security?

Michael Shannon: Leave them to rot where they are. These people are traitors, they've declared war against the United States, they've called for the murder of US citizens. You see, we live in a consequences-free world, at least as far as the elites and the legal profession is concerned, that you can do something like that and then when circumstances change and in her instance the side she backed is losing or has lost, well now it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to come back to you because I’m not comfortable being an ISIS bride anymore.” Well in my view it is: too bad, you chose ISIS and if ISIS loses you have to suffer the consequences, and I think that should be true here in the US and the UK.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik

*Daesh, also known as IS/ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State, is the terrorist groups banned in Russia and many other countries