And she also apparently thought that essential to being a Muslim was to take up arms against those perceived as Islam’s enemies. Where did she get this idea? Is anyone investigating what is taught in her mosque in Michigan, and what they’re saying about Sharia in the U.S.? Almost certainly not — after all, it’s a Religion of Peace. But this complacency will almost certainly come back to bite us, just as Nicole Lynn Mansfield’s commitment to “the best way of life” came back to bite her.
“Yank died for Syria,” from the New York Post, June 1:
The horrors of the Syrian civil war were brought home to a Michigan family when a 33-year-old mother from Flint “” raised as a Baptist but who converted to Islam “” was gunned down by government troops in a rebel city.
Nicole Lynn Mansfield “” labeled a terrorist by the brutal Assad regime “” was an unlikely candidate to be the first American among the 70,000 fatalities in the 2-year-old bloodbath.
Mansfield grew up in Flint, the daughter of a General Motors production chief, in what relatives called a “true-blooded American” upbringing. She worked for about 10 years in hospices and group homes as a health-care aide.
For reasons her relatives can’t explain, she converted to Islam about five years ago and in 2008 married an Arab whom she met at a local mosque. She never introduced him to her family.
They divorced soon after he obtained a green card, but she continued to wear a Muslim head scarf. She believed “the best way of life was to be a Muslim,” said her grandmother, Carole Mansfield.
Nicole Mansfield last saw her relatives in December, and gave little hint of her plans. Her aunt, Monica Mansfield-Speelman, thought she was in South Africa.
“We didn’t know she was gone, but Nicole, she was known to take off like that,” Mansfield-Speelman said. “She was a traveler, I guess you could say. She didn’t stay in one place.”
Her 18-year-old daughter Triana Jones knew where she was.
“I know that she was talking to people online, and that they told her about the project in Syria,” she told CNN.
The “project” was “to help free the Syrians from the Syrian government,” she said.
Relatives said Mansfield had no idea what she was getting into.
That’s almost certainly true.
Nicole Mansfield “had a heart of gold, but she was weak-minded,” her grandmother told the Detroit Free Press. “I think she could have been brainwashed.”
Jones agreed: “She was interested in going over there to help. And she didn’t think it would be fighting; she told me there wouldn’t be no guns or anything. She would never be involved in that.”
But state-run Syrian TV showed Mansfield’s body in a bullet-riddled car, with a flag of the al Qaeda-linked al-Nusra rebel group, in the town of Idlib near the Turkish border. The FBI confirmed her death to family members on Thursday….