Abigail R. Esman
InvestigativeProject
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Past articles by Abigail:
Europe Grapples with Independent Quran Schools Radicalizing Students
The exam is multiple choice, with questions about the treatment of enemies – homosexuals, for instance, and unbelievers. How should they be punished, the children are asked: with lashings? Stoning? Killed by the sword? This is not in the Islamic State, → Read More
Is 2023 the Year of Jihad's Resurgence?
A machete attack in New York's Times Square. A stabbing at the Gare du Nord in Paris. A foiled plot in Germany. A shooting in Spain. It's still only January, but 2023 has already made it clear: the jihadist threat is far from over. With so much media → Read More
Victim Jihad: The Strategy Behind the Jailed Terrorists' Complaints
Saleh Abdeslam is angry. They weren't nice to him during his first trial in Brussels, in 2018, when he was found guilty of "attempted murder in a terrorist context." Muslims, he said then, "are judged, treated in the worst of ways. They are judged → Read More
The Istanbul Bombing and Middle Eastern Women's Demand for Freedom
Several times that week she walked along Istanbul's Istiklal Caddesi, a bustling pedestrian thoroughfare lined with shops and restaurants, crowded with street performers, chestnut carts, and couples on a promenade. She carried a red rose. And then on → Read More
Iranian Dissident: "The least we can do here is to be their voice"
Born and raised in post-revolution Iran, Havva grew up covering her hair every time she left the house – not because her family required it, but because the government did. She hated every minute of it, so much so that for much of her childhood, she → Read More
How Iran's Hijab Protesters Are Fighting for Muslim Women Everywhere
Havva still remembers how it felt the first time she walked in public without a headscarf. "I felt powerful," she recalls now, nearly two decades later. "Free. It was so liberating." She pauses a moment. "But it also felt -- normal. Like how it's → Read More
Persecuted at Home, Iran's Christian Converts Finding Europe's Doors Closed
It was Hassan's brother-in-law who inspired him. "He said....there is a treasure, there is a living God, Jesus Christ, and we are his children, and not his slaves," Hassan told the European Court of Human Rights last month. "He said there is a free → Read More
Black Market Repatriation of ISIS Families Fosters New Threats
When Samir Azzuz was convicted of financing terrorism last month in the Netherlands, it was not the Dutch-Moroccan's first terrorism rodeo: in 2006, as a member of the Dutch terror cell the Hofstadgroep, his detailed plans for terror attacks on the Dutch → Read More
In Molenbeek: Jihadists, Guns and (Drug) Money
Gunshots. Knifings. Cars being set aflame. All in broad daylight, all on the streets of Molenbeek. Molenbeek, Belgium, you may recall, was the Brussels neighborhood that was home to almost half of the jihadists responsible for the 2015 Paris attacks and → Read More
Artists Under Fire: The BDS War against Celebrities, Jews, and Israel
To read an interview with author Lara Melman, click here. The announcement came earlier this month on social media: the folk band Big Thief would not be performing as scheduled in Tel Aviv. It was a complete reversal of the band's statement only a week → Read More
Nexus Between "Vicious Antizionism" and Spiking Antisemitism Motivates Author
To read a review of Lara Melman's book, Artists Under Fire, click here. Abigail R. Esman: How did this book come about? Lana Melman: It really came out of my two big passions – my love for arts and entertainment and love for Israel. I first became aware → Read More
Secular Turks Fear Immigrant-Fueled Islamist Wave
At any dinner party conversation, the refrain is practically the same. "It's the immigrants," someone will say. "It's the refugees.""There are too many.""Too many.""They are trying to change our culture.""This is my country – my beautiful country. They → Read More
Erdogan's Islamist Slide Puts Turkish Women at Risk
For millions of women in Turkey, life has just become more dangerous. And that puts the future of the entire country at risk. At least one woman is killed nearly every single day in Turkey, usually by a family member or lover, with more than 400 such → Read More
The Increasing Danger Facing Women in Turkey
There was Aylin Sozer in Istanbul, whose former boyfriend slit her throat and then burned her alive. There was 23-year-old Sule Cet, raped by her boss and tossed from the 20th-floor window of a high rise in Ankara. And in Denizli Province, there was → Read More
Getting Away with Murder: The Campaign to End Kuwait's Honor Crimes Law
After her uncle raped her, after she'd discovered she was pregnant, after she had given birth to her uncle's child, after she'd returned home again, her uncle strangled her to death. Then, along with her brother, he tied the scarf he'd used to choke her → Read More
Dutch Consider Sending Funds to Terror-Linked NGOs
It was an inspired moment. The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs had gathered to discuss the next year's budget; and as they debated humanitarian issues in China, Poland, and Belarus, Green Left member Tom van der Lee had an idea: Let's send money, he → Read More
Europe's Jewish Students Face Anti-Semitic Onslaught
If there were a survival handbook for Jewish students at the universities of Europe, it would probably begin with this: Tell no one that you're Jewish Condemn Israel as a terrorist, genocidal state Get used to it. This, at least, has been the experience → Read More
Iran's Atrocious Human Rights Record Must Be Addressed Before New Nuclear Talks
There were days in a cramped, dark room. There were days and nights at Evin prison, with bright lights and interrogations and little or no sleep. And then there was the injection, a mysterious drug his prison guards shot into Payam Derafshan's veins, → Read More
How the Media's 9/11 Anniversary Coverage Shifted from a Critical Look at al-Qaida to Attacking America
Whispered first, then shouted from the dust and wreckage of that September morning in 2001 came the words that have become a mantra: Never forget. And in the two decades since the attacks of 9/11, there is much we never did forget: the deaths, the → Read More
Dutch Journalist's Shooting Presents Another Rap-Radicalization Link
A large white paper heart rests among the flowers on the side of the Lange Leidsedwarstraat in Amsterdam, marking the place where journalist Peter R. de Vries was shot on the sunlit evening of July 6. "Dear Peter," it reads. "Come back. Our hero. With → Read More