Excerpt:
Five months after Shayma Senouci left Quebec to join Islamic State fighters (ISIS) in Syria, she wrote a long email to her friends back home. She told them that she felt she didn’t belong in the West and that she had an obligation to emigrate to a Muslim country.
“I left because I felt imprisoned in this country, I felt dirty and deadly, an accomplice for the killings and the humiliations of Muslims worldwide,” the young woman wrote.
Senouci also shared that the debate surrounding the Quebec government’s proposed Charter of Values, which sought to ban public sector employees from wearing religious symbols such as the hijab, solidified her feelings of being marginalized and being unwelcome in her own society.
And she wasn’t the only one.