ISIS Releases Parenting Guide: Tell Jihadi Bedtime Stories ‘While They Are Babies’

Hot off the heels of releasing a guide on how to properly handle sex slaves, the Islamic State (ISIS) has begun distributing a handbook titled Sister’s Role in Jihad, designed to teach women how to properly indoctrinate their children to fully commit to the cause of jihadist terrorism.

The guide, discovered and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), instructs jihadist mothers to start young, lest the child grow older and less susceptible to a full commitment to the Islamic State. The guide specifically calls for teaching children the importance of waging jihad “while they are babies” because anything older than infancy “may be too late,” as the Daily Mail reports: “Don’t wait until they are seven to start, for it may be too late by then!” The Mail highlights specifically that the guide tells mothers, “Don’t underestimate the lasting effect of what those little ears and eyes take in during the first few years of life!”

The guide also encourages mothers to teach children how to play with toy guns and to introduce them to sports like darts that can help improve aim.

“Fun does not mean music and dancing, as is portrayed by Western children’s TV.” The latter, it comments, “mostly teaches shamelessness, anarchy, and random violence.” Israeli newspaper Haaretz notes also that the guide discourages “fun” in the Western sense. While jihadi indoctrination should be fun, “fun does not mean music and dancing, as is portrayed by Western children’s TV.” Music and dancing, they claim, “mostly [teach] shamelessness, anarchy, and random violence.”

The guide does impose one restriction on mothers: children should be clear on “who their target is” when allowed near real guns, and they should be taught with toy guns not to shoot anyone friendly to the cause.

In releasing the English-language translation of the guidebook, Steven Stalinsky, executive director of MEMRI, explained that the handbook’s intent is not only to help mothers raise children, but to use the guide itself as a propaganda tool to warn enemies that the children of jihadists will be entirely committed to killing Westerners. “It is important for the West to understand that all these groups want the world to know that this indoctrination is taking place,” he explained. “No matter what happens in Iraq and Syria in the near future, the next generation – the children of Baghdadi and grandchildren of bin Laden – have already been brainwashed to hate the West and to strive for jihad and martyrdom.”