Muthana’s Bid for Mercy

Hoda Muthana’s lawyer insists the former ISIS propagandist is repentant and “wants to face the consequences” of her actions — as a public service, to “protect others from repeating those mistakes.”

But Muthana has her own ideas about appropriate punishment: “Maybe therapy lessons,” she suggested to ABC News. Sorry, but babbling to a shrink won’t dissuade anyone from joining the Islamic State — or even come close to punishing her for her crimes.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, says she won’t be allowed back in the United States on the grounds that she’s not actually a citizen. But that’s a legal issue: Her citizenship hinges on the precise status of her onetime Yemeni diplomat father when she was born in New Jersey.

In case she does eventually stand trial, Muthana and her supporters are clearly laying the groundwork for pleas of mercy because she’s a young single mother who was “brainwashed” and is now so very sorry.

And, as one of her lawyers disingenuously put it, because “she is just another victim of these monsters.”

Don’t buy it for a moment. She willingly left home after self-radicalizing, married three ISIS fighters (two of whom were killed) and called on fellow Muslims to “spill American blood.”

Indeed, as the Brookings Institution’s Daniel Byman notes, women “have played an important role in the Islamic State as recruiters, enforcers and otherwise bolstering the caliphate.”

Fact is, she grew remorseful only after ISIS’s defeat, when she found herself in a refugee camp with nowhere else to go. Yet for all her claims of regret, she still hasn’t offered a word of apology to ISIS’s victims.

Yes, Hoda Muthana needs to be held accountable. But in court — not lying on a psychiatrist’s couch.