The NY Times has a fascinating – and frightening – story up about one Malika El Aroud, a 48-year-old Moroccan now living in Belgium where she spending her time authoring incendiary pro-jihad writings on the Internet. Seems there’s a place for women in Islam after all. Read it all and be afraid.

Writing in French under the name “Oum Obeyda,” she has transformed herself into one of the most prominent Internet jihadists in Europe.

She calls herself a female holy warrior for Al Qaeda. She insists that she does not disseminate instructions on bomb-making and has no intention of taking up arms herself. Rather, she bullies Muslim men to go and fight and rallies women to join the cause.

“It’s not my role to set off bombs — that’s ridiculous,” she said in a rare interview. “I have a weapon. It’s to write. It’s to speak out. That’s my jihad. You can do many things with words. Writing is also a bomb.”

It certainly is. In a way it’s surprising that politically correct European society would tolerate a voice filled with disdain and hate for the society that gives its owner succor. But it’s important to realize that the official policy of many (most?) European nations toward Islamic radicals within their borders is placation, at the least. Need I use the “A” word? Even unstated, that is the way it is.

“Vietnam is nothing compared to what awaits you on our lands,” she wrote to a supposed Western audience in March about wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Ask your mothers, your wives to order your coffins.”

One of the great ironies of El Aroud’s life in Belgium is that she’s actively seeking to destroy western society while on the dole, collecting over $1100 per month in unemployment money from the state she agitates against.

After training with the Taliban in pre-invasion Afghanistan, El Aroud’s husband carried out the homicide bomb murder of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the prominent anti-Taliban leader in that country. She was tried for the crime in Belgium but acquitted for lack of evidence.

After marrying again, to another terrorism suspect authorities regard as highly dangerous, El Aroud was convicted in Switzerland for inciting violence and supporting organized crime and is suspected of continuing her work to free convicted terrorists from prison.

Malika El Aroud represents everything that is wrong with Muslims living in the west, from her love of militant Islamic terrorism to the manner in which the nations she seeks to destroy persist in accommodating her hateful acts. But what can Belgium do? El Aroud, like many of the new breed of Muslim terrorists, understands how to leverage western society’s legal system against itself.

“I write in a legal way,” she said. “I know what I’m doing. I’m Belgian. I know the system.”