At the end of June 2026, Catherine Beth Washburn, a 37-year-old white woman from an upstate New York town, was arrested for sending $30,000 in crypto to a member of Islamic Jihad in Israel. Washburn kept texting him, encouraging him that, “you do not need equipment, you only need Allah” and showing off a picture of herself with hand grenades and a Hamas flag.
Now, in August 2026, Jessica Bowie, a 35-year-old white woman in Albany, New York who converted to Islam, changed her name to ‘Aisha Saif’, put on a burka, and began chatting with what she thought were ISIS terrorists and plotting to bomb the New York State Capitol by disguising the bomb in a DoorDash delivery bag. Bowie shared thoughts such as “blowing non-Muslim brains out is beautiful” and said she wanted to “harm the enemies of Allah.”
Cathy and Jessica lived around 3 hours driving distance away from each other in upstate New York. Both the Rochester and Albany areas have large Muslim populations and Rochester in particular has been an epicenter of Islamic terrorist plots including another Muslim convert who plotted to attack a bar on New Year’s Eve in 2015 for ISIS, a Muslim terrorist who wanted to shoot soldiers for ISIS in 2014, and Omar Mohammed’s bomb threats against Kodak in 2013.
But white women in their mid-30s were not the usual Islamic terrorist cohort. Until recently most cases of white women engaging in Islamic terrorism were coming out of Europe and involved the converted wives of Muslim men trying to move to Iraq and Syria to be with their husbands.
