"A few months before disappeared, her stepfather says he confronted her: 'What are you going to do, strap a bomb on and blow up something?'"

"He recalled that she responded: 'If necessary, yes.' 'She never liked who she was,' her mother said. 'She was always looking for something.'"

A second American woman, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, 31, has been arrested in that plot to murder a cartoonist who depicted Muhammad. The other woman is Colleen R. LaRose, 46, AKA "JihadJane."

I find it especially hard to understand an American deciding to kill a cartoonist. I can understand how someone coming from our culture could become consumed with anti-government passion adopt a violent path aimed at government targets. And I understand the religious path toward violence and can see that strand in American culture too. And I know converts can be the most passionate religionists. Religionists might aim at private citizens. (I'm thinking of the pro-lifers who've targeted abortion doctors.) But still, going against a cartoonist. How can that happen?

On Sept. 11, she suddenly left Leadville, Colo., a small town in the Rocky Mountains, for Denver, then for New York, to meet and marry a Muslim man she connected with online, her family says. Ms. Paulin-Ramirez, who is 5-foot-11 and blonde, phoned her mother and stepfather in Leadville, providing them with an address in Waterford, Ireland, they say.

I suppose she was drawn in by the passionate intensity of the man, and he came up with the specifics. Killing a cartoonist... it was exotic... erotic.