Free Exercise Defense Raised For Teen Charged With Attempting To Support ISIS

The Chicago Sun-Times reported yesterday that the attorney for Chicago teenager Mohammed Hamzah Khan has filed a motion to dismiss the indictment against Khan on First Amendment grounds.  The 19-year-old Khan was arrested at O'Hare Airport in October as he and his younger brother and sister were trying to travel to the Middle East to join ISIS.  He was charged with knowingly attempting to provide material support and resources to a foreign terrorist organization.  According to a long and interesting article last month in Rolling Stone on the three siblings, Khan wrote in a letter to his parents:

An Islamic State has been established, and it is thus obligatory upon every able-bodied male and female to migrate.

In his motion to the court filed last week, Khan's attorney, Thomas Anthony Durkin, argued:

While it is easy to disagree with Mr. Khan’s unpopular religious beliefs and label them misguided simplistic, or even fundamentalist, it cannot be said that [they] were not sincerely held — and that is all that must be shown.

ISIS Declares Caliphate In Parts of Syria and Iraq

As reported by Time, the Sunni group ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) today declared a new Caliphate on the territory it holds in Syria and Iraq.  Its statement (full text) declared ISIS leader Abu Baker al-Baghdadi to be the Caliph, and changed ISIS' name to merely Islamic State.  The lengthy statement included this explanation:

The time has come for those generations that were drowning in oceans of disgrace, being nursed on the milk of humiliation, and being ruled by the vilest of all people, after their long slumber in the darkness of neglect – the time has come for them to rise. The time has come for the ummah of Muhammad (peace be upon him) to wake up from its sleep, remove the garments of dishonor, and shake off the dust of humiliation and disgrace, for the era of lamenting and moaning has gone, and the dawn of honor has emerged anew. The sun of jihad has risen. The glad tidings of good are shining. Triumph looms on the horizon. The signs of victory have appeared.