Delingpole: ‘Bring Back Shamima Begum!’ Says No One Who Is Not a Leftist Loon

Shamima Begum
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James Delingpole

Given how totally obsessed liberal-lefties are with condemning imaginary Nazi behaviour, it’s amazing how squeamish they are about confronting the real thing.

Burning people alive in cages? Raping, torturing and crucifying? Slave trading? Destroying and looting priceless ancient artefacts? Blowing up and machine gunning people at pop concerts and restaurants? Chopping prisoners’ heads off?

I’d say that all the above are pretty Nazi-level evil. So I’m a bit surprised that liberal-lefties are so keen to welcome back to Britain someone from an organisation which frequently perpetrated such crimes against humanity.

Her name is Shamima Begum, she’s an unapologetic former member of Islamic State and now a bunch of squishy senior judges from Britain’s Court of Appeal has ruled that she can appeal the UK government’s decision to remove her British citizenship.

Naturally, the left is delighted at the news. Here is Guardian columnist Gary Younge explaining why it’s a good thing, beginning with an anecdote about the kind of naughty antics he got up to when he was a young pup.

When I was 16 I stopped off in Holland, during a camping holiday with a friend. We bought as much marijuana as we could and smoked it all in an afternoon. Sat behind a housing estate in the border town of Nijmegen, we giggled, rambled and lay around until the local police came. They took us back to the campsite (we found the fact that they spoke Dutch hilarious), where we were asked for our passports and train tickets. They already had our number: a couple of idiots out of their minds and out of their depth. They told us to get on the next train in the direction of the port. We’d stopped laughing by then. We went home.

Yes, Gary. Very cute. The thing is though, most of us can spot the difference between a) smoking a bit of weed and b) joining a death cult committed to the enslavement or destruction of anyone who doesn’t want to submit to said death cult – ie pretty much everyone.

The difference is that in one case no one is harmed and chances are you’ll become a productive, balanced member of society — or, if unlucky, a Guardian columnist. But in the other case, you’ll spend the rest of your life like a time bomb waiting to go off — a menace both to yourself and all the people who come into contact with you.

Here are some of the things Begum has said about her time with ISIS.

 “When I saw my first severed head in a bin it didn’t faze me at all. It was from a captured fighter seized on the battlefield, an enemy of Islam.”

and, on the beheadings generally:

“From what I heard, Islamically that is all allowed, so I was OK with it.”

Probably not the wisest things to say in an interview when you want to persuade everyone at home that you should be allowed back and that you’re not longer a menace to public safety. But you’ve got to admire Begum’s honesty: like many, if not most, of those who volunteered to join Islamic State and spend years under the caliphate in hellholes like Raqqa, Begum has been brutalised and indoctrinated to the point where she really can’t see what’s so bad about chopping people’s heads off if they qualify as ‘an enemy of Islam.’

When you watch TV dramas like the excellent Caliphate (Netflix) you feel very sorry for characters like Shamima Begum. The Islamist recruiters grab them while they are young (Begum was 15 when she set off with two London schoolfriends to join Islamic State), exploit their naivety and innocence and youthful rebelliousness, and paint a completely misleading picture about the comforts and joys of life in the Caliphate, and about the justice and goodness of their cause. By the time the girls get to Raqqa, where they are instantly married off to some doomed jihadist who’ll almost certainly get killed in battle, the die is cast and there’s no escape but death. You’d need a heart of stone not to feel pity for such a wasted life, even if the decision to take those steps was hers.

Except according to bleeding hearts like the Guardian‘s Gary Younge, we’re all to blame and our responsibility for all the Begums out there should continue ad infinitum.

We, as a society, should in some way be held accountable for how a 15-year-old girl went from watching Keeping Up With the Kardashians to joining a terrorist cult in a war zone.

This is very much a minority view, though, — and probably helps indicate why the Guardian is on the verge of collapse: it’s just more of the SJW lunacy that no one has time for any more. According to this poll, 93 per cent of those surveyed would rather not have Begum back in the country.

It’s not that I don’t understand the abstract principle behind the left-liberal argument: that if you’re a British citizen you should remain that way, regardless of how heinous your crimes or whether you’ve surrendered your allegiance to your country’s most bitter enemy.

But what might look like justice for Begum may well be an injustice for everyone else. Her right to come home looks in serious danger of trumping the rights of more law abiding British citizens not to have to worry about being slaughtered by an unapologetic Islamist or to have to stump up for the next fifty or so years not just for Begum’s social housing but also for round the clock monitoring by the intelligence services.

Most people in Britain aren’t unkind or indeed racist or Islamophobic. But they do, on the whole, have a highly developed sense of fair play. Why should they work hard, pay their taxes, teach their children right and wrong, only to see the fruits of their labour squandered many times over protecting a young woman with a concerningly relaxed attitude towards beheading non-muslims?

Perhaps Gary Younge can address this issue in his next Guardian piece. Presuming the newspaper hasn’t folded by then.

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