Are you worried about the three London ‘schoolgirls’ who’ve gone to fight for ISIS?

Rod Liddle raises an interesting question in his latest Spectator blogpost:

Are you terribly worried about those three London ‘schoolgirls’ who have gone off to fight for the Islamic State in Syria?

His answer:

I must admit I haven’t lost an awful lot of sleep over it.

Douglas Murray doesn’t have much sympathy either. He thinks we should spend less time worrying about these three girls in particular, and more time thinking how we can dissuade other girls from doing likewise – perhaps by showing them videos of the fate that likely awaits them in the paradise that is Islamic State.

For instance, tell them about the nice young British girls who’ve already gone to Syria, and explain that their ‘jihad’ will involve being repeatedly raped by big bearded men before being machine gunned against a wall or blown to smithereens by some Arab group or other who do not like jihad tourists.  A video explaining that the young men will suffer the same fate might do some good too.

These, clearly, are not the responses the BBC would like us to have. The way it has been covering the story, you’d think none of us would be capable of resting until a carrier fleet had been dispatched to the Eastern Mediterranean and “our girls” had been safely winched aboard by an SAS rescue helicopter.

But, outside the Muslim “community”, I’m not sure that many British people will feel quite the same pang for these girls’ fate that they do, say, in that scene from The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie when Mary goes off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. (At least neither of the sides in that war was our actual enemy at the time, whereas I’m not sure you can say quite the same for ISIS)

I also think that this is why the BBC has been striving so hard to tell us otherwise by giving the story such priority. It’s because the PC commissars of correct thinking sense, quite correctly, how incorrectly we are in fact thinking about this particular issue. And, as the BBC so often does – on everything from its Countryfile episodes glorifying wind farms to its obsession with multi-ethnic casting – it imagines somehow that it can leverage its broadcasting quasi-monopoly into brainwashing us into the “right” point of view.

The irony is, of course, that the reason so many of us don’t have the “right” point of view is because of the political philosophy the BBC has spent the last four decades so assiduously championing.

“Multiculturalism” was the supposedly enlightened philosophy whereby immigrant communities were encouraged to celebrate and retain their own cultural identity rather than assimilating with the broader culture. Now we are all reaping the benefits.

Now we are all reaping the benefits.