Shamima Begum can’t stay out of the news, can she? One minute, she is telling us that the dustbins full of severed heads in Raqqa didn’t faze her, the next she is saying we should feel sorry for her. Yet just when she is gaining a degree of public sympathy, although not from me, she says something so incredibly crass and tasteless that you wonder if a) she really wants to come back to the UK at all and b) whether she is in control of her faculties.
Now, Ms Begum is offering her views on the terror attack on the Manchester MEN arena when a psychopathic islamist maniac blew himself up after an Ariana Grande, killing 22 people. Here’s what she says:
“I do feel that it’s wrong that innocent people did get killed.
“It’s one thing to kill a soldier that is fighting you, it’s self-defence, but to kill the people like women and children…
“Just people like the women and children in Baghuz that are being killed right now unjustly, the bombings. It’s a two-way thing really.
“Because women and children are being killed back in the Islamic State right now and it’s kind of retaliation.
“Like, their justification was that it was retaliation so I thought ‘OK, that is a fair justification’.”
I suppose I could cut the wretched woman some slack because her words are little more than gobbledegook, an incoherent ramble which culminates in a final coherent assertion that the murders in Manchester were a “a kind of retaliation” so it was a “fair justification”. I am not sure the families of victims would see things in exactly the same way. On the contrary, I’d imagine they’d be mortified. But it gets worse.
Ms Begum has named her baby son Jarrah, which means ‘able fighter’ or ‘one who wounds’ in Arabic. Abu Ubaidah ibn al-Jarrah, who was a general in the Arab crusades and was well known for massacring Jews. There’s a surprise. But still there is more.
The family lawyer, one Tasnime Akunjee, announces that Ms Begum is being treated “worse than the Nazis”. He adds, apparently without any semblance of irony, that, “The Nazis had the Nuremberg trials. They were given due process. This girl was a victim when she went out there at 15 years old. Our politicians are saying that she should be denied protections and due process that would have been granted to Nazis.” That only four of the 185 people indicted in the trials were found to be not guilty. I am not sure Mr Akunjee thought too much before engaging brain.
Every day in every way, Ms Begum and all her various spokespeople manage to make things worse. If at the start, she had shown any level of contrition and remorse, maybe, just maybe, a new beginning in the UK might have been possible. Instead, the fans of populism are stoking the fires and making it less likely than ever that she will come back.
For goodness sake, Ms Begum said she would have allowed her first son, who is now dead, to fight for ISIS. That does not suggest to me we have a woman who would return to the place she used to live with the best of intentions.
The mass murder of innocents at the MEN could never be used as justification for anything and certainly not the efforts to destroy the crazed lunatics of ISIS. Call it brainwashing, call it radicalisation, call it anything you like. I don’t know what I would call it but I don’t want her spouting her nonsense in this country. Sorry to be all illiberal. It’s honestly how I feel about it.
