Jihadi bride turned back on nation and shacked up with ISIS — UK is not her home
TO see the staggering sense of entitlement that exists among certain sections of British youth today, look no further than the comments made by Shamima Begum.
This is the young woman from London who ran away to join ISIS. Who rejected Britain and ran into the arms of a vicious, barbaric movement that despises Britain and everything it stands for.
Who turned her back on her family, her community and her nation and shacked up with killers who have massacred British citizens.
Yet Ms Begum says she wants to come “home”. Well, I’m sorry Shamima — this isn’t your home anymore.
She shows a blissful, haughty rejection of the idea one’s choices and behaviour might have consequences.
As if you can go on a three-year jaunt to provide moral and wifely succour to a backward, anti-British movement then come home again and avail of British society’s welfare and protections.
Pregnant Begum says she just wants to “come home and live quietly with my child”.
She says she’s confident she and her child will be “taken care of”.
There’s the casual, arrogant assumption it is absolutely fine she holds values that run directly, violently counter to British values.
And all Begum seems to talk about is herself, her friends, her child and future.
What about those massacred by people like her Dutch jihadi husband?
What about Alan Henning, the kindly British taxi driver beheaded by one of Begum’s fellow Brits, Jihadi John?
She turned her back on her nation and shacked up with killers
Brendan O'Neill
What about the eight-year-old girl murdered at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in the name of the cult Begum willingly joined? Nothing.
These people seem not to matter. Apparently she is the victim, not them.
Begum knew well she’d marry an ISIS fighter — it’s what she and her pals went to ISIS-ruled territory to do.
She says she has no regrets about moving to ISIS’s brutal caliphate and was fine seeing severed heads.
Those heads belonged to “enem[ies] of Islam” so didn’t faze her, she chillingly says.
Then she says “Bring me home”. It is extraordinary, bordering on pathological.
WHAT ABOUT THE VICTIMS?
This speaks to what happens when people are brought up in a society as segmented and morally fractured as Britain is — about life under multiculturalism.
Modern Britain refuses to state clearly what its values are, and which celebrates all value systems being fine, none superior to any other.
As a consequence, Britain has become split into various often conflicting communities and value systems.
Many brought up in this climate come to feel dislocated from any idea of Britishness, and from the British nation itself.
Some start to embrace narrow, eccentric, even hostile value systems.
And if you criticise this process? You’re an Islamophobe. This divides communities then clamps down on open, frank discussion about such worrying and sometimes dangerous division.
Too many observers have focused on Begum and her pals’ youthfulness and the idea they were groomed or brainwashed online.
'SHE MUST LIVE WITH CONSEQUENCES'
These girls and other Brits were “radicalised”, we are told, as if they are unwitting dupes.
In truth, they were resourceful and bright. All were grade-A students.
They thought their actions through, planned them meticulously and executed them well.
Far from being passive victims, the girls sought to convince other young women to run away to ISIS territory.
The focus on the “grooming” of Western European youths by evil ISIS masterminds overlooks a more terrible reality: that some Western European youths, Muslim ones, actively sought out the ISIS life.
Britain should not go out of its way to bring Ms Begum home. She made her choices and she must live with the consequences.
Of course, if she makes it back to the UK of her own volition, we should let her enter, and she should be dealt with either as an enemy combatant or ally of enemy combatants.
She should be investigated and, if necessary, punished.
You cannot implicitly declare war on your own nation, side with mass murderers then just go back to your old London existence.
That isn’t how life works. The sooner Ms Begum and every other British backer of ISIS realise this, the better.
- BRENDAN O’Neill is editor of Spiked internet magazine.