IS it possible to feel sorry for Shamima Begum? To hold anything but revulsion at her conduct, at her beliefs, at her obvious failure to accept any guilt or responsibility and (most of all) at her abrupt desire to undo her hijra, now that the Caliphate is burned to ashes around her and her jihadist heroes are all dead? When meditating upon the cauldron of murder that Syria has been made – on the Yazidi and Christian girls, gang-raped, murdered or trucked like animals to market by the men she served (to say nothing of the Caliphate’s male, Muslim or foreign victims) – the self-pity Ms Begum seeks to force upon us curdles in the mouth. Her callous disregard for the victims of the monstrous movement she joined (“enemies of Islam”, she put to her interviewer, when asked about public beheadings) girds even the squishiest of liberals with bands of steel. Her little part in the ruination of Syria and Iraq cannot be forgiven. Not without penitence. And if her blatant lack of remorse were not enough, her admission that she had watched proud ISIS videos of beheadings and murder before deciding to defect and had gone on to defect anyway is one that blows apart any subsequent defence of her actions she might seek to build. What do we owe Shamima Begum? What is her excuse? That she was a child? She was fifteen when she chose to defect – far in excess of the age of criminal responsibility in English law, and easily old enough to know that people who produce snuff videos of themselves sawing the throats of journalists and aid workers are not a crowd one should join. And what of her plea that she was groomed; deceived by propaganda and by lies? Perhaps she was, but what of it? Does this absolve her? Had she not some basic responsibility to think for herself, to question what her ISIS contact was telling her to do before lying to her parents and boarding a flight to Turkey? And now that she has rediscovered and re-embraced her Britishness, she expects to be spirited from the refugee camp where she now languishes, away from the country she helped to destroy, and back to one she had once merely wished to destroy. She scratches and claws for our cloak of protection; protection she so casually cast aside when she pledged allegiance to a depraved cult that promised slavery or death to all who would not submit to their tyrannical rule. And if she now returns, are we to endure the menace she might still pose to our society? Stoically to pay for the prison cell and the welfare benefits and the new identity and the constant surveillance she might require? Certainly, a tall order.

And yet, take her back we must. Leave aside, for a moment, the question of her newborn son – an innocent, whose moral right to return to the United Kingdom is not questioned. Leave aside the ongoing legal skirmish over the State’s attempt to strip her of her British citizenship, or the practicalities of how she might get out of Syria and make her way home, should the courts rule in her favour. Consider Shamima Begum herself, and the principles at stake in the decision on her fate. As satisfying as many would find it to leave her to her fate, the arguments for taking her back are clear and compelling.

The most important reason is that she is our responsibility, morally if not legally. She was born, reared and educated in Britain. It was in our country that she was radicalised, it was on the watch of our security services that she escaped, it was our country she betrayed and there is no other country that could be reasonably expected to have her. Certainly, the suggestion that either Bangladesh (a country she has never visited, and which faces an Islamist insurgency of its own) or war-ravaged Syria should be left to deal with her is absurd. Naturally, the degree to which Ms Begum’s defection is “our fault” is highly debatable: her personal moral responsibility for her actions, though ineradicable, does not itself erase our failure as a country to properly assimilate her. (Or failing that, to have caught her before she reached ISIS territory). But it is also entirely beside the point: she is our problem not because she is “our fault”, but because there is no-one else who can be reasonably expected to take responsibility for her, no other nation to which she has any more than the flimsiest and most technical claim to membership, and the alternatives to our taking responsibility are morally unacceptable. However one looks at it, she is a problem for someone to deal with. And if we refuse to take responsibility for her? The alternatives are simply unacceptable: death by disease, starvation or dehydration, of her and certainly her child; summary execution, perhaps after rape and torture by vengeful local militiamen or by Assad’s death squads; or her escape in the chaos of a shattered nation, free to spread the jihadist word and free to raise her son a footsoldier for Islamic supremacy.

Consider too that we are (and are lucky to be) a nation of laws, and that we cannot remove protection for Shamima Begum without weakening the regime of fair play that protects us all. Whether we like it or not she is British, and in Britain we have rules for dealing with terrorist sympathisers. So let her face British justice. I’m not qualified to comment on the precise legal arguments for and against revoking Ms Begum’s citizenship, or for blocking her return. But the Home Secretary’s attempts to do both are blatantly and cravenly political, and as such are a brazen violation of the spirit of the rule of law, whatever the government’s lawyers might say. Sajid Javid’s pretence that Ms Begum is Bengali (and therefore not technically left stateless by his move) is a disingenuous and obvious ruse, regardless of whether it stands up in court. The point bears repeating: it is precisely in the case of hate figures like Shamima Begum that our liberalism is tested, and if we are to ever lose our freedoms and our democracy the rot will have begun here. If the government begins to act outside the law, if the courts are unable or unwilling to check them, if the public and the opposition and the press do not notice or do not object, even if at first all of this only occurs in cases like this one, how then do we fill that hole in our defences? Either the law is exercised impartially or it isn’t: there is no room for exceptions. And through that tiny hole made by Shamima Begum will trickle more such decisions – more arbitrary rulings, more weakening of the courts and the law, more softening of our grip on our rights; perhaps until the hole is big enough for a torrent of corruption and graft and wholesale abuse of power. And even if an exception could be made – if we could get away with breaking our own rules and degrading our own values – even then, would it be worth it? To keep out one teenager? Just how important is she? Why do we fear her so? It is our freedoms, our values and our laws that make Western liberal democracy better than the medieval Islamic fantasy project. Indeed, they are the crown jewels of our civilization. They are not worth tarnishing for the stupidity of a schoolgirl.

There is also the possibility, however remote, of Ms Begum’s personal redemption. Admittedly, I have said some pretty tough things about her so far, and I’ll do so again: she appears to be a despicable and wholly unrepentant person. And yet – this is a teenage girl; effectively a single mother, a victim of rape through underage marriage, a traumatised survivor of war and totalitarian conditioning, still grieving the deaths of her first two children and now desperate to save the third. She defected at fifteen, and once within the Caliphate would have been killed had she tried to escape. Does she not merit a second chance? Are we ready to say, at nineteen, that hers is a hopeless case – that her life is worthless? There is some hope that she might be a powerful voice against extremism and terrorism, if only she were brought back and properly deradicalised. After all, she is not some shapeless gasbag like Anjem Choudary, but someone who actually went to Syria, and tried out life under the Caliphate. Alas – it’s a nice thought, Shamima Begum touring schools to expose the lies of Islamist propaganda, but not, I think, a likely one. Her media skills clearly aren’t up to much. She’ll probably want a quiet life if she ever makes it back.

But even if she were to return and nothing we expected came to pass – if she somehow escaped jail, somehow kept custody of her child, refused to recant or apologise, wrote a snivelling and self-justifying book, even returned to preaching Islamic supremacy from the safety and comfort of Britain – even then, it would be a triumph to have her back. Her return would not just be a gesture of magnanimity. It would prove that when we talk about freedom and human rights and the rule of law, we mean what we say and we do not apply one law to Muslims and one to everyone else. Treating her in the spirit of the law would allow us to credibly promise other Britons fighting for terror groups a fair trial if they would give up and come home. And it would be a crippling humiliation for her and for everyone who thought like her: to have her return a supplicant, begging for the protection of the nation she had abandoned when flush with the certainty of Islam’s final victory; and to live the rest of her life on handouts from her saviours. Her action, her decision to return, would speak a truth louder and larger and more powerful than any words we or they or she could muster, for that truth or against: that their promises are worthless and our way of life is better.

 

Nathan

Monday, March 4^th, 2019

London