Rees Mogg

Page may contain affiliate links. Please see terms for details.
Someone bring me the smelling salts please. Rees Mogg is not absolutely right to agree with this but for once he’s not completely wrong either.


View: https://twitter.com/jacob_rees_mogg/status/1613823611856474112?s=61&t=pkU7y99CvduW6zBeJS_0Sw


COMMENT

Making an example of Shamima Begum is a spineless copout

Leaving her to live out her days in a refugee camp might seem like a fitting punishment, but it is a dereliction of our moral duty
JUDITH WOODS12 January 2023 • 5:00pm
Judith_woods%20Aug%202021-small.png

QNjv4BqfvIGhjXRXkgDGeVfs3fPvEBq4P4E5dcsd2zZuGPIXaI.jpg

Shamima Begum is living in limbo at the al-Roj camp in northern Syria CREDIT: Sam Tarling

We need to talk about Shamima. Much as most of us would like to forget the existence of the east London schoolgirl, a new 10-part BBC podcast, The Shamima Begum Story, has reminded us that she is still alive, still our problem, still engaged in a legal appeal to win back her citizenship.
Indignation directed at the BBC for having the temerity to give the now 23-year-old so much air time is a deliberate misdirection.
The Tory MP for East Worthing and Shoreham, Tim Loughton, a former children’s minister, has stated that it’s not clear why Begum joined Islamic State as a teenager and remains sceptical about “what forces brainwashed her”.
“I think most people will say that, frankly, we owe her nothing,” he fulminated. “She got herself into this mess and, frankly, it’s down to her to work out how she’s going to get out of it.” But the truth is, she can’t. She has been rendered stateless and to suggest she has options is fatuous.
Begum lives in limbo at the al-Roj camp in northern Syria, run by the Syrian Democratic Forces, which she describes on the podcast as “worse than prison” because there is no release date in sight.
But regardless of what she did, regardless of the fact that in 2019, she was dramatically stripped of her British citizenship and banned from entering Britain, she remains our moral responsibility.
mqdefault.jpg


Begum was 15 when she left this country along with her school friends Kadiza Sultana, 15, and Amira Abase, 16. We’ve all seen the grainy black-and-white CCTV footage taken at the barriers of an Istanbul bus station.
From the podcast, we learn there were “people online telling us and, like, advising us on what to do and what not to do”, with “a long list of detailed instructions”, including what cover story to use if they were caught. The girls were also told to “pack nice clothes so you can dress nicely for your husband”.


From the outset they knew they were destined to marry IS fighters, despite their tender years.
Begum was a good girl – they all were. An A-grade student who went to mosque and obeyed her parents. There was no room for any sort of rebellion in her life – so, instead of staying out late and acting up as teenagers do, she took a wrecking ball to her life. By way of preparation, the prospective Jihadi bride stocked up on sweets. “Mint Aero, mint chocolate, like a lot,” she says on the podcast. “You can find a lot of things in this country, but you cannot find mint chocolate. It’s a tragedy. Tragedy.”
It’s hardly a mature, nevermind an emotionally intelligent, remark in the context of joining a bloodthirsty death cult, and it will doubtless do her legal appeal no good. But the sheer banality of it signals a lack of guile – a troubling failure to grasp the seriousness of her situation. That is surely worth interrogating further.


We know the girls travelled to Turkey and from there crossed the border into Syria, where Shamima was married to 23-year-old Dutch Isis fighter, Yago Riedijk, days after arriving. She spent four years in Syria and had three children by Riedijk, two of whom died of disease or malnutrition. A third, born after her capture by Western-backed forces died of pneumonia.
Both of her British school friends died in the conflict. Riedjik is now being held in a Kurdish-run prison in Syria. According to interviews from 2021, he still believes in the eventual establishment of a Caliphate and would like to resume married life with Begum. For her part, she is hard to gauge. She is self-contained, closed off and displays none of the tears and histrionics we expect – indeed demand – from female victims.
Initially, when she was tracked down by reporters, she wore conservative dress and made no attempt to show remorse, to condemn IS as a terror group, to beg and plead to be allowed to return home, as we felt she should.


Instead she seemed hard, verging on implacable. Four years on, she is in Western dress, hair uncovered, expressing regret.
She says she understands the public see her “as a danger, as a risk, as a potential risk to them, to their safety, to their way of living”, but adds: “I’m not this person that they think I am.”
We’re not the only country grappling with the fallout from the IS regime. France has refused to repatriate suspected foreign fighters from Iraq and Syria, instead leaving it up to Baghdad to prosecute them. Germany conducts its own criminal prosecutions and has a programme in place to deradicalise and reintegrate those who have returned.
Leaving a stateless Shamima Begum to live out her days in a refugee camp might seem like a fitting punishment but it is a dereliction of duty. She was born in Britain. She was legally a child when she joined IS. She should be prosecuted here, not be subject to trial by the media.
That’s why we need to talk about Shamima. Making an example of her is a spineless copout.
 
I've said for years that Begum was groomed. Morally she's little different to those other girls groomed for sex etc.

The UK has a moral responsibility to repatriate her and deal with her as a victim.

The possibility that criminal proceedings might stick should be considered but with a high bar.
 

glasgowcyclist

Über Member
Contrast the treatment of Rhianan Rudd, from Essex, where the terrorism charges were dropped:

C376AAD6-BDEF-4031-9102-DC18220C6306.jpeg


Evidence showing the grooming and sexual exploitation of a schoolgirl was handed to MI5 months before she was charged with terrorism offences, a BBC investigation has found.
The prosecution of Rhianan Rudd was later dropped after the Home Office concluded she was a victim of exploitation.

Her mother says investigators should have treated her daughter "as a victim rather than a terrorist".

The case raises questions about how the UK deals with the problem of children involved in extremism, according to the senior lawyer responsible for reviewing terror laws.


https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-63736944

Sadly, at only 16 years old, Rhianan took her own life.
 

ebikeerwidnes

Well-Known Member
I also feel rather grubby agreeing with JRM

but no-one is ever totally and completely wrong about everything

I mean - if JRM said grass was green I would nip outside for a quick look at the lawn - but he can be right about some things

not many

but every now and again
 
The full article is behind a paywall, however are some here seriously supporting getting this lady back to the Uk she was an innocent bystander to this all? (repeating the lies Isis told them to say, like that they where just cooking dinner and being an housewives'.) However from Isis propaganda we known they had loads of women only ''brigades'' specializing in spreading terror killing and torturing etc. Sure there is not way to tell whterh she was part of that, but that shouldn't mean we need to pretend she is/was just an young schoolgirl who made an mistake.
The comparison with ''Rhianan Rudd'' is nonsense, not only highlights that yet again a other failure of social services, all she did was downloading an bomb making manual, and believing some far right idiot in an time she was extremely vulnerable if anything it shows the risk of letting some age groups on the internet unsupervised.
However that is something else as traveling to an war zone and live their to the very end claiming you just made dinner and baby's, while the propaganda showed it was more like making baby's dinner and torturing and killing people and pretend it's all part of islam.

They(she and all other ex-isis remaining) should be trailled right there and then according to the laws that are normal there simple.

Moral this and moral that, well to anyone defending that, how moral would you feel if she is repriatrated back, gets off scots free and for example stabs an random person to death because of the total idiocy in her head?
 

multitool

Shaman
Sorry, what was your point?
 

bobzmyunkle

Well-Known Member
Moral this and moral that, well to anyone defending that, how moral would you feel if she is repriatrated back, gets off scots free and for example stabs an random person to death because of the total idiocy in her head?
i wouldn't like to be mistaken for a crim in your neighbourhood.
 

ebikeerwidnes

Well-Known Member
Some people are very clear about what she did and stuff

but, apart from going abroad to jpoin a terrorist organisation, can they point to actual evidence of any of that

and can they point to where she was given a proper chance to challenge that - preferably in a proper court

In my opinion she is our problem - if she is tried and spends the rest of her life in prison then that is just fine by me

but I would like the 'tried' but to come before the punishment
 
Some people are very clear about what she did and stuff

but, apart from going abroad to jpoin a terrorist organisation, can they point to actual evidence of any of that

and can they point to where she was given a proper chance to challenge that - preferably in a proper court

In my opinion she is our problem - if she is tried and spends the rest of her life in prison then that is just fine by me

but I would like the 'tried' but to come before the punishment
The problem is the perpetrators she was part off killed all the people being able to give evidenceedit specially for @multitool clarification, they killed off most of the people able to give evidence.[/b] and if they aren't killed, they certainly cannot be expected to travel the world for the comfort of said perpetrators, that's why i said earlier they should be on trial right there. Why should the few victims left be pulled out of their comfortzone? Why actually are all those left-ing media hell bend on picturing the criminals as actually very nice persons who made an mistake? Why don't they let the victims speak?
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom