Shamima Begum: Bring me home, says Bethnal Green girl who left to join Isis
On the day the caliphate suffered a mortal blow the teenage London bride of an Islamic State fighter lifted her veil. Her two infant children were dead; her husband in captivity. Nineteen years old, nine months pregnant, weak and exhausted from her escape across the desert, she nevertheless looked calm and spoke with a collected voice.
“I’m not the same silly little 15-year-old schoolgirl who ran away from Bethnal Green four years ago,” she told me. “And I don’t regret coming here.”
With those words and the act of lifting her niqab, a mystery ended. The girl sitting before me, alone in a teeming Syrian refugee camp of 39,000 people where she is registered as No 28850, was Shamima Begum, the only known survivor of the three schoolgirls from Bethnal Green Academy whose fate has been unknown at home since they fled Britain together in 2015 to join Islamic State.
Ms Begum may have reached comparative safety, yet she chastised herself for leaving the last Isis territory as Kurd forces, backed by the West, closed in.
“I was weak,” she told me of her flight from the battle in Baghuz, with something akin to remorse. “I could not endure the suffering and hardship that staying on the battlefield involved. But I was also frightened that the child I am about to give birth to would die like my other children if I stayed on. So I fled the caliphate. Now all I want to do is come home to Britain.”
Should someone who quite clearly doesn't regret going to join ISIS and is still sympathetic to their plight be allowed back in this country? Then again, she'd already been 'radicalised' by those closest to her in this country.
>>31502 >The SIAC says otherwise.
Then they are wrong. This is a long-settled provision of international law. It doesn't matter how many citizenships you're entitled to claim, if you only hold one and that government removes it, it has rendered you stateless. It doesn't matter whether or not you can fix it. The prohibition on statelessness has no provision for someone to go anywhere else. It is plain a simple - a government cannot render someone stateless, even temporarily. We also have case law that says that a government cannot unilaterally determine your citizenship on your behalf, without having to consider that it's for the government of Bangladesh to decide who has citizenship there.
At the point that Begum's British citizenship was revoked, Bangladeshi law automatically granted her Bangladeshi citizenship. If the Bangladeshi government fail to uphold their obligations under the UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness and arbitrarily failed to recognise Begum's status, that's their problem; the UK has no obligation under international law to pre-empt the lawless actions of other states. The matter is long-settled, but not in the way that you think.
>>31519 >At the point that Begum's British citizenship was revoked, Bangladeshi law automatically granted her Bangladeshi citizenship.
That doesn't matter. The British government simply doesn't get to make that determination. That's between her and Bangladesh.
I agree. She looks like she'd have "gym and watching telly" as her interests on her Tinder bio. If I'm going to shag a stateless caliphate proponent, I'd want to at least be able to rage against western capitalist doctrine with her too.
"On 15th March 2021, Begum announced she was on hunger strike as she was in dire need of a Nando's and was willing to go the most extreme lengths to have some."
Nando's (/nænˈdoʊz/) is a South African restaurant chain that specialises in Portuguese-African food, including its signature flame-grilled peri-peri style chicken.[a]
>>34208 I think it's the slightly strange comparison of people like Goering and a twelve year old doing star jumps at the behest of a Nazi party member. It's not that funny really, although his comic timing was spot on. He almost stumbled upon the quite interesting point that we actually had no problem prosecuting British collaborators post-war. I say "almost", he was in the same hemisphere.
>>35312 She could be wearing a t-shirt with Del Boy's face on it, I wouldn't care - she needs to have her citizenship reinstated and stand trial in the UK for any of her alleged crimes.
>>35333 Couldn't agree more - she is loathsome, and holds loathsome views, but she is British and should be in a British prison, not rotting to death in a refugee camp.
>Shamima Begum, who fled the UK and joined the Islamic State group, was smuggled into Syria by an intelligence agent for Canada.
>Files seen by the BBC show he claimed to have shared Ms Begum's passport details with Canada, and smuggled other Britons to fight for IS. Ms Begum's lawyers are challenging the removal of her citizenship, arguing she was a trafficking victim. Canada and the UK declined to comment on security issues.
>>39192 Shamima Begum is more like if the Muslamic ray-gun gangs had a teenage girl who helped them recruit victims. Perhaps she is evil, or perhaps she has just been brainwashed by the truly evil people and it would be monstrous to hurt her even more. Of course, if you are willing to entertain the latter possibility, then you are ruining the fun of a large percentage of the idiots in this country and you need to shut up.
>>39192 >It had me thinking about the Rotherham girls who were groomed. How is this any different really? Other than one being white and the other brown?
The situations are nothing alike, except I suppose that they both involve brown people who you instinctively like defending.
It's an interesting corollary to our recent discussion about carpet-bagger sting operations. Begum might have been entrapped (induced to do something that she wouldn't do of her own volition), but it might have been completely above board in criminal terms.
Regardless, there's an obvious question as to what investigative functions were being served here. I'm not sure how useful it is to have a grass who is smuggling people into Syria if they're allowed to complete their journey and go and join ISIS. If we're being charitable, maybe they were letting a load of complete menks go on the basis that it would allow them to keep tabs on the really serious players? Maybe they had a plan to keep tabs on people in Syria but that plan went to shit? I dunno, but it does look like yet another failure by the intelligence services.
There are some perfectly reasonable parallels. Begum has obviously committed criminal offences, but it's also perfectly reasonable to see her as a victim of grooming, particularly if she was trafficked to Syria with the full knowledge of the state. Many of the girls caught up by grooming gangs were ignored by police in part because they had committed criminal offences - they saw junkie slags when they should have seen victims.
>>39195 >I'm not sure how useful it is to have a grass who is smuggling people into Syria if they're allowed to complete their journey and go and join ISIS.
From the sounds of it, he was simply an informant capable of doing little more than taking copies of the ID of the people he was smuggling into Syria from Turkey to pass on to his handler so the intelligence agencies had some idea of who'd actually made it into Syria.
>>39193 >Shamima Begum is more like if the Muslamic ray-gun gangs had a teenage girl who helped them recruit victims
They did, in fact, have teenage girls who helped them recruit victims. The CPS seriously considered charging them, and in some cases did so.
As my old schoolteachers would say- If your CIA handler told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?
Victimhood and responsibility don't have to be mutually exclusive, one does not override and wipe out the other. Otherwise how far do you take the logic? All criminals are innocent if you want to go that far. They were brainwashed by society.
I don't think we wholly disagree. I'm not arguing that Begum is a victim or a villain, just that it's complicated. The possibility that the state might have aided and abetted her actions only makes things more complicated. Begum's legal team are obviously going to try and make the most of it, they seem to be intentionally conflating people smuggling with people trafficking, but there are legitimate questions to be asked about missed opportunities to stop Begum from travelling to Syria.
The state has a duty to prosecute Begum for crimes she may have committed, but they also had a duty to protect a 15-year-old girl who was at risk of radicalisation. If an agent of the state tells you to do something or even encourages you to do something illegal, you have a legitimate defense of entrapment. That might not be enough to fully exculpate you from serious criminal charges, but the court will recognise that you were cajoled or coerced into doing something that wasn't your idea - you performed the actus rea, but the state created the mens rea from whole cloth.
We have seen many, many cases of disturbed or vulnerable people being coerced into committing acts of terrorism by the agencies supposedly tasked with preventing it. Obviously we don't know if this was in any way the case here, but the state has a lot of questions to answer. We probably won't get those answers and Begum probably won't have to answer for her actions in court, because certain parts of the state security apparatus use secrecy to evade accountability.
>>39201 There is always the fiction that punishment for a crime should focus on rehabilitation rather than retribution. Obviously that's not how most crimes are punished, but governments like to pretend that the opposite is true. So it could be argued that she should be rehabilitated either way, because either she's an innocent victim who deserves to be rehabilitated back into society or she's a vile criminal who deserves to be subject to the full rehabilitation of the law. Her intent, and her mental state, don't actually matter at all to what needs to be done.
I assume that among the hundreds of posts in this thread from several years ago, someone has already offered the opinion that I have on this, which is that it's fine to put her in prison but it's fucking mental to revoke her citizenship.
I mean the thing is, if you were to tell me that the entire So Called Islamic State was manufactured by Western intelligence agencies in the first place, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised. Well, surprised that it actually worked, maybe, but you get my point. So I have no doubt it's totally possible they entrapped people into going over there, much like the paedo hunters entrap people to go meet fake kiddies in car parks.
I guess the difference here though is that with the paedo hunters, there is no kid, the whole staging was an elaborate fiction; so it's a philosophical debate as to whether that means you've actually prevented any crime at all. Whereas with joining ISIS, sure, they were roped into it, but they still went and actually did it. If that lad who cut people's heads off on Twitter was set up by MI5, he still actually cut actual people's actual heads off.
The other issue is what do you do with offenders like this. I buy the argument she should be tried and punished here, not have her citizenship revoked, but even still. You can't ever let a Shamima Begum back out into society, as much for her own good as anyone else's. She'll never be able to reintegrate properly, and they'd always have to keep their eye on her to make sure she's not recruiting new home-grown extremists, and she'll just get all kinds of abuse if people clock who she is. So she ends up just being a massive expense to the taxpayer. I think the reason people are drawn to the idea of effectively exiling her instead, is that it's just the most pragmatic option short of the death penalty.
>>39203 >I mean the thing is, if you were to tell me that the entire So Called Islamic State was manufactured by Western intelligence agencies in the first place, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised.
That might be difficult to argue, since there are roots all over the place, and they were very explicit about their disdain for Western agencies.
Original flavour al-Qaeda, on the other hand, was initially fabricated through the groupthink between FBI agents desperate to find a organisation they could prosecute under RICO and a fraudster and fabulist desperate to get out of a very long prison sentence. When Osama found out about this, he would adopt the identity for what was previously just him giving money to random daft militant wogs. If the FBI wanted a global terror network, he was more than happy to provide one.
Shamima Begum, who left the UK for Syria as a teenager to join the Islamic State group, was a victim of human trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation, a court has heard.
Ms Begum travelled to Syria in 2015, with her citizenship stripped on national security grounds in 2019. A five-day immigration hearing is considering a new attempt to challenge the removal of her UK citizenship.
The Home Office insists she continues to pose a threat to national security. The case is being heard at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC), which can hear national security evidence in secret if necessary. Lawyers for Ms Begum, now 23, told the court that a decision by the then home secretary, Sajid Javid, to remove her British citizenship was unlawful, as it did not consider whether she had been a child victim of trafficking.
>Shamima Begum, who left Britain as a schoolgirl to join Islamic State (IS), has lost an appeal against the decision to remove her British citizenship.
>At a five-day hearing in November, Begum, who was 15 when she left her home in east London with two school friends in 2015 to travel to Syria, challenged the decision taken by the then-home secretary, Sajid Javid, in 2019. On Wednesday, the special immigration appeals commission (Siac) decided the revocation of her citizenship, which occurred after she was discovered in a refugee camp in north-east Syria in 2019, was lawful.
