The Shame of Shamima By Madeleine Kearns
She should live out the rest of her adulthood in jail — ideally a British one.
L ast week, the British Court of Appeals ruled that Shamima Begum — one of three schoolgirls from east London who flew to Syria in 2015 to join ISIS — has the right to return to the United Kingdom, in order to appeal the government’s decision to revoke her citizenship.
The 20-year-old ISIS bride was discovered last year by Anthony Lloyd, the Times of London correspondent, who managed track her down to the Kurdish-run refugee camp in northeast Syria. Begum had left ISIS, was nine months pregnant (with a baby who would shortly die), and had lost two other children to malnutrition. She was informed by another journalist that the Home Office had revoked her citizenship.
The picture of Begum — young, mourning, exhausted, and far from home — would ordinarily have evoked pity. But she made the fatal mistake of opening her mouth.
In the course of the interview, Begum casually told Lloyd how “unfazed” she was upon finding the heads of captives in the bins. Sky News’s John Sparks asked what it was like to live with and under the Islamic State, to which she replied, “at first it was nice” and that things only “got harder” when “we lost Raqqa” to U.S.-backed troops (we being ISIS). As for second thoughts, she only had those towards “the end.”
SPARKS: Only at the end?
BEGUM: Yeah.
SPARKS: You didn’t have regrets up until that point?
BEGUM: No.
SPARKS: What was it about Islamic State that attracted you? What did you like about it?
BEGUM: The way they showed that you can go [to Syria] and they’ll take care of you. You can have your own family, do anything. You’re living under Islamic law.
SPARKS: Did you know what Islamic State were doing when you left for Syria? Because they had beheaded people. There were executions.
BEGUM: Yeah, I knew about those things and I was okay with it. Because, you know, I started becoming religious just before I left. From what I heard, Islamically that is all allowed. So I was okay with it.
SPARKS: You didn’t question that?
BEGUM: No, not at all.
Elsewhere, Begum sewed fighters into their suicide vests and spoke approvingly of the Manchester bombing in which girls younger than herself were blown to pieces. And yet she had the audacity to tell a reporter that “I think a lot of people should have, like, sympathy towards me for everything I’ve been through.” And the further audacity to complain of the British government’s treatment of her in revoking her citizenship. “They don’t have any evidence against me doing anything dangerous,” she said. “I was just a housewife.”
There are those willing to sympathize. A writer for the Guardian wrote that Begum “was the victim of a cult” and needed our “help.” But 76 percent of the British supported Savid Javid, who was then home secretary, in his decision to strip her of citizenship. “If Ms. Begum does come back to this country, it will prove impossible to remove her,” Javid said in a statement. A spokesperson for the British Home Office called Begum’s victory in the Court of Appeals “a very disappointing decision” and indicated that they intend to challenge it in the U.K. Supreme Court.
Javid added that Begum would also create “a national security risk that cannot be fully mitigated.” Which is quite a statement. And, though truthful, it does not exactly inspire confidence in Britain’s ability to deal with homegrown terrorists. Begum has told journalists that she is “willing to change.” And the Times of London’s editorial line is “the hope must be that her experiences might yet turn her into a powerful voice against the cult she joined.” But that’s also what Usman Khan said after he was convicted in 2012 of plotting to bomb the London Stock Exchange. Khan was given a 16-year prison sentence and enrolled in a mandatory “deradicalization” program. Yet after promising authorities that he had changed his mind, he stabbed two students to death on London bridge last December.
This isn’t the first time the British government has stripped terrorists of their citizenship for national-security reasons. After El-Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey, two of the notorious ISIS “Beatles,” were caught by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish soldiers in 2015, Javid wrote to the U.S. attorney general asking that they be extradited there, since “we believe that a successful federal prosecution in the US is more likely to be possible because of differences in your statute book and the restrictions on challenges to the route by which defendants appear in US courts.”
If Begum can be brought back to Britain to face the full force of the law, then that ought to happen. And if there’s a chance she cannot be properly prosecuted, as is the case with Kotey and Elsheik, then — for the sake of justice and the safety of the British public — she should not. In either case, let’s be clear: Shamima Begum is no victim. She is a wicked traitor and accessory to some of the worst human-rights abuses imaginable. Nothing short of a lifetime in jail can atone for her crimes.
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