UKC

There isn't much that shocks me about the current politics and government these days, but Sajid Javid's action in making Shamima Begum stateless seems to have raised the bar on incompetence levels for this government.

Not only does his action appear to have no legal basis (listen to it being totally eviscerated by lawyer Phillip Sands on the Today program this morning https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0002mdg at 1:35:12) it is also contrary to his own guidelines published a year or so ago.

However it also appears to me to do precisely the opposite thing of what he was using to justify it. He said it was to keep the country safe, presumably using the Trump Wall logic of keeping the nasties outside the country. But it is bound to foster resentment within the (AJ Edit) by extremists as a distinctly anti-islam action and hence foster potential domestic terrorism, something which bringing her back would not have done.

Secondly, this pretty unpleasant woman on her own is a small problem and never likely to do much especially if back on home soil being watched. But she is just the tip of the iceberg in these refugee camps and there is reportedly hundreds of UK jihadis loitering around these places most of whom are male and not with small children. These are precisely the conditions that created Isis in the first place.

This is a terrible precedent to set and something which even further isolates the UK as a tolerant western democracy. As the lawyer I referenced above says on the radio piece - imagine that this was  a Bangladeshi citizen with British parents but no British nationality. Do you think we would willingly accept her as a British citizen if the Bangladesh government made her stateless? So why do we think they should? 

Yet more British imperial arrogance.

Alan

well said Alan, I agree.

and whilst the views she espouses are nasty, we should not forget that she was 15 when she went - still a child. and listening to her now, she is still very naïve and clearly influenced  by others. why on earth, as part of your "pitch" to come back to the UK, would you try to justify the Manchester bombings? even if you thought that, anyone with an ounce of common sense would have had the wit to keep that view to themselves in the circumstances  - all of which suggests that she is a foolish young girl who in other circumstances would be treated as a victim. is she really a danger to our society? and if so, is she any more of a danger back in the UK, with her family, than in a camp surrounded by hardened fighters?

keep your friends close and your enemies even closer

He’s not stupid - or not particularly - he’s just nasty. He doesn’t care about anything other than being the next Tory leader, and that means playing to the base, ie Tory party members. Who are, in the main, racist and jingoistic.

Particularly important to him to establish his racist credentials, of course, being brown himself and thus suspect.

jcm

What I find really annoying is that I thought Ben Wallace the Security Minister nailed it at the start of this story - We won't risk anyone going to find her, but if she makes it to a UK consulate and she's a British citizen, then she is eligible for consular support. If she comes back to the UK she will be fully investigated. This seems entirely legal and reasonable.

I hate it when politicians do things they know are not legal for good headlines.

It’s particularly ridiculous considering we’ve already let 400 odd ex-IS members back in over the last few years. 

This is populism at work again.

Again it just looks like we have politicians with no backbone who won’t stand up and explain what our process is and why.

It’s not just the Conservative party. Check out the other threads on UKC. The whole country is losing the plot. 

Yes, there was a slightly rhetorical element to my thread title. Phillip Sands alluded to the leadership question as well. 

So then a second question is - why am I asking these obvious points here, and you making an obvious assertion, and yet the Today program and other mainstream media appear not to be asking these questions?

Alan

We've got to the point where one person's 'gut feeling' is given as much respect as another person's fact-based reasoning. No wonder our politicians are going for the low hanging fruit of emotional string-tugging.

There's a follow up at 2:41, it's a little hard to follow and poorly summarised but the opinion of a Bangladeshi law professor is that she would, up to the age of 21 automatically hold dual British-Bangladeshi citizenship (subject to caveats about her parent's assumed age and status).

The two problems I have with all this is that whatever her legal status the idea of dumping her on Bangladesh is grossly irresponsible and counterproductive from a security and propaganda perspective for the reasons you've clearly expressed.

Also by this action (doubtless not the first but it has caught press attention) Javid has set a precedent making a whole class of British people born in Britain to people born elsewhere very clearly second class citizens. Subject to Pakistani law with which I'm not familiar this potentially includes himself. This is clearly unjust and ill considered.

I wonder if Javid rushed and bungled this in order to ensure the child is denied citizenship rights, playing to the gallery in his race to be PM? This is truly a government that never fails to disappoint, a perfect storm of malice and ineptitude.

jk

He is playing to a different crowd (75% of the British public support his decision) the bulk of them will blame the judge when the decision is found to be illegal.

Yes, that's right. She conveniently had another nationality one generation away. Presumably my own children could be 'dumped' on the Netherlands now if they were in a similar position (although sadly all three would accept gladly, and they have Dutch passports) but this does mean they are being shown to be less 'British' than those who have long British lineage.

Alan 

The Secret Barrister pointed out that the Home Office has a very sensible policy on what to do about this kind of situation in the Home Office's 2018 counter-terrorism strategy, foreword by Sajid Javid.

https://twitter.com/BarristerSecret/status/1098139734176686080

Pity he's too weak to follow his own department's policy.

The increased use of arbitrary denationalisation under the Tories essentially means that we are now subjects not citizens, always subject to the whim of whatever government is in power. 

There's another issue, pointed out by someone on Sky the other day - if we can arbitrarily refuse to take one of our citizens, then so can other countries. That means the process of deportation is threatened - how do we send back criminals and terrorists from this country if their home country can just denaturalise them? 

Absolutely appalled by this one... if this is the new populism I'm getting seriously worried about the people I share this island with.

Born here, radicalised here, our responsibility! The idea that we can palm her off on a much poorer country with their own problems is contemptible.

I'm sure you're all right on the legal side of things, but am I reading you right there and you're saying that trying to keep a, frankly monstrous, supporter or member of Islamic State - a vile death cult - out of the UK, is somehow anti-Islamic?

I think it's mostly the murder, slavery, rape and stated intention to wipe out most of the population of the world that people object to with IS, isn't it? I can't say I care what religion they fly their banner under.

I would think, and hope, that the majority of British Muslims would be as horrified by the likes of her as non-Muslims are; in fact, it seems decidedly anti-Islamic to me to conflate them with the likes of IS.

No, I am not saying that.

Alan

OK - could you please explain to me what you meant by it being a distinctly anti-islam action? I don't understand that at all.

See what jkarran said 10:09, and what I said a few posts ago. I don't think you and many others are thinking through what 'keeping her out of the UK' entails. 

It's interesting. You see a misguided child; I see a self-indulgent probably psychopathic near-adult (now actual adult) who left a civilised country to go to a murderous caliphate, actually at war with the country she left, to find a husband who shared her ideals so she could play her part in helping to wipe those who disagree from the face of the Earth - and who appears to still be OK with that, unphased by trifles such as the severed heads of unbelievers, or kids blown up at concerts - and who only wants to come back because they're losing the war she went off to join.

Teenagers often do stupid things, but this goes far, far beyond anything which can reasonably be written off as that.

Leaving many other  issues aside, this decision does seem anomalous in that many others who were with IS in Syria have apparently already returned to the UK (I think an earlier post suggested 400). Presumably at least some of these have dual nationality and would have been directly involved in fighting, unlike this lady, yet they have been allowed to stay. Is the the logic that once one has been able to return without much publicity then one's UK citizenship is assured?

Maybe - I'd like her kept away if possible, but can happily accept that might actually not be the best thing to do or might not really be possible anyway.

But I still can't see why it's anti-islamic to want to do so.

I'm sure she will find a state somewhere.  There are plenty of places in the Middle East, already doing much less than they should when it comes to the region's refugee crisis, that would appear a far better fit for her. 

Anti-Islam?  Isn't it more a case of being anti- someone who harbours an avowed hatred of anyone not on-board with Salafist Islam, to the point of wishing death on them (and seemingly willing to breed more foot soldiers to carry this out)?

And that by revoking citizenship to someone who went out of their way to perpetuate that cause, it may just discourage others who would consider joining ISIS's ranks from doing so? 

As it stands, and as Abu Hamza has shown, the expectation that substantial legal punishment or custodial sentences will be meted out for supporting ISIS, is pretty low.  There's a good chance if Begum comes back here there may be nothing we can charge her with.  At least nothing that sticks.  And no doubt there will be a ready supply of people who will make the case that any punishment is too harsh.  Its interesting that Bangladesh apparently doesn't want her and I wonder what Yazidi or other Shia would feel about us providing a home and social support for her?  What good to our local communities does this message send?

Anyone who considers ISIS an attractive prospect, and who will sign their children up to be ISIS fighters, will resent the UK no matter what it does.  I'm not convinced we should be reticent about punishing them in a mistaken belief that it will bring them on-side.  Part of the problem in my eyes is that we are so quick point to our own culpability for their actions while expecting no deeper self-reflection on their part or on the part of their community.  

Our tolerance doesn't really do us much good in these circumstances.  To flip this argument, ISIS's USP was its extreme lack of tolerance.  This was its power...and possibly its key failing.  Some pragmatism is called for.

Clearly there are huge swathes of the UK that, understandably, think she deserves severe punishment.  Dismissing this as imperial arrogance will probably do more damage to support for liberalism than revoking her citizenship would. 

I think he knew or even planned for this to happen knowing Bangladesh would not accept her. This would mean that, beacause baby and mum are solely British, they should be allowed back to the UK, but it will be somebody elses fault and a good illustration why we should be out of the EU and not at the mercy of 'other peoples' laws. I know that doesn't quite scan but these are not subtle people and it's so emotive they don't have to be. We should take responsibility for her and prosecute her like any criminal if she has committed a crime. To leave her stateless and adrift in Syria could well be more dangerous and counter-productive for Britain than actually facing up to it's obligations.

I'm sorry skog but 'keeping her away' is the immoral thing to do. We, the UK, have an international responsibility to deal with this person.

I'd used the term 'racist' myself. If you accept the point above maybe you'll realise.

I don't see ISIS as representative of Islam and neither do must Muslims. The misguided decision to revoke her citizenship was not driven by anti-Muslim sentiment but by revulsion of ISIS. To suggest otherwise is to feed into the same narrative that ISIS have been pushing for years in an attempt to radicalise the wider Ummah.

Edit: typo.

It isn't anti-islamic but it will be perceived as so by potential terrorists in this country. I should have made my initial statement more clear by saying ...

But it is bound to foster resentment within the UK *** by extremists *** as a distinctly anti-islam action and hence foster potential domestic terrorism, something which bringing her back would not have done. 

I thought that was implied but obviously it wasn't clear enough for you.

Alan

Why have you written that in reply to me?

I think the big difference is that they sheepishly returned and desperately tried to keep their heads down, while Begum's given several interviews pleading for sympathy and help to return, while showing bugger all contrition for her support of ISIS.

That might be right - I'm not convinced, as I'm not sure how we can handle people like her, but I'm certainly open to persuasion if there's a way to do so.

Are you saying it's the trying to dump her on Bangladesh that's racist, rather than the trying to keep her out of the UK? Maybe.

IIRC the removal of British citizenship from those with dual nationality has been used in a number of these cases, and has been found to be legal.

EDIT: 120 times for returning IS:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/20/who-ha...

There is no legal way to revoke citizenship of someone who only has British nationality, hence the number of IS who have to be accepted back.

She is not being treated any differently in that respect, there is an appeals process that I'm sure lawyers are queueing to be involved in, so in the end a correct legal decision will be reached.

What exactly is the issue here?

No, I didn't get that at all from your post.

Fair enough - but surely  the answer to that is to make sure we make it clear that we don't conflate IS with mainstream Islam, surely?

Pussyfooting around people who think action against IS is action against Islam doesn't seem very constructive.

Skog wrote...

You replied...

and as one of the 'others' that thinks the action, was wrong but not anti-Islamic, I explained why.

Except when you consider what constitutes "here" and "our".

The people who you share this Island with, who you decry, who wish for Begum to suffer serious punishment and not be allowed to return here, are almost certainly the same people who will have been pointing out for decades the deep flaws in the concept of multi-culturalism that spawned her.  A doctrine that has allows a deeply conservative, extreme, mini-Bangladesh, to exist in places like Bethnal Green, and be replicated around the country, and which created exactly the kinds of communities where the likes of Begum went through a life-time of radicalisation. 

Thes critics have continuously been dismissed as racists, bigots and Islamophobes.  The "here" where the problem arose, which they were forced to accept, is not a "here" they ever signed up for.  And now when it comes back to bite us, the same people who voiced a distaste for it are the ones who have the finger pointed at them.  Do you think they should accept she is "our" problem?  When they've spent lifetimes trying to say they did not want these communities?  

When middle England is being blamed for the fvck-ups and blind-spots of cosmopolitan liberal Britain, is it any surprise they turn further right?

See clarification on the anti-islam point. I have edited this in the OP (because I can and it is obviously distracting to some).

I would disagree. I think bringing her back to face the music would do more to discourage others. There is a humiliation and the reality of life in an Isis camp that is a powerful disincentive.

I don't think we should be talking about the individuals here so much as the precedent and the experience of how these people are created. How does hothousing a lot of resentful extremists in dire refugee camps help prevent fostering future attacks? And if you don't do that with them, what do you do without bringing them back to this country (as we have done to many already anyway)?

I don't think anyone has said anything about punishment. Javid is trying to wash our hands of her and eschew any responsibility, and hence any punishment by law. Allowing her to come back would facilitate punishment although I share your scepticism about how severe that would be.

Alan

The ironic catch-22 here is that if ISIS was recognised as a state, anyone who left to join them could be regarded as having dual nationality.

I’m relieved the government haven’t been short sighted enough to go down that particular avenue...  Or does it just mean they’ve not hit peak-stupid yet?

I think they are one in the same thing but yes.

That's poor Stitch. 

This is what you wrote

'I don't see ISIS as representative of Islam and neither do must Muslims. The misguided decision to revoke her citizenship was not driven by anti-Muslim sentiment but by revulsion of ISIS. To suggest otherwise is to feed into the same narrative that ISIS have been pushing for years in an attempt to radicalise the wider Ummah.'

Nowhere on this thread have I implied anything of the kind. Waiting for an apology.

Would you be prepared to look at her as a victim of grooming? 

There are plenty of cases of 15 year olds who have been sexually groomed, who have been coerced into a relationship and who, despite knowing it's not quite right, can't see the full picture of how they have been targeted.

I would really hope that in a situation like that people wouldn't be saying "well they made their bed" and "it's their choice" and force them to continue in such a relationship... even if the victim didn't think they were a victim.

At the end of the day we are talking about a teenager and a baby a few days old, making them stateless and excluding them from the UK is only going to add to the view that the UK deserves 'punishing', surely a mature, pragmatic, just country would not render someone stateless and would see the benefit in keeping a potential threat close and under survailence whilst seeing if they can become part of society again.

I want to live in a mature, pragmatic, just country.

The decision was made when this alls started that recognising IS as a state would give it a legitimacy it didn't deserve.

I suspect he’s not stupid,he’s just ambitious beyond his level of competency (like Boris Johnson) and wants to appeal to his Daily Mail-reading base. 

There's an argument there.

There's also an argument that ISIS is no different from the Nazi party, and that anyone who would have chosen in 1930s/1940s Britain to travel to Germany, sign up to the Nazis, join the SS or choose to collaborate in the work of concentration camps, stands in a category of their own. 

They cannot be dismissed as mere victims.  They knew full well what they were doing, where they were headed, and what this stood for.  They undertook substantial individual conscious actions over a prolonged period to make this happen.  And are unrepentant.  

"The people who you share this Island with, who you decry, who wish for Begum to suffer serious punishment and not be allowed to return here, are almost certainly the same people who will have been pointing out for decades the deep flaws in the concept of multi-culturalism that spawned her.  A doctrine that has allows a deeply conservative, extreme, mini-Bangladesh, to exist in places like Bethnal Green, and be replicated around the country, and which created exactly the kinds of communities where the likes of Begum went through a life-time of radicalisation."

so what solution did the "I told you so" brigade come up with to prevent people following their own beliefs and culture?

Yep. This woman (or her family) has tried to use the media to highlight her plight of being stuck in a refugee camp. 

It has backfired. 

However, this woman and her family have a history of this. We already know of her because she stole her sisters passport, and her parents tried to sue the metropolitan police for failing to keep their daughter from running away. 

This isn’t a cut and dried case, but Sanjid David sgouldnhave stood up, made a statement in line with policy and not bowed to her or the general public’s pressure. 

It's a much bigger question than this one woman or even all those wanting to return from Syria.  If we go down the road of removing citizenship from people we don't like we are removing a really  key legal protection from pretty much all of us.  These things have a tendency to expand in scope - ISIS woman >general terrorists>criminals>to anyone the government doesn't like.  And even if we don't do that, it provides a precedent for other countries to do so.  We are big enough to handle these sorts of people within our legal structures and should do so, not move to "banishment" as an easy solution.  Also, git has the potential to set up the ludicrous situation of countries racing to remove citizenship from people they don't like.  If Bangladesh had moved first here, presumably Javid would have been stuck?

I'm very, very sorry that I misguidedly interpreted your post as a request for clarification and then mistakenly tried to provide some.

There...you OK now Hun?

It’s not the 1940s anymore. Things have changed. Seriously changed. 

The masses have access to the internet and communication other than landline phones and handwritten letters. 

The masses have access to cheap air transport and can fly around the world on a whim. 

You can’t just tuck people away that you don’t agree with anymore. 

True, have a look at the other thread about her and there's plenty that would trample the law to punished this one girl.

Yes.

But if so, it has turned her into a monster, and unless there's a realistic way to undo that, that is now who she is.

That the whole thing is a tragedy doesn't change where we are now.

Despite Bangladesh stating she is not a Bangladesh citizen, you think the UK can overrule them and use her mother's place of origin to palm her off on them? Is that correct? Or leave her with the Kurds... who also happen to believe the UK should live up to it's international responsibilities... know better than them too? The people who've actually been fighting ISIS.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/shamima-begum-isis-bride-sy...

The other point worth considering, as made by the very astute commentator Nina Schick, is that if you are happy with the UK not taking back one of its citizens who has (potentially/probably) committed crimes abroad, then the other side of the same coin is that you would have to accept other countries not taking back foreign born criminals that the UK wants to extradite.

https://twitter.com/mpc_1968/status/1098009898116415489

Right there you have the problem.

You're average middle Englander, your deplorable, your Brexit voter, probably has no issues with people following their own beliefs and culture.

But challenging "multi-culturalism", identifying that it may have issues, that beliefs and culture may get out of hand and directly contradict our own core-ethos and existing identities, gets exactly the kind of response you have just given.

You are right, they never proposed a solution.  All they asked for was an open debate, an adult discussion, an opportunity to express opposition, and for that opposition to be taken as a valid concern.

Instead what they got was an absolutist response when concerns were dismissed as racism.

And hence, we are where we are, where isolationist communities and the fostering of all viewpoints, no matter how extreme, has to be accepted.

It also seems that the UK government is forgetting another side of the narrative, that of a 15 year old girl groomed online for a number of years to leave her family and county to marry an unknown man and have 3 children by the age of 19. To me there are obvious issues on consent that are not being raised due to the sinister IS side of the story. 

The argument, hard to reconcile is that she should be looked after for one side of the story while being punished for the other. 

I agree.  Yet we've allowed extremists to tuck themselves away within our own communities.  While we've tucked away in another corner those who took issue with that. 

Both corners have got much bigger as a result, but we seem to think that hippy liberal ideals we throw around in the middle will fix it.

Pathetic.

Fair point. I accept that.

I agree, however is Begum less of a threat if:

1. We fly her home to what will no doubt be a heroes welcome by the sizeable Islamist fringe in her community, where people will point her out as proof you can go on jihad and the kuffar are stupid enough to bring you back and look after you;

or:

2. She's tapping a keyboard somewhere or is a poster girl in the next issue of Dabiq, (noting her credibility will be low after her slot on ITV).

I have no idea, and I'd bow to the experts on this, not simply assume bringing her back is the 'right' thing to do so as to get a warm fuzzy glow about how enlightened I am.

I can't argue with any of that, it's all very depressing.

We're in the awful situation of having to defend a civilised, mostly decent and liberal society against significant number of people who want to damage and ultimately destroy it and are, or have recently been, happy to kill or die to that end or support others to do so.

I don't know what to do.

About the only thing I'm confident about is that letting such people live amongst us, and failing to deal with them, could well prove fatal to our way of life. And I can't see how how to deal with them.

I'm not sure on the grooming issue. Begum herself has said that she wasn't in contact with individuals. She said that she in effect 'self radicalised' through watching the news, heavily supplemented with ISIS propaganda videos, including executions. Weird that anyone could watch an aid worker having his head sawn off and think 'that's the life for me' but there you go.

So charge her, try her, if guilty sentence her appropriately. Don't misuse denaturalisation.

She was targeted by a woman in Manchester who was targeting hundreds of other girls just like her. 

Read the policy. She won’t be just flown back. 

She will be held until de-radicalised. I suspect that could take a very long time. Any time she then posts anything on the internet that suggests she has any sympathies, she’ll be back inside. 

Traitors were tried even then when there was a war on. We have a criminal justice system, we should use it. 

I'm not honestly sure that stripping citizenship from someone who ran off to live and raise a family abroad with a group we're actually at war with, is misusing denaturalisiation.

Look Mike, I replied to your post replying to skog's post who was replying to Alan Jame's post (which Alan has since edited to clarify) and some confusion arose (unsurprisingly). I wrote...

'I don't see ISIS as representative of Islam and neither do must Muslims. The misguided decision to revoke her citizenship was not driven by anti-Muslim sentiment but by revulsion of ISIS. To suggest otherwise is to feed into the same narrative that ISIS have been pushing for years in an attempt to radicalise the wider Ummah.'

Which you immediately took as a deep personal insult and demanded an apology. So I gave you an apology. With a slightly sarcastic 'you OK Hun', cos I thought that you were getting your knickers in a twist over nothing. A thought that you've now confirmed, Hun.

According to the way naturalisation is framed in the legislature this case is a misuse as it would render her stateless. He tried to say that she could get a Bangladeshi passport but they say no. 

You should read more

" The Secretary of State may not deprive a person of British nationality, unless obtained by means of fraud, false representation or concealment of a material fact, if they are satisfied that the order would make a person stateless."

Making them 'stateless' is misuse....

Just read what people actually post and respond appropriately. It's pretty clear where I was coming from on this.

Sorry, I missed that. Do you have a link? I was just going off her interviews. 6:55 onwards in this instance.

youtube.com/watch?v=EWcJHxmXD1Q&

all we needed to say was that any UK citizen is entitled t return to the UK at any time but they, like everyone else, is subject to UK law, judgement and sentencing.

A particularly prudent measure would to have included an estimated sentence.

That way we are propagating all of the best parts of society and the contribution required by citizens to make it work.

So actual location is irrelevant, and clearly being in the UK doesn't stop radicalism. The woman in Manchester will have had all the advantages that Begum had, (and obviously thinks herself still entitled to), but still became an active extremist.

If de-radicalisation works, and we have the resources to deal with nearly 800 returned 'fighters' probably double that number of Islamist 'leaders' in the mosques and at least ten times that number of supporters with the same virulent hatred of the West in general and the UK in particular (but so far have been too lazy to get off their arses), then that would be great.

Somehow I don't think we have anything like that level of resource.

Do you seriously take that as clear evidence she is evil and dangerous?

She may well be of course but put yourself in her shoes for a moment to wonder how wise and brave and contrite your teenage self would be having experienced what she has: the grooming, the isolation from (our) normality, the need to conform absolutely to survive, the curtailment of her education, the loss of liberty, life under a barrage, the death of her children and others around her, defeat and flight, the inability to go back to the journalist's safe air conditioned hotel when the interview is done but instead back to the people she's lived among. Is it really any wonder she doesn't come across very well?

jk

I think I'd need a supernatural connection in order to locate the sarcasm.

Right back atcha.

Surely that's for the legal system to decide. She has Bangladeshi citizenship, therefore she's not stateless. If the Bangladeshis want to render her stateless, that's their business. A passport isn't required for nationality.

Really? She seems pretty much bang on the ISIS message right now.

How long do you think she would need to be watched for?

You don't see a possibility that, for example, she gives her son a ticket to a pop concert and a suicide vest for his 15th birthday?

I agree we shouldn't try and dump her on Bangladesh but the first priority of the government is to keep law abiding UK citizens safe.

Then we'd better develop it or we'll be seeing these people and their ideas back from wherever we dump them in force with followers and funding in the years to come.

jk

Yes. I am completely comfortable with a minister ignoring the law in this case.  Ministers are clever people who only have the national interest at heart and can decide for themselves in what circumstances the law should be applied or ignored. 

No, I think she's a bit thick, self centred and lacking in empathy for the victims of ISIS (worth noting that she traveled over 6 months after ISIS had reached a nadir when they over ran Yazidi territory).

The post was a guess at why she appears to be being treated differently (or not, as Ridge has it) to other returnees.

The Bangledeshi's say she doesn't, and they seem to have a point given she was born and raised in the UK. In these circumstances I would leave it to the Bangladeshi's to interpret their own law.

I'd argue the same could be said of some one here. The victims of IS aren't just those they killed, enslaved, maimed and displaced.

jk

She's still had it hell of a lot better than those she was keen to assist in the rape, torture, murder and genocide of. It's not as if IS propaganda glossed over that bit, it was the USP.

Having spent 4 years of "Oh, severed heads - meh", and no doubt being issued with a slave to abuse given her 'rank' as a fighter's wife, I'd suggest she's so damaged as to be a continuing threat, regardless of attempts to de-radicalise her.

As I said above, I'll leave that decision to the experts, but I wouldn't want her living next door to me.

Look at the attacks on the UK in recent years.
How many times have we've been told that the individual(s) were known to the authorities, but they've still be able to carry out their attacks.
Clearly we can't monitor their every movements.
Continual Police cuts aren't much help either!

So by that measure it's up to the UK how they interpret their own law too? 

Where someone was born or raised has nothing to do with nationality, or are you saying the millions of British citizens born overseas aren't really British? Not a route we really want to go down.

At the moment it's "We say, they say". Why not deal with it through the legal channels?

We should not expect the Kurds or the Bangledeshis or anyone else to deal with dangerous British citizens.

There's no doubt she is (or was!) a British citizen. 

Ok, careless phasing on my part. They've said she'd not a Bangladeshi citizen.

"She's still had it hell of a lot better than those she was keen to assist in the rape, torture, murder and genocide of"

this is the danger when arguments get polarized. certainly she may have belonged to a proscribed organisation, but absent any proof of what she actually did out there (apart from have children) is it not a stretch to say she "assisted" in rape, genocide etc? What did she actually do?

Ignoring a persons human rights and stripping them of their sole citizenship, no matter what they have done, doesn't make us safer at all, it makes us all less safe. What is more dangerous, one terrorist who could still be tried under proper due process, or a government who can remove the citizenship of anyone they consider undesirable?

The Home Secretary has trodden on due process, and set a dangerous precedent for the purposes of propaganda. This action wasn't aimed at the girl, or at extremists in general it was for gaining support from the angry public and a distraction from Brexit.

Again, ISIS is a particular case.  You migrate there, you MUST know what they do.  I believe she said she would be happy for her children to be ISIS fighters, she married 3 of them herself with children from at least two.  She barely mustered sympathy for the Manchester bombing victims and doesn't seem to hide where here sympathies lie.  If she wasn't such good breeding stock, or was better behind the wheel of a truck, I suspect she'd be prime candidate for a suicide bomber.

The innocent victim or unwitting dupe thing can only travel so far. 

This isn't that unusual.  A huge number of people around the world, far better than her, are stateless and manage to fend for themselves against it all.

Surely citizenship should mean more than simply which borders you happened to be between at the time you were being squeezed out of someone's vagina?

I agree. But just out of interest, are you in favour of deporting dangerous foreign citizens or just importing dangerous British ones?

She clearly isn't merely an innocent victim any more, even if it looks like she might have been to start with. But even if that's the case it doesn't address the fact that the Home Secretary should follow his own policy and the due process of law. 

One thing which no-one has yet mentioned if she was to actually return;

How long before the extremists of both sides, both rabid "nationalists" and rabid "islamists", decide to have a rally down to where she lives, both to protest and support her.

Would anyone here really want to live within 5 miles of wherever that turned out to be.

She would be another centre of trouble, just like Abu Hamza.

Now if those that support her return would be happy for her and her family to move in next door .....

I think the Kurds would love the opportunity to deal with her.  Given ISIS went to their soil to take their land away from them, perhaps the Kurds should be given this opportunity?

As I pointed out before, misusing denaturalisation is likely to make it more difficult to deport dangerous foreign citizens.

Completely missing my point. Let's pretend that there is no ambiguity over coersion and that she was an adult who went of her own free will.  She still should get afforded due process, that's the difference between us being a civilized society and sliding into authoritarianism. 

It’s a long running story. You need to digback to 2014. What she says and what the truth are will be quite different things.

Not part of our discussion but I did double take at this quote from Beggum.

"I'm not going to go back and provoke people to go to ISIS or anything, if anything I'm going to encourage them not to go because it's not all as it seems in their videos."

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/02/shamima-begum-british-claim-banglade...

You're answering a question I didn't ask. No probs though, no apology necessary.

Charge her with what exactly?

How long do you think she should be imprisoned for before she is no longer a threat to any of the rest of us?

I don't dispute any of that. what I object to is hysterical hyperbole. If she has "assisted" in the listed terrible crimes, then she should be capable of being tried for them. Anyone who thinks she will ever be tried as an accessory to rape or genocide etc (absent any specific evidence) is living in cloud cuckoo land, and distracts from a serious consideration of what crimes she may actually have committed

Please read what people post, here's the link again.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/shamima-begum-isis-bride-sy...

It was a supplementary point actually, not an answer to your question. 

I didn't propose prison as a way of reducing her threat to us. I proposed following the Home Office's policy. Prison is a possible punishment if she is found to have committed an offence.

Out of interest, there are many people in this country already who may be a threat to us in future. How do you propose to deal with them? Do you think it is possible to do anything more than we do already?

I Googled 'Shamima Begum radicalised by Manchester woman 2014'... and variants on that. Nearest I got was this 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31589762

...stating who she wasn't radicalised by. Curious report if her radicaliser had already been firmly identified. Even curiouser that the instigator of Begum's woes isn't once more in the news, given that the story has been huge for three days now.

Yes, she seems to have changed her tune in the last day or two. She must have seen the light ( ironic).

a) you haven't taken in what I wrote.

b) you made three unsupported and dubious assertions.

What exactly do you mean by love the opportunity to deal with her?

The Kurds have been quite clear about what they would like to happen to captured foreign jihadis, they would like to deport them to face justice at home.

jk

"What did she actually do?"

We know she took the bins out.

"We use the full range of capabilities available to disrupt and manage the return of individuals from the conflict zone.  Where appropriate we will also use nationality and immigration powers to deprive individuals of their British citizenship.."

Isn't this what he's doing?

Unfortunately he appears to be doing it in contravention of our laws. So no.

Yeah and when found guilty they were sentenced to death by firing squad.

If that was thier fate then I don't think there would be an issue with bringing any traitor home to face justice. The problem is we are taking on a huge cost of keeping this person locked up for a while before being inevitably let out again to live among us.  Then we take on the risk of either the direct or indirect threat to our fellow citizens she'll pose. 

Good point. Lets try an experiment. A 15 year old lad gets interested in the far-right and spends the next 4 years cheering on people raping asian girls in front of him and handing out hot dogs while asian men get lobbed off buildings or set on fire etc. Would we really be giving him a free pass and saying he's not really done anything wrong?

Are you saying that as long as we could be sure a traitor would be executed on their return then you would have no problem with their repatriation?

I really don't know. However leaving them at liberty and free to commit crimes doesn't sound like a great idea.

As I noted up thread, this process has been used around 120 times previously, and tested in the courts. It's not unprecedented, and has followed an existing process.

Although I suspect you're right about the motives, it's not yet clear if this is illegal or just something some people don't agree with.

"Yeah and when found guilty they were sentenced to death by firing squad."

I think you have the nub of the argument here. I suspect there is a large element of the British public who don't want this woman back because they fear she will not be punished properly in their eyes. We already have people on this thread saying "where is the evidence she did anything wrong?" so you can imagine how the defense lawyers will be playing it. If it was clear and obvious she would likely spend the rest of her life in jail then I suspect there would be more sympathy for bringing her back to UK...but in reality her trial would become a beacon and religious/political football for all sides of the argument and the fear would still be she would be a free woman within a decade, maybe less.

I don't care about Shemima Begum. I care about a Home Secretary making a decision that appears to be contrary to the law. Shemima Begum has no power over me - Sajid Javid does. If he has made a dubious decision - which I'm sure he knows he has - on an estimation that it will play well to the British public, and do his political ambitions no harm into the bargain, then I'm not sure I trust him to protect my interests as a law abiding British citizen. What other dubious decisions would he be prepared to countenance out of political expediency?  

That's our problem though innit?

I'm no legal expert but she's admitted belonging to a proscribed terrorist organisation, that's a maximum of 10 years. If there's a way of wheedling out of that then it's our laws that need fixing (maybe MPs are too busy with something else but let's not get into that).

That would probably amount to an offence s.44 of the Serious Crime Act 2007. My point about Shamima was that there appears to be no evidence that she did any "cheering on" or handing out of hot dogs

Some people are contending not just that she did nothing wrong, but that she is in fact as much a victim of ISIS ideology as a dead aid worker or a raped Yazidi.

I must be a bit thick though cos I can't see much parity between being the victim of a sociopathic thug and being the victim, primarily, of your own stupidity.

Most civilised people would be of the opinion that if you became aware that your spouse was spending their days raping and beheading people, the natural response would be to run away and call the police, not cook their dinner and wash the blood off their boots.

In Begum's case she appears to have run away in the hope of marrying just such a person.

Again, I don't disagree with that. what I am trying to point out is that being married to someone who commits a crime does not make you also guilty of that same crime

Given where this took place there is very little possibility, even with eyewitness statements, that the required standards would be met for prosecution. 

Even if it's all on high defintion video, (and I'd be surprised if there aren't some pretty damaging images of here out there), it won't be used as it could identify any assets on the ground.

Depending on the legal situation I think we're going to end lumbered with her a couple of years down the line.

Just a shame her and the rest of the bastards weren't turned into pink mist prior to this point.

As far as the legislation goes it all seems to hinge on the last part:

"The remaining powers to deprive will remain unchanged i.e. anyBritish Citizenmay be deprivedif theyacquired it using fraud, false representation(s) or concealmentof a material fact3regardless of whether it would leave them stateless or where the Home Secretary is satisfied that doing so is „conducive to the public good‟ and the person would not be left stateless as a result4."

Javid and others seem to forget this part.

From: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/...

Other IS members have been repatriated, and anybody over the years stripped of their UK nationality has generally had dual nationality. Had she been naturalized, however, it would have been a piece of piss to deprive her, but as it stands, no.

Even if you met on the "Plenty of raping murdering babykillers" dating site? 

If our laws are deemed or perceived to be too soft for this type of crime, then yes it is a UK problem. (I'm not suggesting that the public get to decide on the law btw ), But what is the track record of the authorities cracking down on problematic extremeism? It could be good, but I will wager the perception by the public is that it's rubbish, mainly from reading our mainstream media. 

"10 years is max sentence, she will be out in 3, then on benefits, free flat, kid in care...etc etc...in prison she will probably be radicalizing others...."

Not hard to imagine the conversations in every pub in the country on this topic...

There was a hilarious response to this interview (on Twitter, I think) where she seems still completely OK with ISIS.  Somebody posted, "Smart move - get the corbynistas on board first".   :-D

I've not argued that she should be made stateless, in fact I've said she should be brought back.  

(good job I don't get in a huff every time someone gets crossed wires on a thread, eh Mike ).

Shhh.... listen.  Can you hear anything?  Me neither.  Just silence....  

Here's an example of what I'm trying to get at..

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/11/08/new-head-cps-fire-refusing-use-...

This type of stuff can be insidious. People read it and gradually just lose a tiny bit more faith in the system, and then when something like this happens, they don't believe a word of it when told she should come back and face British justice. 

I am surprised that the response to this from the government is to try and cynically dump her on a country that is much less resourced to deal with her than the UK, and I'm surprised people support that. I can see there's a blindspot, but I thought people would go 'yeah, good point, what a shitty thing to try and do.', when it was pointed out.

It's a very difficult situation. I have no clue but suspect Javid will probably be overturned by the law at some point, she will come back and it will be a sh1t show from top to bottom with vested interests across the spectrum capitalizing on it to try and gain support

I am not surprised.The strategy is that  you need to get a message out to those who left for Syria you cannot just come striding back in you are going to have to fight for your citizenship. Even if the govt loses( which it probably will do), it will take a few years to sort out legally, and the point will have been made.

Bring her back, into court for promoting terrorism. Baby up for adoption immediately who will then have a better chance her life. 

I've had a quick read through and I can't seem to find an answer to what appears to be an overlooked issue. Now, it's all dependent on being a member of a terrorist organisation being a criminal offence in Syria, which I assume it is (or at least, I assume they have something they'd be able to pin on her). So why is it that we are entertaining the idea of bringing her 'home' to potentially punish her? Are we not ignoring the fact the she has committed (if indeed, she has) a crime in another sovereign country and therefore should be handed over to their authorities for trial? 

If despite this, it is believed that she should be returned here still then where do we stop? Do we start demanding British drug mules are handed over to punished here? Drunks getting in to a scrap in Benidorm, those too? 

If a country decides to deport rather than prosecute then we are obliged to take them back. Given the state of Syria I can understand that the forces that currently hold her aren't inclined to  set up a trial for these people, they have enough on their plate.

Our government understands this and is trying to palm her off on a country who really have nothing to do with this.

That is debatable. As I understand it she's been through three dead husbands and two dead children, living under the constant threat of airstrikes and god knows what threats from within her own community. It's hardly a walk in the park. Anyway, I'm not sure this has to be a 'which was worse' competition, my point is that flawed victims are still also victims.

We could argue she chose that path where IS's other victims didn't but can a groomed child really be deemed to have given informed consent? It's not like she could turn around and leave if it wasn't all she hoped. What do you do living around all that horror except try to survive, normalise it or let it break you (I suspect it's an and not or for most in reality).

Like you I've no firm idea how effective reintegration can be, it's apparently been a bit of a mixed bag elsewhere after ideological/racial/ethnic conflict but either way, if we're (rightly) too squeamish to openly summarily kill her (and the rest) or otherwise play fast and loose with our law then there is little alternative, we or someone else eventually has to try. If we try we have an idea how successful we're being and we maintain some control/knowledge of her situation, activity and network. If we dump her in a camp or upon an impoverished country with its own complex problems we lose that little control and we can expect more trouble back in return.

It's not a good situation, there are no easy good answers but shirking our responsibilities and eroding the rights of ordinary British citizens in the process really isn't the best of the bad options.

jk

In whose eyes? Yours maybe. In others it gets a message over. 

If she had not been found by the Times and quietly snuck back in there would have been no issue. Now it’s a news story and she and the Uk govt are trapped. 

Because it's not an ordinary criminal justice situation. Syria a country still in the grip of and utterly devastated by civil war, what passes for functioning governments there cannot cope with the load of jihadis they have, they need to offload the foreigners at least. Pretending that isn't the case and ignoring the situation just makes it worse and harder to eventually bring back to a stable state.

jk

Thank you. Seems fair enough!

I agree that targeting vulnerable and alienated people is very much a strategy of extremist groups and religious cults. That's where the Prevent strategy does seem to work, identifying targeted, vulnerable or unstable individuals and going in with a very comprehensive, multi agency approach.

However I think people are overegging the "poor vulnerable little child" approach. It's quite clear she knew what she was heading for and fully immersed in it. There will have been coercion and manipulation, but it's (IMHO) extremely distasteful to try and equate her to a groomed child on the streets of Bradford or innocent victims of IS.

I think we're screwed either way. However dumped in a camp at least keeps her off the streets, and demonstrates you can't expect to go on a killing spree, (or just mop up the mess and take the bins out), and expect to resume where you left off. 

I think all options have to be explored. Bunging the Syrians a few quid to keep her might be an option. At least it avoid the huge ruckus on all sides when she returns to the UK.

Extradition is a significant factor in all alleged crimes carried out by any nationality in any country. The more serious the crime, the more significant the extradition discussions become. We do try and repatriate drugs mules and some other criminals to serve time here. This is common and anyone who is nicked when overseas normally rings the embassy as their first stop. In this case it should also be pointed out that Syria is in total chaos so the chances of any trial there are nil.

I have been out and I may have missed it, but it seems that the apologists for Javid's disgusting decision (not just referring to mrphilipoldham here) aren't yet proposing a practical solution of how the world community should deal with this individual? Or do you not care, somebody else's problem and all that?

Alan

Being a Mancunian, and considering her attitude about the Arena bombing, I made my thoughts clear on the other thread, she can rot in hell over there.
If she does make her way back to the UK, so be it, but I for one won't be offering the slightest assistance.
And don't forget, she made the symbolic gesture of relinquishing her British citizenship by throwing her (sister's) passport away (allegedly).

Yes. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a currently uninhabited island a long way from anywhere that we could deport them to once they'd done their time. It could be called the Caliphate of Krapistan and with no one else for them to be offended by they could spend their days in honest labour and prayer reserving the weekends for beheading, throwing each off buildings, all the sorts of things they'd want to do to reaffirm their pious and godly lifestyles.

I despair for the jingoism and hatred that this modern era Brexit politics has created. There was a time when our country stood up to be an international leader, and that is the false rhetoric that some of the Brexit idiots are spouting as what they think we can still become while also applauding Sajid Javed's action in this case. However it appears that goes hand in hand with washing our hands of awkward problems and leaving them for others to sort out.

The country I would be proud of would be a leader in preventing problems all around the world, even if they were nothing to do with us. In this case though she is an ignorant, uneducated and unpleasant individual but she grew up here and we should take our responsibility in dealing with her, not leave her for some other country which has other problems that we can't even begin to imagine.

What sad and nasty nation we have become.

Alan

It is debatable. The only evidence as to what she may or may not have suffered are the words from her own mouth in the numerous interviews she's done. Not a word of regret with regards to her dead children, dead as a result of her own poor choices no less. What else has she to say of her time in ISIS? Again, in her own words she 'had a good time' and 'no regrets' up until the end when things got a bit tough for her. You say it was hardly a walk in the park for her but that's just a projection entirely created from your own feelings on the matter.

and while we're on the subject, where's the three dead husbands sprung up from? Same source as the phantom Manchester Jihadi groomer?

Again with the groomed child. Have you any evidence she was groomed or are you just projecting again? The only evidence I've seen is her own statement. Where she denies being groomed.

Everything you've written comes down to guess work and supposition. The only hard evidence we have, the interviews, you either ignore or discount.

Edit: supposition, not superstition.

But I suspect very few of them would have blamed the judge before one of our tabloid newspapers declared judges to be "enemies of the people" for finding the government was acting illegally over some Brexit matter a year or so ago - a disgraceful piece of "journalism".

Martin 

What we have become is a nation of extremes.  On the one hand we have the get rich or even richer at any cost population and f*ck the rest of you. On the other hand we have the intellectual liberal hand wringers who think we should be all things to all men and be able to provide all the solutions to all the world's problems as well being a refuge to the world's haters of all things western. And finally the hand that nobody cares about. The hand that is described as racist, ignorant, ill educated the 'untermenschen'. Unfortunately they represent the majority of the population of this country. Exploited, exhausted and discarded. Loathed and pushed to one side. The disenfranchised proletarian who votes according to where he sees answers to the problems that cause him to be homeless, jobless, penniless.Maybe you should try and come down from your elitist ivory tower and view the world from where they have to grovel for a living. Maybe you wouldn't be so quick to condemn.

Absolutely agree Alan. This woman was born here, educated here, and permitted to be indoctrinated here. She is our responsibility. She may (or may not) be entitled to Bangladeshi citizenship but her entitlement to British citizenship is much the stronger. We are denying her British citizenship, which she has held for 19 years, on the basis that she is not then rendered stateless. Why on earth should Bangladesh not do precisely the same? Especially as she has never made any claim of Bangladeshi citizenship.

Martin

I'm saying if she comes back she needs to be punished to the full extent of the law but I don't think that will be very far in most people's eyes. Direct evidence of what she was and wasn't involved in is likely thin on the ground and whatever charges do stick will likely mean she's free to enjoy the delights of the UK for the bulk of her life rather than sh!thole she abandoned it for when she switched sides. 

Leaving her to her fate in the middle east is likely more of a punishment than a few years in a luxury womans jail here in the UK before a near lifetime of freedom and unlimited free healthcare in our country. Despite how much she claims to despise everything we stand for. 
 

Again, are you at all surprised she doesn't come across well given where she is and what she will have experienced?

I presumably saw the 3 husbands thing on this thread since I'm not really following the story elsewhere except when it's piped into my car. Can't say I was interested enough in her story specifically to fact check it, my concern is with our government's handling of the issue of returnees more broadly. If it's incorrect then thank you for letting me know.

You think the idea to run off to war just popped into her head? Whether she stumbled into their propaganda by herself or was lured there by a nasty stranger with sweeties the purpose of that propaganda is to brainwash the vulnerable into believing and doing something they wouldn't otherwise. I'd consider that grooming even where it is largely self directed but would substitute brainwashing if that stops you moaning.

I think we can safely assume someone in a refugee camp after nearly four years on the losing side of a brutal war, minus two children (why wouldn't I believe that) didn't have a jolly old time of it.

I'm not sure which hard evidence you think I'm ignoring? Nor why it would have a bearing on my belief that Sajid Javid has got his approach to this issue wrong and like the rest of our government, is unfit for office.

jk

Post of the year, sir.

(and so, so true!)

Stereotyping, over-generalisation, no factual basis... Working class population in the UK is usually reckoned to be about 30-35% these days. 

I'm not surprised she didn't come across well. But my total lack of surprise is based on the fact that she appears to be a sociopath.

You've spent a lot of time passionately defending her for someone whose not really following the facts of her case.

I take it yours is more of a faith based position then.

If you really want to shed a tear about British teenagers lured off to foreign wars, how about ones even younger than Miss Begum, just 17, and they didn't get the option to come home, they were killed, three of them, same battalion, same battle. I remember at the time how nobody made much of a fuss about it. Then again, the hand wringing liberals never had much time for dead teenagers. If they were the same colour as most other people in the UK and especially if they were foolish enough to die fighting for the UK.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/a-tale-of-two-wars-and-thei...

They weren't on the losing side for 4 years. And if she's as mental as she comes across, I wouldn't put any bets on what she counts as 'a jolly good time', after all, most normal people would be at least a little put off by bins full of severed heads. Not her apparently.

The hard evidence coming out of her mouth. Javid doesn't come out of this at all well, but out of Javid and Begum, I know who I'd rather live next door to.

I do wonder if she was a he, and didn't have a new born baby to use as an emotional crowbar, if he'd get the same sympathetic reaction?
She's playing people like a f*cking banjo.

A minority of people. Unfortunately a fair few who you'd normally consider intelligent and perceptive.

Stereotyping what exactly? I expect you're an ivory tower dweller as well.

The outcome of the Brexit result should provide you with sufficient facts of how many people are feeling ignored, forgotten,abandoned, disenfranchised.

There is no working class population any more. Not in the traditional sense. 

There's the have far too much, the have more than enough and the have sod all.

Whilst I agree with the sentiment of your post, I don't think allowing this woman back in Britain, is anything to do with being rich, intellectual liberal, or people that don't care, it's a matter of doing the right thing. Trying to make her nation-less is against what Britain is supposed to stand for, it's what we've fought wars for.

It's our law and it's international law too, how can this one woman be so powerful we're prepared to trample years of laws, to punish her.

To be trite about it, we've already let actual ISIS fighters back into the country, not some woman who most probably had f*ck all to do with much, and had even less chance of changing her mind.

I hate having to defend her, but this mob mentality doesn't help anyone, Javid will eventually have to back track, probably after going through a lengthy court battle, cost us, the tax payer a load of money, when it would have been easier, cheaper and more effective to simple let her come back. We didn't have to help her get back simple leave the door open for her. If she got back we could arrest her if necessary and make sure she wasn't a danger to anyone.

Since we seem to have managed this for the bloke fighters in ISIS that were British, why is she so much worse? Is it because she's a woman?

Any bloke would have had much more freedom to return at an time, than she most likely did.

One more thing, had she been groomed here in the UK and some bloke had sex with her, she's have been the victim. The bloke that had sex with her would have been put in jail, and on the sexual offender register, but because all of this happened in another country, she's somehow the devil incarnate. The truth is no one knows what she's been through or how much she's been involved, she was 15 and spent 4 years with ISIS, I'd imagine that might f*ck a good number of people up.

FFS! It's not about defending her, it's about defending our own laws, and international law, which we expect other countries to follow and abide by. This has very little to do with a stupid 15 year old girl.

And it's about responsibility, how the f*ck can the UK expect Bangladesh to take this woman, when she's our problem. As much as I don't like it, she is our problem, trying to foist her off on a country she's never even visited is sickening.

I hear what you're saying but it doesn't excuse the mean spiritedness and nastiness which seems to be coursing through the veins of our body politic at the moment. I think the anger that people feel at a system that is weighted against them is being channeled and exploited by people who want to maintain their own advantage. We don't have to give in to this fresh exploitation. There's a rich history of the "disenfranchised proletariat" actually building a fairer society- in spite of the odds - through refusing to be manipulated by division and hatred, and through actively confronting ignorance.  

That's partly the point though, we've already let ISIS blokes, I think it's about 100, back into the country.

Why because it's a woman has it suddenly become so difficult?

Do you ever bother reading what you respond to. For perhaps the third time on this thread.

Javid is wrong.

Rule of law should be upheld.

Begum is much more perpetrator than victim, going off the small amount of evidence we've got.

I'll defer to your judgement since you're clearly qualified to make that assessment where I'm not.

Hardly. I think she was a fool, she's no diplomat and has views that jar. I'm not surprised by that and I don't need to assume she's a sociopath to explain it. Nor do I rule out the possibility. Frankly I don't much care, I'm far more concerned by the principal and the government's approach.

As you please.

You really don't have to try quite so hard to be unpleasant. You have absolutely no idea what my thoughts are about those young men or the others we send to die, nor what I think about the job they do. Still, you've used their deaths to score a petty point on the internet. Wanker.

Perhaps, perhaps not, most normal people never have to find out how they react to a bin full of human heads. Perhaps like most people faced with the truly awful they find a way to cope that ends up irrevocably disconnecting them from those that haven't ever had to. I'll reserve judgement unless and until I need to give a shit either way.

Ah, the hard evidence you also claim is probably all lies. Got it.

jk

You can rest assured that that part of the story won't be prominently reported in the tabloid rags. As far as their readers will be concerned, Javid will have been right to have punished a British citizen without trial, and any mention of that being illegal will be broad-brush dismissed as the result of interfering foreigners or loony liberals.

Whatever is so wrong with UK justice that we should be preferring trial-by-media or ostracising-on-suspicion-of-wrongdoing in preference to due legal process?

I've been trying to work out what's the relationship between the growing wealth inequality and the case at hand of the girl, and the only thing i can come up with is that both are the result of the Tories being utter incompetent self-serving assholes.

Is that the point you were trying to make? Otherwise i can't seem to figure out what your little Che Guevara moment has to do with any of this to be honest

In reply to Krik as well.

100s have already returned, essentially, under the radar.
This individual, thanks to some reporter (Times?), has been thrust into the public eye, and everyone is now aware that it's going to cost vast sums of money to deal with her.

We now have a country where 10s of millions of people are almost living day to day, hand to mouth, and the fact that this (alleged) terrorist sympathizer is going to be feeding off a skint state.
Is it any wonder that they're a bit pissed?!?!?

Maybe The Times should foot the bill?

edit: yes, I know in the big scheme of things, the cost is piss all, but people don't perceive it as such.

Ah.. so you're qualified to judge her victim, based on nothing more than her age, but judging her sociopathic based on her words and demeanour is highly questionable.

You don't care but you'll spend lots of time defending her status as victim? Odd. We don't disagree on the governments approach.

You accuse me of trying hard to be unpleasant and then call me a wanker? You show yourself to be a hypocrite. Not because of the insult, but because you know deep down you'd never even considered dead British teenagers, killed fighting against the like  of Begum's husband, but you're full of faux pity for poor little Shamima.

Why reserve judgement on stuff you know sod all about? It hasn't stopped you so far.

The only evidence we've got, not the best admittedly, but a sight better than just pulling an ill considered opinion straight out of your arse with no relation to any facts at all.

Edit: typo.

We can expect middle England to continue turning right without any help from the Home Secretary.

But the point about second class citizenship is very important . I have the right to claim Irish and Hungarian citizenship. Based on what the Home Office is trying to establish in law about this woman's Bangladeshi antecedents, surely the same principle would apply to me. 

I don't like it I tell you. 

If I commit a crime I have a right to expect to be subject to British law; trial by my peers etc... And punishment  

Certain young people who became part of Hitler's staff were excused by the Nürnberg trials on the grounds of their youth and impressionability . "a young follower"  The same principle may well apply to a 15 year old schoolgirl . 

I think you're likely right. But Sajid Javid shouldn't be making the decision to maroon her in Syria based on what the likely outcome of any judicial process is likely to be. Having said that I don't believe we should be making any efforts to facilitate her return. 

A lot of us valued our EU citizenship, often somewhat more than our British citizenship.  And without having harmed a soul, we are having that taken away from us.

Given all this woman has done, I really give zero fvcks about her losing hers.  She clearly has no concept of what citizenship entails, at the most basic and fundamental level. 

She's abusing the very concept of it, and slapping us in the face with it.  ISIS must find it fecking hilarious, and all the evidence they need of our weakness, that we're even talking about taking her back. 

I think that's different.  I have a degree of sympathy with someone growing up in a Nazi country, surrounded by Nazis, who faced death if defying Nazis.

On the other hand, someone who travels to a Nazi country, so they can be a Nazi, and left safety to do so....

Qualified no, content yes. She was persuaded to go to war at 15. There's a reason we treat children and vulnerable people differently.

Yes. I think a child persuaded to go to war whether by an individual, an organisation or the propaganda they create is a victim. The may also be other things.

Read that back to yourself out loud in the morning and think about how you come across. You're dragging up pictures of dead soldiers to impugn what, my decency or my 'Britishness'? You don't know me. It's ridiculous and frankly vile.

Because it's reasonable. We have a robust legal process for deciding these matters. There's good reason we don't let the mob decide, someone's guilt, their mental state or the punishment they're to receive.

jk

You suggested he was defending her, I don't think he was, I think he was making the same point as you, and me! and of course the double standards regarding grooming. While reiterating that we really don't know much about her at all. At least that's what I got from reading his replies

"> You've spent a lot of time passionately defending her for someone whose not really following the facts of her case."

Clearly nobody in their right mind has sympathy for Isis etc or people who murder on their behalf. 

But then how is she worse than a guy who goes out looking for a victim to use his knife on in order to prove allegiance to some got up gang? Or some tw*t who takes a bottle of acid to a disco and chucks it over some girls dancing ?

Atrocities great and small go on all the time . Many would say put 'em in a boat, shove it out to sea and sink' em. 

The trouble is that's not how law works. If Sajid Javed sticks to upholding the law he'll be doing precisely what it says in his job description. If he starts fiddling about with the law to please middle England ... 

And plenty of people would agree with you but the Home Secretary should be making decisions that comply with the law. 

So are you condemning her because she's thick?

Alan James stated "what a sad and nasty nation we have become". Maybe he should check the cause rather than cry about the effect. Wealth inequality took off under Thatcher and was rocketed into the stratosphere by New Labour. Both parties are to blame.

The point is that most people in this country are too concerned about paying the next round of debt off, how to afford new shoes for the kids, getting the car fixed, rather than concerning themselves about whether the government are right to alienate an unrepentant, selfish, self absorbed wife of a terrorist who has no qualms about aligning herself to this group nor the atrocities carried out in the name of her adopted state. 

But what Javid has done will probably cost us more and she'll still end up coming back.

Who said that?

Then why bring it up, and why should she be treated differently yto the 100s of others? she's probably one of the least dangerous of the people we've let back in.

Is it because she's a woman?

Everyone can be as pissed off as they like, but if we have laws for this situation, why the f*ck is Javid trying to ignore them, other than to play to an already baying crowd?

Next he'll be telling us the EU are making us take her back, but he didn't want to.

Genuine question: Do you consider the internet a place we inhabit? I ask because IIRC by your own past admission your immersion in it and the output of prolific youtube philosophers radically changed your political views. I presume you were an adult. Forgive me if I've confused you with someone else.

jk

 You've already admitted you're not following the story, but she's described a process of self radicalisation. According to those closest to her, against the best advice of her family, her school, her community and her religion.

But according to you it's someone else's fault. Someone 'persuaded' her.

All the advice and evidence she had access to indicated ISIS were a bunch of evil bastards. She made a choice. Have you forgotten what it's like to be 15? 

What I was trying to do was show you that your sympathy is grossly misplaced. There are plenty of British teenagers far more worthy.

Yesterday I made a point about Nazi ideology being confined to a tiny lunatic fringe. Somebody responded with "Tell that to Jo Cox's family" and a news link. Since Mair was very much a part of the lunatic fringe it seemed they were actually making my point for me. Whatever, I didn't throw a hissy fit or call people names. I argued the point. Perhaps you should be the one reading back your outburst out loud in the morning?

Yes, and I've defended that process. If your comment is aimed at this debate then what the f*ck are you doing engaging in it?

People went off to Spain in the thirties to fight for the fascists or the communists. They often got embroiled in horrors that didn't fit into the dream they went out with. Some came back utterly chastened whereas some went to their graves still believing in "the cause" . I don't think any were de - Britished

Well that's jolly good. So you are saying that that the exploited, exhausted and discarded, loathed and pushed to one side disenfranchised proletarian don't really care if Begum retuns home?

You sound a little bit off the mark there to be honest

Stereotyping your imaginary 'ivory tower dwellers' for a start. 

You have a very strange idea of what constitutes a fact if you think you can deduce facts about voters simply from the outcome of a referendum. You can guess, that's all. And there's been plenty of argument about what exactly the Brexit vote meant and how it was composed without any suggestion that it was as simple as you seem to think. You also undermine your original argument that the majority of the population are the "Exploited, exhausted and discarded. Loathed and pushed to one side. " if you're depending on the Brexit vote for support. That was just under 35% of the electorate, remember?

You are trying far too hard to be clever and have clearly confused yourself in the process. 

Which leaves 30% of the electorate too exhausted, exploited and discarded to even bother to vote one way or another. 33% of the electorate voted to stay in the EU..1 in 3 at best. What's your point?

Have you, I made some terrible mistakes at 15 and after that! I'm glad I've not been condemned by any of them for the rest of my life though, or had a good part of the nation wanting me to suffer.

People make shit decisions every day, drink driving for one, where the consequences can be catastrophic or a simple years ban, depending on your luck.

How do you know that 30% of the electorate were too exhausted, exploited and discarded to even bother to vote one way or another? Post-referendum polling evidence suggests that non-voters were 2-1 in favour of remain, which contradicts your theory. That's just polling data, so has its limits, but it's better than what you have to offer. You're just making things up. And that's really my point.

(Edit - the reason for the non-turn-out of Remain voters is thought to be complacency - they really didn't think that Leave would win)

Yeah, been there, done that, but it's hardly on a par with joining the most heinous organisation that's existed in the last few centuries, is it?

Heard of the Nazi Party?

Wasn't the leave vote in the comfortable Tory shires also a major factor in the Brexit result?

Yes, good point.

Yes, they've been banking my subscriptions for the last 30 years.

Far from it.  I'm condemning her because she made conscious calculating decisions.

She just happens to be ignorant as to what citizenship means, extending it as far as receiving social welfare.  So its perverse that so many people seem desperate to protect it for her.

You can play the relativism game forever.  Might as well say we're no better than ISIS/Nazis ourselves  The point remains, she travelled TO Islamic State, to support its war against ALL other states.

Completely lost me there I'm afraid.

Don't think I've ever said the internet, or YouTube philosophers, changed my views.  As that that's not the case.  Quite the opposite in fact.  And yes, I'm an adult last time I checked.

Really don't know where you're coming from there, especially in light of the message you are responding to.  

The whole family are media savvy. They know how to work the system and have done since at least 2014 when she originally went missing. It was all over the news then just as it is now  

I’d be interested to know if they have a publicist. 

You and some others are spouting some absolute bollocks on this thread. Why on earth are you apologies and excusing this woman joining the most horrific organisation since the nazis. It just baffles me. These people deserve to die for what they have done. Revoking citizenship is something of nothing 

If you're arguing for UK law to be amended to include a death penalty, that's another subject. As it stands, it is the UK courts that should determine what such people 'deserve', not you or the gutter press.

Tell you what - take a basic course in literacy and learn to read; then use that new skill to read what others have written before you post. This will stop you making a total a*as of yourself in public.

Talking down to and belittling people's grammar is not going to win you many arguments Rob. 

Please quote Alan’s “apologies and excuses” so we can all discuss.

I think you’ve bought the hype- IS are undoubtedly sadistic murderers but your case isn’t helped by hyperbole. Set in context, they’re small time amateurs

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide

What a cheap and largely irrelevant point - playing the man rather than the ball, with the inference that had my same point been made by a penniless person on the street it would have been okay.

And of course no solution to the actual question under discussion, just more buck passing.

Alan

Section 17 of the Terrorism Act 2006

17Commission of offences abroadE+W+S+N.I.

This section has no associated Explanatory Notes

(1)If—

(a)a person does anything outside the United Kingdom, and

(b)his action, if done in a part of the United Kingdom, would constitute an offence falling within subsection (2),

he shall be guilty in that part of the United Kingdom of the offence.

(2)The offences falling within this subsection are—

(a)an offence under section 1 F1... of this Act so far as it is committed in relation to any statement F2... in relation to which that section has effect by reason of its relevance to the commission, preparation or instigation of one or more Convention offences;

(b)an offence under [F3section 5 or 6 or] any of sections 8 to 11 of this Act;

(c)an offence under section 11(1) of the Terrorism Act 2000 (c. 11) (membership of proscribed organisations);

(d)an offence under section 54 of that Act (weapons training);

(e)conspiracy to commit an offence falling within this subsection;

(f)inciting a person to commit such an offence;

(g)attempting to commit such an offence;

(h)aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring the commission of such an offence.

(3)Subsection (1) applies irrespective of whether the person is a British citizen or, in the case of a company, a company incorporated in a part of the United Kingdom.

(4)In the case of an offence falling within subsection (2) which is committed wholly or partly outside the United Kingdom—

(a)proceedings for the offence may be taken at any place in the United Kingdom; and

(b)the offence may for all incidental purposes be treated as having been committed at any such place.

For goodness sake you're doing the same. I wasn't belittling his grammar, I was challenging his reading of this thread.

A few may have sympathised with the actions of a 15 year old; I don't think anyone  has sympathised with the stupid and nasty teenager's comments as reported, or her actions.

The objection to Javid's ruling us that a) it goes against the rule of law, b) it de facto creates a two tier citizenship (i.e. if you are born to immigrants then you are not as much a UK citizen if you weren't, because your citizenship can be revoked on a whim), c) it will be perceived as racist, and d) it has done the exact opposite of what any of us would want, it's made this wretched women a martyr (and, also her child). Let her return to the country of her birth and subject her to due process. She could end up doing 10 years inside; on the evidence we've all heard to date that seems OK.
 

How are they "disenfranchised"? I thought they were the 52% that have dragged us into the mess we are in?

Only if your context is purely numerical. The people they wanted to murder amounted to everyone who disagreed with them, including most Muslims and all Shia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_Shias_by_ISIL

ISIS's murderous ambitions were severely limited by the tiny number of people willing to swallow their obviously insane ideology. Stalin, Mao, Hitler etc tried to hide the truth about their regimes, so were only fully revealed as monsters with a degree of hindsight. ISIS, on the other hand, actively revelled in and publicised their atrocities, which makes the people who ran off to join them especially despicable and worthy of only utter contempt.

Where did I, or anyone else, apologise or excuse the actions of this woman?

I have said several times that she comes across as unpleasant and ignorant but her character and crimes aren't the main issue here. It is the precedent set of dealing with these people that I think makes both the world, and our country, less safe by hothousing them in anarchic refugee camps, and also how this will be interpreted by potential terrorists back home. It also creates a second class level of British citizen - those who come from a long line of British-born heritage and those that don't who apparently now can be dumped for the rest of the world to deal with.

Alan

The cheap shot was you stating "what a sad and nasty country we are". If that's not playing the man rather than the ball I don't know what is. Hoisted by your own petard I would say!

Yes, I can see that but at least mine was a cheap shot with some moral substance behind it.

And you once again avoid offering any actual solutions of course.

Alan

I’m not trying to make any sort of claim along the lines that ‘IS aren’t that bad, really’- they are medieval sadists and the world’s response, of overwhelming military suppression, seems entirely justified.

i was just responding to the suggestion that only the Nazis were ‘worse’ than them. States Inflicting a reign of terror on those that fall under its control is depressingly common, and  even in the territory they occupied it would be hard to pick between the behaviour of IS and that of the ‘official’ state under Assad. On a world scale, from the disappeared in Argentina, to victims of right wing paramilitaries in Central America, the treatment of Muslims in  Myanmar, the Khmer Rouge, there seems to be many people only too willing to sign up to be the agents of states wanting to torture and kill their citizens. Their motivations may be different, but the consequences of their actions are the same.

as to this case- I think it’s an own goal, for all the reasons others have given. Bring her back, subject her to due process, and don’t make the rule of law another victim of IS.

1)  Law is not a reason.  Perhaps it should change.

2)  She absolutely denounced her citizenship and became a citizen of Islamic State.  Which then made her stateless.

I thought you were the chap who claimed you used to be a bit of a leftie hippie but after finding the likes of Jordan Peterson's lectures you radically changed your views. Not you? Fair enough, as I said, sorry for the possible confusion, my memory isn't great.

The connection to the post I responded to is that you said you'd to some degree excuse a young person immersed in a society with bad ideas for adopting and accepting them but not someone who physically travelled to immerse themselves in those ideas.

My point is we don't have to travel to immerse ourselves in ideas, the internet is as much a community for the sharing of ideas and values as the real world we live and breathe in. One of us might slip into libertarian politics, another flat earth conspiracy or environmentalism or jihadi extremism. None of us are really immune to these traps, we both seek out and are now actively fed by the machines we built more of the same, confirmation and validation of our new ideas. We're not faultless in this, most have opportunities to turn back and I'm sure many do but this behaviour (human and machine) is exploitable. It doesn't start with accepting the most extreme ideas, it starts with an article or video that resonates or excites, the thread to follow into an immersive world where radical new ideas become normal. Of course with all advertising and propaganda what we see and are persuaded to believe is not always the a true reflection of reality, for some the journey back from that realisation if and when it occurs is straightforward, for others it is much less so.

jk

Yes why not go the whole hog. Reintroduce the death penalty . The Home Secretary could just make a decision about that on our behalf. No need for parliament or the courts to get involved. No need, even, for a referendum; everybody knows what we all think about it, after all. 

"ISIS, on the other hand, actively revelled in and publicised their atrocities, which makes the people who ran off to join them especially despicable and worthy of only utter contempt."

Is it not worth trying to understand why a 15 year old did this? She may be one of Wanderer100's "Exploited, exhausted and discarded. Loathed and pushed to one side... disenfranchised."

There are some crimes were I agree that it is not worth attempting to understand the motivation of the offender:- paedophilia; football hooliganism; drunken stabbings. these appear to be motivated purely by selfish and moronic views.

other crimes should ring alarm bells though and should prompt deeper consideration:- gang violence (why are the protagonists in gangs in the first place); offences fuelled by drug addiction (why is the person on drugs?) etc. and offences of terrorism committed by people against their own country fall into this category in my view.  There is something seriously wrong if our teenagers are doing what Shamima did and simply dealing with the offence without understanding what lead to it is a lost opportunity.

The law in this area was reformed continually as the threat evolved. New law cannot be applied retrospectively. Respect for the law as it applied at the time of transgression is very much a reason for  person to be treated in a predictable defined way by the state, if the state does not abide by its own laws why should anyone else.

So are you're suggesting we should recognise IS as a state or abandon the universal declaration of human rights? 

jk

Only because ISIS is a tiny state created from nothing, which has fortunately came up against the combined force of all the world's super-powers - from China to the USA. 

ISIS's stated aims are more genocidal and total than the Nazi's ever were.

Even if just for purely utilitarian reasons, ie to reduce the likelihood of other people following the same path 

because if we are discussing this in heated terms here, it would be naive not to accept that discussions around the fairness, or otherwise, of this decision are taking place among Muslims; and those concluding that it is unfair are exposed to influences that may lead them to do more than just complain on the internet. That’s why this decision is a bad one, it is likely to increase the likelihood of the outcomes we want to avoid.

Of course we can’t neglect to enforce the rule of law for fear of how some people may react; but senior government ministers acting in arbitrary and probably unlawful ways just looks to me like taking needless risks with our safety 

You said "Tell you what, take a basic course in literacy and learn to read." If that's not belittling someone and their grammar then I need to go on a basic literacy course and learn to read like you are recommending.

You appear to be talking about how successful or unsuccessful they've been, rather than how horrific they are.

I wonder how much of the disagreement on this thread is down to people not quite grasping just how utterly awful IS are, quite what people are signing up to when they choose to join them. They're not just your average run of the mill oppressive religious extremists; not as bad as the Nazis - that's just daft, sorry,...

And if my auntie had balls, she’d be my uncle 

in the world we actually live in, they were indeed a tiny state that came up against overwhelming opposition. Your interpretation of what their goals were isn’t relevant; whatever ambitions they had were constrained by the fact they were nothing more than two bit sadistic thugs, who because of their talent at self publicity and willingness to create notoriety got much more media exposure than their actual capabilities deserved. 

That doesn’t make them the second most evil regime in history, as was being claimed; and if we stop following our own laws and start administering arbitrary punishment, then we snatch defeat from the laws of victory. Even senior Nazis got a fair trial before they were punished 

Yes, apparently you do. 

I’m obviously not making my point clearly enough, because that’s not what I’m saying. 

People are quoting law as the reason she must be welcomed back. It is wrong to fixate on the law as the reason.  It is not. The law was made for a reason. We should address that and amend the law if necessary. There is no reason new law cannot apply retrospectively.

I have not suggested anything to do with "abandon the universal declaration of human rights".

"recognise IS as a state"  is a soundbite that has no meaning.

Given the degree of prominence ISIS gave to beheadings, torture and slave markets in their own publicity material, and given that the vast majority of Muslims disagreed with their religious justifications, Is it not entirely possible, probable even, that most of ISIS's Western recruits were the sort of warped inadequates who were actively attracted by ISIS's vile reputation and the opportunity to do harm to the innocent?

I'd be happy with an ISIS member fitting into the same category.

I'm not here to wave a magic wand. I was offering a counter to your view that Britain should be beacon of hope and sanctuary to the rest of the World but that it's become a sad and nasty country. If you truly think it has become a sad and nasty country maybe you should try and understand why rather than just tar the population with your arrogant appraisal of what you perceive.

Apart from any sense of fairness and decency.

I'm sure we bombed them with fairness and decency ?

'People are quoting law as the reason she must be welcomed back.'

You've lost me right there. Point to a single line, anywhere, where anyone talks of 'welcome.'

In reply to Rob Exile Ward and no_more_scotch_eggs:

Yep. If you've had any exposure to news about IS, you should have noticed that they'd have no problem at all with that.

Perhaps we could agree that the Nazis and IS are both utterly awful, and that comparing the morality of voluntarily joining IS to that of voluntarily joining the Nazis is not actually hyperbole at all?

This is an aside, not necessarily anything to do with the arguments on this thread - I know next to nothing about law, but I've seen you say this a couple of times now and I don't think it's really correct.

The reason it caught my attention is that I remember an old friend, who is a lawyer, serenading us once on that very subject, quite unprovoked (he's an enthusiast).

The example he was using was that of an unscrupulous store owner selling poppers (the kind you sniff to get a hit, then a nasty headache and some degree of brain damage) to kids, and trying to get off with it on the basis that it wasn't illegal at the time - but failing because the judge was quite happy to apply the law retrospectively.

A quick google of 'can laws be applied retrospectively' shows at least that the answer to this is not simple (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law ); beyond that I'll have to defer to people who actually know what they're talking about.

Sorry for the sidetrack!

'Perhaps we could agree that the Nazis and IS are both utterly awful, and that comparing the morality of voluntarily joining IS to that of voluntarily joining the Nazis is not actually hyperbole at all?'

F*ck me, I think we possibly can, I don't have a problem with that at all - you're welcome to point out anywhere I may have given a different impression.

And what did we do with Nazis? Subject them to the rule of law. 

I already know why - years of austerity, bad government and increasing influence of the far right with their self-interest lobby groups.

It also seems that you agree with me that it has become sad and nasty in the way we treat people...

"And finally the hand that nobody cares about. The hand that is described as racist, ignorant, ill educated the 'untermenschen'. Unfortunately they represent the majority of the population of this country. Exploited, exhausted and discarded. Loathed and pushed to one side. The disenfranchised proletarian who votes according to where he sees answers to the problems that cause him to be homeless, jobless, penniless."

Of course none of this has anything to do with the issue in question and whether or not Javid has made us safer, and whether or not he has set a precedent of dual-levels of British Citizenship.

Also, no magic wand is needed to solve this one - bring her home and deal with her under our law and system and the problem goes away.

Alan

You don't know a lot about law do you? 

We bombed them under international law. That's current international law by the way, not one that we haven't passed yet.

You gave that impression when you relplied to me replying to no_more_scotch_eggs saying why I though it was legitimate to compare joining ISIS to joing the Nazis. Your reply is quoted in my post above at 10:33, but I think you may since have deleted your post, making it a bit harder for me to point out.

It very much is a good reason. If our state and indeed by extension any of us can arbitrarily pick and choose which laws it is bound by none of us are safe.

Oh for goodness sake, use that big brain of yours, there absolutely is.

Facile example: Being called David is a criminal offence punishable by public flogging. Law created 2019. Law effective from 1900.

Reasonable?

You have though you may not have realised. If you don't accept IS should be recognised as a state (sensible), one British Jihadis took citizenship of when they left for Syria/Iraq then what you mean when say we should withdraw their British citizenship is that we should accept they may be made stateless by that action. The UDHR for which Britain voted states 'Everyone has a right to a nationality'.

Your position is not compatible with the convention. Choose.

jk

Thanks for your defense. If we can't support the rule of law I'm not sure where we are as a state. Wanderer's post nearly made me choke on my tea... a world travelling mountaineer lectures us what the UK poor want as some kind of uniform mobbe. His thesis is nonsense: down to the very poorest in the UK for every 'Scum' reader whipped into a frenzy we have more thoughtful people who understand the vital importance of the rule of law in any fair state (and yes despite the fact the law has become stacked increasingly against them in the last decade) . I guess a part of the problem is these angry mob types don't like the fact we don't have a death penalty (as evidence shows its not effective and too many miscarriages of justice happened to make it acceptable) or in this case little chance of seriously long jail sentences for teenagers who get groomed by evil ideologues,  partly based on exaggerating the effects of the West bending law (like the second Iraq war), and so leave the UK to most probably become a breeding housewife for new jihadis in a muderous state. The mob also fail to understand the irony in extreme anger: her extreme anger based on the lies and exaggeration in her grooming is what led to her illegal actions, as extreme anger leads to most violent crime in the UK.

That's a very badly informed view of British society.

Of course there are those on the left, who you would tritely refer to as "liberal hand wringers", who do have an assumptive and patronising attitude towards the 'proletariat'. You're just as bad as they are, albeit on the other side of the political spectrum.

"Is it not entirely possible, probable even, that most of ISIS's Western recruits were the sort of warped inadequates who were actively attracted by ISIS's vile reputation and the opportunity to do harm to the innocent?"

you might be right, I don't know. the point is, that unlike e.g. paedophilia for which there can never be any argument that it is for any "greater good," violence to support religious aims does at least have that veneer, and it is worth understanding what that is. dismissing them all as warped inadequates is unhelpful.

How is ISIS different to  the burning of heretics (catholic or protestant) in our fine country a few hundred years ago? were half the country warped inadequates? (until we had a change of monarch and they became victims) 

You're correct in that law is sometimes applied retrospectively, but more normally in civil law, and often where existing law doesn't exist or is unclear. The dangers of applying criminal law retrospectively should be obvious to anyone, but that hasn't always stopped governments from doing it, as with the much-criticised Criminal Justice Act of 2003. 

Were Milgram's sadists all 'warped inadequates' too?

You're looking at this from a particular perspective. I think it matters what order you come to the information in, if someone starts with an attraction to the violence and barbarism then seeks justification for it I'd agree. If they come from material that convincingly creates a framework in which barbarism is justified and normalised then subsequently see and accept the barbarism. That's not the same thing.

jk

Thanks.

I'm not going anywhere with this - I just saw jkarran say something a couple of times, that I didn't think was quite right!

Have you ever been imprisoned in one? (Neither have I).

"Thanks.

I'm not going anywhere with this...."

Frankly, this whole Shamima Begum fiasco keeps getting Syria and Syria

As this was in an exchange discussing the retrospective application of new law I'm not sure what bombing has to do with it. Although retrospective bombing could open up a whole new revenue stream for the arms industry.

I specified 'Western ISIS recruits', people who'd been brought up in tolerant, liberal societies, educated in enlightenment values and still took it upon themselves to reject all that and run away to join a death cult.

The burning of heretics in Britain was a horrible manifestation of a horrible era and the participation of so many is just further evidence of the sheep like behaviour shown by most people.

Western ISIS recruits weren't being sheep, they were going directly against the opinions of the vast majority.

A minority, undoubtedly, the rest sheep. And they didn't know what they were volunteering for from the outset. The studies design was also flawed.

So how is Bethnal Green an environment that justifies a framework for barbarism? You keep ignoring this point...family, friends, community, school, her religion, common decency; all were urging her away from ISIS. The only support for ISIS in her life was what she herself sought out on the internet.

I disagree with the particular point DR makes, but he does have a more general point. In our modern, Western societies, irrespective of whether you are in country with a Roman or Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, the law all too often becomes a game played out for its own sake, as if the basis of law were derived from some unchangeable physical "law".

I would propose a much more utilitarian view, whereby laws and jurisprudence serve a purpose, i.e. making societies of more than a few dozen people governable. In order to do so, laws will have to satisfy a feeling that justice is done when applied. This has, of course, to be balanced by a limited set of fundamental principles that are essentially arbitrary but that we can rationally agree on (essentially what we consider human rights).

IMO these should (and do!) include a ban on depriving someone of his nationality.

However, banning retrials in cases of new evidence to fulfil some judicial principle is IMO counterproductive, as it misses the point of satisfying the popular sense of fairness. Same goes for the cum/ex tax fraud: Whatever the wording of the law, it should be obvious that claiming tax reimbursement twice for tax paid once is fraudulent, and the banksters should not be let off on a technicality, especially when the same courts approve sacking a long time employee for taking a leftover apple after a business meeting. 

Laws unfit for purpose should be changed, if needs be even retrospectively, but this has to be done carefully. 

CB

Thanks, apparently not legally. I'd argue it is logically right otherwise we accept we have no legal protection from targeted state persecution.

jk

You need to speak to Wanderer100 because according to him, the utopia you describe above is only enjoyed by  a few - living in ivory towers, and there is a vast, teeming underclass just waiting to bring it all down - be that by brexit or ISIS

She probably spent too much time on the internet.... some people do you know.

Well I look forward to her returning to the bosom of her family.

I also expect to look forward to the inevitable violence, including arson and riots, that will follow the equally inevitable demonstrations for and against.

I do hope her supporters go out and give blood on her return - because it may be needed to deal with the aftermath, both to the demonstrators and the Emergency Services that get involved.

Definitely not me.  I was solidly left-wing tho.  In fact I would still consider myself to be...if it weren't for my brand of left-wingism being deemed insufficiently doctrinal for much of today's left and rebranded right-ism as a result.  I was purged.  Which turned out to be a healthy experience as everyone else on the outside turned out to be nothing like I had been led to believe.

That was nothing to do with Jordan Peterson.  Whatever conversion took place for me occurred well before I had heard of him; based on the experience of working in solidly left-wing, progressive environment...and seeing how horribly wrong it could go, as its well-meaning leaders and followers became everything they claimed to despise while claiming the loftiest of motivations.  Animal Farm and every other literary critique of socialism writ large.  Following that up with two years living in a country that experienced the full horror of a socialist revolution has provided more than enough evidence to be sceptical.

Jordan Peterson appeals to me as a result, rather than my views existing because of anything he said.

The left, the current state of it, and where it seems to be headed, horrifies me.  Mostly because it appears devoid of necessary self-criticism.  Or more accurately, it thinks it is being critical, but only within a limited sphere and at specific targets.  An old Chomsky quote popped up on my Facebook feed recently which seemed timely: "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....".  That for me sums up the state of the left.  

My point was that we are conflating youthful mistakes, thinking with your balls or your emotions, with calculated sustained actions and decision-making processes.  Relativism can only get us so far, and stretching it as far as we do in this case doesn't provide a useful mechanism for dealing with Begum.

In this case we allowed the creation of an environment in the UK that gives all the fertiliser required to grow Shamima Begums, where we are told to accept abnormal as normal.  This is demanded by the left, not the right, and I only see them doubling down in their support of it.  And for this individual, she has gone beyond being a mere keyboard warrior, sending money, or leafletting in the street.  She has gone to the nth degree to adopt ISIS and assist them.  She is a problem for liberal culture because, ironically, her existence and indoctrination from birth to the age of 15 is a largely an outcome of liberal culture. 

I'm completely onboard with the legal arguments, and that these will ultimately decide where this goes.  But we don't know where that is for now so the arguments we are having are ethical ones.  

You're right again... do you want another apology?

'Were Milgram's sadists all 'warped inadequates' too?

Hmm... apparently Milgram's 'experiments' weren't quite as he reported at the time, so maybe we should stop quoting him?

Another thing common with Brexit apologists here..

The suggestion that we should define policy based on the potential for illegal behaviour of a mob.

Alan

That's exactly why law is formed by government. Its slow and the loopholes don't get closed as quickly as I would like. Part of the rule of law is the democratic process required to change it.

The same could be said of the girls in Bradford, not many saw them as deserving of punishment.

'I do hope her supporters go out and give blood on her return'

Well I hope he or she have got plenty to spare, because there are no supporters on here as far as I can see.

Still, reasonable decent people were quickly and easily persuaded to violate the norms of the society they came from when isolated from it and encouraged. Do you think a kid coming across the softer end of jihadi propaganda knows the risk they take in exposure, how it acts on them, where it may lead them, that they willingly and capably consent?

I don't know Bethnal Green. You keep ignoring the fact that communities are not just the people physically around you. This here is a community you're part of, distinct from the workplace you're in, your town or country. From the outside of the little vortices these people jump or fall into you clearly see the reasonable majority and the abhorrent ideas the individual adopts for what they are (from your perspective). Once sucked in, looking out from a manipulated perspective the world isn't the same, your community isn't the same.

jk

And you're ethics tell you, a 15 years old girl, who was groomed into going to Syria, who after making that decision, had no way of contacting anyone in the UK, or changing her mind, or chance of escape should have the Foreign Secretary tell the world and her she's someone else's problem, that she is now the problem of a country she's never visited in her life, more to the point a country that has no responsibility for her at all.

This is what your ethics tell you?

"That was nothing to do with Jordan Peterson.  Whatever conversion took place for me occurred well before I had heard of him; based on the experience of working in solidly left-wing, progressive environment...and seeing how horribly wrong it could go, as its well-meaning leaders and followers became everything they claimed to despise while claiming the loftiest of motivations.  Animal Farm and every other literary critique of socialism writ large.  Following that up with two years living in a country that experienced the full horror of a socialist revolution has provided more than enough evidence to be sceptical."

Something I checked through both my moderate UCU and management contacts and they all report the same situation... there was more far left influnce than in the vast majority if UK HE (far left is hardly progressive) and their related SWP trouble-makers but also an inept and needlessly hostile leadership that included the idiocy in such circumstances of no proper security on a VCs office; that allowed an occupation of the rent-a-mob. At no point does you University management public statements at the time claim any such crisis. I ask you this again, was the VC telling lies to the public to cover this up? 

Perhaps but it's convenient shorthand for a class of experiment that has been repeated broadly with results relevant to the point I was trying to make, societies can be quite readily redefined and new norms established, you don't need to be a weak or bad person to accept the new norm.

jk

We seem keen to give 16 years olds the vote.  Only talking about 15, and ignoring 16, 17, 18 and 19, misses some key years.

I don't know to what degree she was groomed, versus the degree to which she was attracted to and actively sought out the means to go to Syria, specifically because the ISIS brand of morality and social justice appealed to her.  

I'm not convinced about that.  If ISIS manages to groom people in the UK, I think there is a degree of two-way information flow, even if just relayed messages through family and friends.

Everything I have seen her say indicates even now her mind is unchanged.  She's pissed off that she can't sign-on from Syrian refugee camps.

But a country that may be a far closer match with her viewpoints institutionally and socially.

I think both you and Wanderer100 are onto something here, which goes much deeper than "what a sad and nasty imperialist xenophobic country this is".

It's not something that is a result of brexit and racism, although they are part of the mix. I'm not intelligent enough to articulate it, but I'll have a go.

She certainly is, and this is what in my opinion is behind the attraction of extremism of all kinds.

We have a society that is all about individualism, success and being famous for being..er..famous. Advertising and pretty much everything you see in the media is aspirational and based on material wealth, yet social mobility has stalled, wages are down, a degree is required for a job a lettuce could do and ZHCs that don't pay a living wage abound. For a huge swathe of the population life is shit, yet the constant barrage of materialism and the need to be admired and sucessful on mainstream and social media continues. No wonder people are disenfranchised.

A large number seem to create a fantasy identity online to validate themselves, based on the shit they see in the media. Look at the facebook/whatever profiles of petty criminals/football hooligans/gang members and a lot of otherwise normal people, aping the poses of Z list celebrities and 'gangstas'.  They're the stars of a fantasy world where other people are bit players; that's why filming and laughing at the scenes of fatal accidents is so popular. There's no sense of belonging to wider society, just a small clique of like minded individuals becoming more and more insular.

It's a bit like snakes and ladders. The ladders that pull you up are being removed, the snakes on the internet that slide you towards IS/EDL are everywhere. Innocuous at first (share this if you support "our boys"), leading to ever more targeted and extreme feeds.

Interesting. Where does this distinction come from. Isn't football hooliganism gang violence (without the shit music and baseball cap/bandanas)?  I suspect a large number of IS members are no stranger to being up in court for stabbing people over petty squabbles. Why is a gang member chucking acid over an innocent passer by more deserving of understanding than a football hooligan glassing the same person in a pub?

and:

"Our teenagers" "Our Country"

What do those terms mean in a nation of many cultures, identity politics and mixed messages?

"Our teenagers". Ms Begum is clearly of the opinion the kids torn to pieces by shrapnel in Manchester weren't 'hers'; Begum's mate, whose Dad was burning flags alongside Lee Rigby's future murderer, equally isn't one of 'mine'. I think we'll have trouble finding anyone wanting to claim responsibility for the "muslamic ray guns" kid on you tube. (Although he might have been talking about 'rape gangs, - and the kids in Oldham, Rochdale etc certainly weren't seem as a being of any value by the perpetrators, the police or social services).

"Our country"

Well, it's certainly not mine just because I was lucky enough to be born here, though it's Begum's because she was.

It's a nation that should be a beacon of tolerance and law and order for the world, (but the non-immigrant inhabitants are lazy workshy scroungers and I can't wait to get my Irish passport because Granny was born there).

It's a nation more than capable of hosting a few hundred rabid islamists, thousands of sympathisers and the odd mass murder, but one f*ckwit shoots a labour MP and it's next stop the Fourth Reich.

We defeated the evil of Nazism, but we didn't really do much overall, and the people who fought were racist imperialist war criminals, so feel free to deface any memorials.

I can't even bother to try and understand the sliding scale of who's opressing who this week.

Is it any wonder there's no social cohesion? We're f***ed as a coherent nation.

You keep asking this and I keep saying I don't know what you are on about - other than apparently trying to try and get me to make an accusation against a VC that will somehow implicate them in telling lies.

I've experienced hostile leadership to unions, and I saw next to nothing of that in the institution in question.  Incompetence maybe, but faced with chaos and strangulation by mob action, its hard to look competent.  

Of course the university's public statements are not going to claim a crisis.  What would be "crisis" in any other organisation became normality in ours.  And with the coverage, even expectation, of chaos the best the university could do is present a brave face and give the impression it was business as usual.  This is hardly unusual.

I agree with most of what you say actually.

and you are probably right that I have mis-categorised football hooligans

The point that is interesting to me however is your reference to the non-immigrants (i.e. the "natives"). What concerns me most about singling people out for criticism based on their race or religion is that this misses the point that f*ckwittery is not constrained by such concepts. I am as much aggrieved by the "native" lazy sod scrounging and spending their life in the pub as I am about people immigrating just to take what they can get without putting back. that is probably a different topic however

Law is set by parliament, it should precisely not be made by government / the executive, as this case illustrates. Otehrwise I absolutely agree about the necessity of a slow and orderly democratic process to change laws.

My issue is that the legal body has become a "religion" and a purpose unto itself, and that legal theorists and practitioners ignore and deliberately downplay the notion that the only justification for laws is that they serve a purpose, i.e. social coherence and fairness.

CB

There's a lot of muddy thinking going on here. Apparently it's 'the left' who are responsible for the ISIS brides. But we've had a Conservative government since 2010, when Begum would have been about 10, so how does this work? And - 

Again, how exactly did 'liberal culture' indoctrinate her?  

And can you stop using this generic term 'the left' please, and be a little more accurate? I think you mean 'the hard left', or something similar. Not all of the left are neo-Stalinists and Corbynites. 

I don't think life is shit for large swathes... not by historical and certainly global standards. There's certainly problems, and some of the good stuff is taken for granted, like free education and healthcare.... but on the whole I don't recognise the dour description from you and Wanderer100.

There's a lot of getting angry about stuff on line, by people of all political persuasions. In days gone by we just wouldn't have had that dubious opportunity. Still, for most people we are living in very comfortable times, we'd do well to remember that.

I agree with the above completely, although I think it is part of the same topic.

There are indeed "native" (maybe not good wording on my part, but it beats "indigenous"..) obnoxious, lazy wastes of skin who contribute nothing to society; and there are immigrants who are the same. As far as I'm concerned I dislike such people regardless of race, creed, colour or sexual orientation.

However the media narrative varies depending on the political nature of the publisher. Immigrants are:

A. No good thieving free loaders who hoover up benefits, take jobs, prevent elderly people getting hip reacements and lower house prices;

B. Hard working, industrious, exotic pets that provide cheap childcare, plumbing services and do the jobs the lazy chav vermin won't do (and are far too demeaning for little Tarquin and Chlamydia to even consider).

Both are lazy stereotypes that immediately 'other' both groups. The problems really start when these prejudices begin to distort how people are treated. You then get the ludicrous situation where the 'white working class' (not good terminology either) a group with the lowest number of people entering university and the least chance of social mobility are seen as 'priveleged' compared to a middle class graduate based purely on skin tone.

In reality there's very little different between families on 'white' council estates or in 'black' inner cities. Both tend to have poor educational choices and job opportunities, both are alienated and looked down upon by (admittedly different) parts of society. Both are prey to extemism and searching for an identity, by it in gangs or in far right or islamist extremism.

No argument. However it's not about historical or global standards if you're living in some crime-ridden inner city shithole, bombarded by TV shows where people with normal jobs seem to live in converted warehouses or loft apartments. Imagine living where going into the wrong postcode gets you stabbed, and everyone lives in fear of the local criminals.

I think we're in a unique situation where people have never been more connected with external influences and disconnected from their fellow citizens. I can't remember a time when there was the level contempt for politicians and the legal system that exists today.

But would you refuse to accept a person renouncing nationality as it was against their beliefs ?