Shamima: victim or villain?

In 2015, London school girl, Shamima Begum flew to Syria to join the ISIL as a jihadi. She was 15 years old.

She would spend the next few months fomenting terror, recruiting other young women to the holy war against the enemies of Islam and enforcing the ISIL ideology. She (reportedly) carried a Kalashnikov and stitched would-be suicide bombers into their vests so they could not be removed without exploding.

Shamima was in the news again recently following the ruling of the Supreme Court to refuse her appeal to be allowed to return to the UK to fight her citizenship case. The UK will not take her back, apparently it would set the wrong precedent for others wishing to return, others who pose a threat to the safety of the British public. So Shamima is left in Syria, essentially stateless.

As I reflect on her situation, a couple of things strike me. One, if Shamima was white hers would be a different story and two, the nationalism employed as a tool of power if no longer ‘creeping’.

Righteousness and xenophobia

The savagery towards Shamima is, at the surface level, easy to understand. This is a person who joined a terrible fundamentalist faction, eschewing our supposedly shared Western values and waged war on us. Let her rot seems to be the de facto response. I get it. Why should we be compassionate towards a terrorist? Where was her compassion when she was planning to blow up innocent people?

But from an objective viewpoint, Shamima is more victim than villain.

She was radicalised, a process that began certainly before her 15th birthday and possibly long before, when she was a much younger child. She is to be pitied, not vilified. Of course, not everyone decides to become an active participant in terror – she must of receive a trial and be treated accordingly – but to leave her stateless? It makes me question the values we are purporting to protect.

What many see as righteous anger, I see as thinly veiled fear.

Shamima has a haunting vacancy in her eyes. It’s a look you see in veterans and victims of abuse. It’s a sort of calcified mistrust and wariness. It is perhaps the reason Shamima is so easy to revile. Her gaze is empty, framed by the black chador, a blank canvas to paint with our own fear.

But Shamima was a child. Radicalised as a child. Married as a child. Imprisoned as a child. Shamima has given birth three times. All three of her children are dead. She has spent her youth in detention centres in the Middle East. She is broken and alone.

I do not care if Shamima still wishes death upon the west, I believe she should retain her citizenship and be tried as a citizen. I do not care if it makes prosecuting other terrorists more complex.

If Shamima was white, her story would be different. She would be spoken about with pity. Our ire would be directed towards her radicalisers. The media would angle for her redemption. She’d make a documentary with Stacey Dooley. But she is brown. So there is no pity, only fear and ugly glee in her desolation.

Nationalism as a political tool

The left wing often refer to a ‘creeping nationalism’ in the UK. They have done for many years. The idea of ‘creeping’ interests me. It qualifies nationalism as having a sort of slow sentience, a moving quality, as though nationalism is moving across our island like a fog.

What is absent from this narrative is the very deliberate employment of nationalism as a tool by Johnson and Farage and a host of other cynical, power-drunk players.

Nationalism is a useful tool. We have instinctive fear of those who are different to us. It was a biological necessity I suppose. The algorithms of Facebook recognise the power in directing fear (albeit for the benign objective of clicks) and so do some politicians. It’s central to project fear and has been employed more and more openly since people like Berlusconi illustrated its potency in modern politics.

This nationalism sets the tone for how the media handles the Shamima Begum story; devoid of compassion and in some cases vindictive. Is that who we are? Is the world really as simple as us and them, black and white, good and evil, the west vs the rest? There are insidious people who would have you believe that, but it is untrue.

Shamima is not a monster. She is one of the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society. Ghandi said “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members’. If this is true, Britain doesn’t feel very great at the moment.