Comment
JANE MOORE
Jihadi bride Shamima Begum must hand son to her family where love, not hate, rules
SHAMIMA BEGUM was the same age as my youngest daughter when she took the decision to leave the comfort of her family home and travel to Syria as a jihadi bride.
Why? Religious indoctrination played its part but undoubtedly, so too did the romantic ideals of a 15-year-old girl who watched a couple of IS propaganda videos featuring fired-up jihadi fighters and naively flew off to wed one.
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Within ten days of landing, she was married to Dutch-born Yago Riedijk, then 23, who’d been brought up in a “lovely” middle-class family in Arnhem before converting to Islam and joining IS.
Tellingly, Shamima says he treated her “really well”, that she still loves him, and “I wouldn’t have found someone like him back in the UK.”
In other words, in her deluded young head, a convicted terrorist was quite a catch.
But fast-forward to now, and by her own admission, 19-year-old Shamima is “not the same silly little 15-year-old schoolgirl who ran away from Bethnal Green four years ago.”
She says that the whole experience — including losing her first two children and seeing a decapitated head in a bin — has “made me tougher, stronger”.
And as we know from her unrepentant interviews, she feels she has done nothing wrong, displays a breathtaking sense of entitlement when demanding our sympathy, and, most heinously of all, feels that the Manchester terror attack was “fair justification” for the women and children killed in the Islamic State.
LIVING IN SQUALOR
So, as the “tougher, stronger” adult she now is, she must be treated as such and left where she is.
Revoking her British citizenship, as Home Secretary Sajid Javid did, is a good start.
But the letter sent to her parents has made it clear that her family has the right to appeal and all early indications are that they will.
But in the meantime, what of her newborn son?
He’s an innocent and as, by law, his mother — who reportedly has dual Bangladeshi nationality — was still classed as British at the time of his birth, is he entitled to UK citizenship? Or indeed Dutch?
If so, given that we routinely remove children from homes where their welfare is under serious threat, we should have no qualms in removing a baby from a mother who is wilfully displaying terrorist sympathies, has lost two children already — one to malnutrition — and is currently living in squalor.
And if Shamima is as concerned about her baby son’s wellbeing as she claims she is, then she should willingly hand him over to either the UK or Dutch authorities for fostering with a family where love, rather than hate, is the norm.
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Vacuum sucks at Xmas
MODEL Abbey Clancy says she wanted to throttle husband Peter Crouch after he bought her a phone charger for Christmas.
“Can you believe it? I nearly tied it round his neck,” she laughs.
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As a general “happy wife, happy life” rule, all appliances – particularly those related to housework – should be avoided when buying presents.
One friend ended a year-long relationship after being given a tray for Christmas.
Another took the best part of a year to stop crying at mention of the vacuum cleaner she’d been gifted by her husband for her 40th birthday.
“But it’s the deluxe model,” he’d pleaded by way of mitigation.
Having said that, after years of buying The Bloke beautiful cashmere sweaters that went unworn, I thought, ‘I’ll teach him’, and bought him a £25 laminating machine for Christmas.
But he genuinely loved it and set about laminating everything in sight.
One suspects he’d encase me in plastic if I stood still long enough.
Big sparks at Marks
WHEN the estranged wife of Bake Off’s Paul Hollywood bumped into his new girlfriend at a supermarket checkout, sparks reportedly flew and the police were called.
Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells (a shopper in Canterbury actually, but near enough) said sniffily: “It’s just not the sort of behaviour you expect at Marks and Sparks.”
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Ah, so it wasn’t just any old, low-rent ding-dong – it was an M&S fight.
When a kiss was OK
FORMER US sailor George Mendonsa has died at the age of 95.
George, from Rhode Island, was in Times Square to celebrate the end of World War Two when he grabbed dental nurse Greta Friedman for the now famous, impromptu kiss.
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They had never met before.
Luckily for George, it was 1945 and his wholly innocent gesture rightly became an iconic image.
If he attempted it now, it would no doubt go viral on the nuance-free echo chamber that is social media, accompanied by a #MeToo hashtag and calls for him to be prosecuted for sexual assault.
A rather secret seven
RECOGNISE this man? Ooh, hang on, you’re probably thinking...
Is it my building society manager? No, wait... Eric Pickles’s younger brother?
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Or... was he Father Christmas at that grotto I took the kids to last year?
Damn. OK, give up.
Unless, of course, you live in the constituency of Ilford South, in which case you’ll hopefully recognise Mike Gapes, the man who’s been your MP for the past 27 years.
But otherwise, therein lies the problem for the new “Independent Group” of seven MPs who have courageously quit Corbyn’s “institutionally anti-Semitic” Labour party – most of us will only recognise two of them, Chuka Umunna and Luciana Berger.
And until some recognisable big hitters jump ship, they’ll struggle to gain traction with an electorate that – regardless of being left or right wing – currently feels that all politicians blend into one.
In the meantime the, er, magnificent seven are in search of a catchy name, and of course, New Labour isn’t an option – not least because they are branding themselves as centrist and hoping to attract disaffected MPs from other parties too.
“Central Perk” perhaps? “Middle-earth”?
“Centre Forward” with Alan Shearer as brand ambassador?
Suggestions on a sustainable postcard please.
SCRAPING OR CHUCKING MOULD
THERESA MAY says she scrapes any mould from the top of jam and eats the rest.
Ditto. Same goes for simply slicing out the green bits on a loaf of bread and consuming milk/eggs that are out of date but pass the all-important sniff test.
All of which makes my millennial offspring recoil in disgust.
Asked where fond jam-maker Jeremy Corbyn stands on this divisive issue, a spokesman says: “He personally never gets to the point of scraping or chucking mould.”
Yawn.
As one wag pointed out, it’s a blatant attempt to appear superior without actually settling the issue in question.
Much like his position on Brexit.
Talking of which, doesn’t the impasse on Brexit merely reflect how reliant the majority of politicians have become on the EU telling them what they can and can’t do?
And that now they have to make decisions themselves, the leadership skills required to do so are sorely lacking?
MOST READ IN OPINION
Cheers to cleaner keef
ROLLING Stone Keith Richards says he is cleaning up his lifestyle.
“I’ve knocked the hard stuff on the head,” he declares.
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So what does his tough new health regime involve?
Er, “a little wine with meals, and a Guinness or a beer or two”, no exercise, as he doesn’t want to damage his joints (bodily, not cannabis-filled, one assumes) and a continuing cigarette habit because “I just pick them up and light them without thinking about it”.
Bless him.
When it comes to clean living, he makes Rab C Nesbitt look like Elle Macpherson.
Shamima Begum - Letter explains ISIS bride has been stripped of British citizenship despite begging to come back after fleeing to Syria
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