Insisting it’s wrong to give her a ‘platform’ is childish: I’m Not a Monster illustrates issues that may come to affect many, says Guardian columnist Zoe Williams
Insisting it’s wrong to give her a ‘platform’ is childish: I’m Not a Monster illustrates issues that may come to affect manyabout Shamima Begum, he visits a camp where the young woman from east London was once held. They call it the “mini-caliphate” because scores of children, radicalised by their mothers, hurl rocks at whomever they perceive as the infidel.
It’s a bit ham-fisted for my tastes: I don’t need a parable to understand that a five-year-old can’t be held responsible for his own radicalism, nor that he could be won round with kindness. I’ve met five-year-olds. It is bizarre to me and dangerous for many citizens of the UK that none of the supreme court or Special Immigration Appeals Commission appear to have met any 15-year-olds.
Even if we were to accept that her repentance is fake and her zeal for the caliphate as strong as ever, that would still mean accepting that the assembled forces of British security and its penal system were no match for her. And if we accepted that, we’d have to consider it much safer for this lifelong fundamentalist warrior to live in Syria, unmonitored by security services, than in the UK at her Majesty’s pleasure.
Taken in the round – the way they were groomed and gulled by IS agents, the way they were failed by security services – these girls did not have the protection that any citizen of the UK deserves, and there is no crime so heinous they could have committed that would exculpate the state for that failure.
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