If one of our citizens wants to join Isis, it’s their call. We should just make sure they never, ever return...

FORTUNATELY, Shamima Begum isn’t our problem. But as others are discovering, by the time the dilemma of returning jihadis who are also citizens presents itself, it’s a bit late to start scrabbling for a consensus.

Now, before we in Ireland are forced to debate the fate of our very own Shamima Begum, is the time to plan our response. Before we’re dealing with the divisive complexities of a teenager and a baby in a hell-hole refugee camp, we need a policy that ensures everyone knows exactly what such recruits are choosing when they hook up with Islamist terrorists.

Shamima Begum, in case you’ve missed her, is a smirking 19-year-old jihadi bride now demanding to be allowed ‘home’ to east London, three years after she sneaked away to marry an Isis terrorist.

There’s a lot of support over there for the UK home secretary Sajid Javid’s pledge to prevent the return of radicalised young Islamists such as Begum.

Hatred

It was, after all, another returned Isis supporter, Salman Abedi, who brought home his bomb-making skills and hatred of Western liberties in order to murder 22 people – most of them young girls – at the Ariana Grande concert in the Manchester Arena two years ago.

So apart from the perfectly understandable view that Begum should lie in the bed she made for herself, there’s a legitimate reason to fear the true motives of these people when they seek to return. In a TV interview at the weekend, Begum was chillingly casual about the sheer evil with which she’d engaged. She went to Syria to marry a terrorist and bear children to propagate the Daesh regime. The only reason she now wants to return is that the Isis ‘caliphate’ has collapsed and she fears for her newborn son after her two previous babies died in infancy.

Beheadings didn’t bother her, she said, because they were ‘Islamically’ permissible. She had no regrets about leaving her family to marry a Dutch jihadist, himself the product of an affluent upbringing, who fathered her three babies. She still loves him, she says, he was the ‘best thing’ about life under Isis, and her biggest fear is their great romance might be thwarted if they return to Europe.

Joyless spoilsports that the Dutch and British authorities are, they just might throw a spanner into the love affair between a crazed fanatic, who planned to bomb funfairs in his native Netherlands before fleeing to Syria, and his adoring wife who thinks it’s cool to chop off infidels’ heads with hunting knives. Well, so much for ‘all the world loves lovers’.

The problem for the British government, as justice secretary David Gauke pointed out, is that Begum is a UK citizen and it is not permissible, under interstint national law, to render a citizen stateless, even though she is, by choice, now a citizen of the ‘Islamic State’. But there’s a body of opinion which holds that abandoning Begum to her fate in Syria, where she and her baby are currently living in a refugee camp, will be counter-productive in the fight against Islamist terrorism.

Far from making an example of her to discourage other young women from taking the same path, there’s a fear that her ‘martyrdom’ will boost recruitment for Isis amongst equally deluded teens. Rather than leaving her in Syria, the counter-argument is that she should be returned to Britain, her baby taken into care under laws that prevent radicalisation of children, and she herself be put on trial on terror-related charges.

Deterrent

As she rather smugly points out, though, there’s no actual evidence that she engaged in terror-related activities. ‘I was just a housewife,’ she simpered. ‘Stayed at home, took care of my husband, took care of my kids. I never did anything dangerous, I never made propaganda, I never encouraged people to come to Syria as well. They don’t really have proof that I did anything that is dangerous.’

And there’s the rub, because she’s right. There is a good chance a British court would acquit her, taking into account her age when she first went to Syria, and the difficulty of proving that she was acting entirely of her own free will. At the very least, they’d almost certainly impose a lenient sentence once her lawyers had argued that she was misled and vulnerable. And a couple of years in a comfortable English jail won’t be much of a deterrent for the next Shamima Begum.

The chances of de-radicalising her, back home, have to be slim. That means the UK taxpayer faces a huge outlay in the cost of attempting to rehabilitate her and keeping her on a ‘watch list’ for years. She has shown no remorse, and speaks of her time among terrorists as if it were a on I’m A Celebrity. ‘It’s changed me as a person,’ she said, ‘it’s made me stronger.’ The husband, Yago Riedijk, is still on the loose, and surely determined to reclaim the baby born to be a jihadi just like his dad. The ongoing risk Begum poses to UK citizens is unquantifiable.

Unlike the British, we have a written Constitution. As well as the explicit rights it confers on citizens, it also grants us socalled ‘unenumerated rights’, or rights that aren’t spelled out but are an implicit part of our contract with the State. All rights, however, are an adjunct to responsibilities, and so, arguably, our Constitution also exacts unenumerated responsibilities. And one of these implicit responsibilities, by any metric, is loyalty to the State, its laws and its way of life. We may need a referendum to spell it out, but the Constitution should provide for the removal of citizenship and residency rights from anyone who wages war on the State and its people.

Terrorist

Already, after all, those applying for citizenship and naturalisation are required to confirm that they have never ‘been associated with, been a member of, or given support to, a terrorist organisation’. Form 8, under which foreign nationals apply for naturalisation and citizenship under the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act 1956, also asks if applicants have ‘been involved in, supported financially or otherwise, or encouraged terrorist activities’. They are further required to confirm that they have never, ‘by any medium, expressed views that justify or glorify terrorist violence, or that may encourage others to terrorist acts or other serious criminal acts’.

If such breaches are enough to deny citizenship to a non-national, shouldn’t they be enough to deny it to a native, too? If that was the case, there would be no debate about the likes of Shamima Begum. There is no question but she has supported and encouraged terrorist activities. And she has undoubtedly justified and glorified terrorist violence.

The Shamima Begums of this world seek to exploit the very qualities of Western democracies that they most despise – goodwill, tolerance and compassion. But they would replace them with the oppressive, misogynistic, hate-filled savagery of the death cults they worship. Youth or naivety is no excuse for their behaviour: Begum and the two girls who fled with her had sought out radicalisation on the internet, using the dark web as a form of online dating agency specialising in swarthy terrorist butchers.

Such people need to know, when they choose this path, there will be no turning back, that no bleeding-heart campaign will redeem them – and if it all goes pearshaped, their best hope of mercy will come, not from the society they rejected, but from the sort of people who would go into an arena filled with teenagers, look in their faces, and detonate a bomb.