HOW COULD SHE SAY ARENA BOMBING WAS JUSTIFIED?
Unrepentant Jihadi bride compares deaths of 22 Manchester suicide bomb victims with those killed in ISIS controlled Syria
SHAMIMA Begum sparked an outcry yesterday after she said the Manchester Arena bomb attack, which killed 22 people, was “justified”.
The teenage jihadi bride said it was “wrong that innocent people got killed” at the Ariana Grande concert.
But she provoked anger by comparing the atrocity to the “women and children” bombed in Islamic State-held Baghuz in Syria.
Begum said they were “being killed right now unjustly. It’s a two-way
thing really because women and children are being killed back in the Islamic State right now and it’s kind of retaliation.
“Like, their [IS] justification was that it was retaliation so I thought ‘OK, that is a fair justification’.” It’s kind of retaliation.”
She added: “I do feel that it’s wrong that innocent people did get killed. It’s one thing to kill a soldier that is fighting you, it’s self-defence, but to kill the people like women and children.”
IS claimed responsibility for Salman Abedi’s suicide bomb attack at Manchester Arena on May 22, 2017, which killed 22 people, including children.
Begum, from Bethnal Green, east London, is claiming repatriation from al-Hawl detention camp in Syria. She gave birth to a baby boy over the weekend. She fled with two school friends to Syria in 2015.
Begum, who married a Dutch radical, admitted being unfazed by the horrors of Islamic State, but said she wanted to leave now because of her baby.
“They don’t have any evidence against me doing anything dangerous. I never made propaganda, I never encouraged people to come to Syria. They don’t really have proof that I did anything that is dangerous.”
Her lawyer Tasnime Akunjee yesterday claimed the authorities could have prevented the 19-yearold British mother fleeing her home to join Islamic State four years ago.
Mr Akunjee said officials were guilty of “catastrophic” failures in discharging their duty of care to the then 15-year-old schoolgirl.
Without acknowledging that her family and those closest to her were probably best placed to spot the changes in Shamima, he claimed police, teachers and social services knew the teenager, and the two friends with whom she fled, were at risk of radicalisation because one of their schoolfriends had already gone to Syria. He said: “We need an urgent inquiry into how Shamima Begum ended up in Syria along with her school friends.”
Begum’s interview yesterday sparked outrage from Nikita Malik, director of the Centre on Radicalisation and Terrorism at the Henry Jackson Society, who told the Express: “This is nothing but a blame game. The Bethnal Green girls actively sought out the very IS propaganda that their defenders are now claiming radicalized them. The choice to join IS was Ms Begum’s – as she herself admits.
“Nobody made Shamima Begum get on a plane other than herself – she knew what she was doing and was capable of making her own decisions.” Mr Akunjee said she followed classmate Sharmeena Begum to Syria. Sharmeena was a pupil at the same East London school, Bethnal Green Academy, as Shamima and her friends Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, and joined IS two months earlier.
The lawyer claimed Tower Hamlets Council council, then led by Mayor John Biggs, should have conducted a serious case review into the girls’s flight.
He said the authorities failed to order a review, even after Khadiza died in a Russian air strike on Raqqa three years ago.
“It is almost inconceivable that to date no agency has been investigated let alone held to account for the litany of failures that resulted in the Bethnal Green schoolgirls managing to travel to ISIS.
“To my knowledge, neither the Begum family nor any of the other families affected have ever been contacted as part of a formal inquiry that led to these failures.”
He was backed by Dal Sabu, a former Met chief superintendent who was once the force’s most senior Asian officer.
“This has been a catastrophic failure in safeguarding.” he said. “It is extremely concerning.
“There has been no independent review and nothing to suggest that lessons have been learned or that safeguards have been put in place to ever stop this happening again.”
But Ms Malik added: “Any attempt to blame the council, the police and her school is nothing but a cynical attempt by Ms Begum’s supporters to help her shirk responsibility for her own actions.”
Imam Farhad Ahmad of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, said Miss Begum should express sincere regret for joining the terror group and undergo re-education of she is allowed back.
He added: “We should ensure she is not a threat for the country but we must also allow criminal justice to take course to determine if crimes have been committed. If she is released into society she should be monitored carefully for a long period and things like internet access should be restricted or carefully monitored. “
Last night, Shamima told ITV News she did not understand why she would be considered a danger and expressed “regret” for anyone affected by the actions of IS.
She said: “I’m a 19-year-old girl with a new born baby. I don’t have any weapons; I don’t want to hurt anyone even if I did have weapons or anything. he has no proof that I was a threat other than that I was in ISIS, that’s it.
“I don’t know how I would be seen as a danger. I’m not going to go back and promote people to go to ISIS or anything, if anything I’m going to encourage them not to go because it’s not all it seems in their videos.
Regret
“I do regret it because when I went I thought I was going to make a family and I didn’t realise what the things they were doing that they weren’t showing in their propaganda videos, and I actually do regret it, I do feel bad for anyone who was affected by the actions of ISIS.
“Even if ISIS were to gain territory all of sudden now really quickly I wouldn’t want to go back.
“The things that I’ve learned about them recently because for the first three years I just didn’t know realise the injustice that was going on to Muslims and nonMuslims in the Islamic State but now that I’ve learned I don’t want to go back.
“I don’t want to put my son through that either.”
AS THE Shamima Begum case develops, it moves through the looking glass into a jaw-dropping world of moral distortion. This teenager – her attitude part recalcitrant, part vacant – is losing any sympathy she might have had as a self-styled “victim” with each utterance.
She admits she knew of IS atrocities prior to leaving the UK. She has named her new-born son Jerah, the name of an infamous 7th-century warlord. She believes the atrocity in Manchester should be seen as retaliation for the multinational bombing of IS-held sites.
And her lawyer Tasnime Akunjee is making it far worse with his advice and own grim record: slandering Theresa May as having “Nazi blood”, boasting contacts with Islamist organisation Cage, blaming security services for “creating” Lee Rigby’s killer and even comparing Begum to a First World War soldier with shell PTSD.
This is classic fundamentalist behaviour: self-justificatory rhetoric designed to prove the UK’s bad faith, and not to be taken seriously. But it certainly won’t raise any sympathy, public or governmental, for this controversial case.