Don’t let this baby’s brutally short life be used in a blame game
CONcEIvED in a warzone, born in a refugee camp, dead of pneumonia before he was three weeks old. Jerah Riedijk’s life was brutish and short, another war baby whose existence was over before it really began.
His mother, Shamima Begum, had feared her third child – like her first two – would perish. ‘This is really not a place to raise children, this camp,’ she said in the days before his death.
And whose fault might that have been? This is now the issue.
Following the decision of Home Secretary Sajid Javid to strip Miss Begum of her British citizenship, and thus leave her potentially stranded in the al-Hawl camp in northern Syria, it has been sickening to see those playing the blame game and trying to make political capital out of this tragedy.
It was never reasonable to expect Britain to rush to mother and baby’s rescue in a dangerous situation with no consular access, even if she had been returned here to face due process, were it possible.
Yet even hardliners who wish that Begum and others are cast to their fate without help from the UK must have wobbled when they heard of the demise of her helpless newborn. The death of an innocent baby changes everything, yet the impulse to use this tragedy as part of a propaganda war is unedifying.
Labour’s Diane Abbott has claimed Jerah’s death is a ‘stain on the conscience’ of Mr Javid and this country, while conservative MP Phillip Lee said that he was ‘deeply concerned’ by Mr Javid’s decision, which was ‘ driven by a sort of populism’.
If Dr Lee means that most ordinary Britons don’t want to see Miss Begum back in this country anytime soon, then I think he is correct.
Others have also mentioned the ‘populism’ of the Home Secretary’s decision, and it feels like a sneer to those of us who support him; a supercilious insult direct from the moral high ground, by those coddled in the glow of their ethically-sourced liberal opinions.
We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if Shamima Begum were male.
Any man who had shrugged at seeing decapitated heads in a bin while celebrating and supporting murderers would have been banished without a second thought.
Yet because she is naught but a woman, she is given the benefit of the doubt.
What was the Home Secretary to do? After everything Miss Begum said, there were and are real concerns about letting her back into the UK. After all, it might be the end of the caliphate, but it is not the end of Isis.
Begum’s son was one of nearly 100 children of Isis fighters who have died fleeing from the battle in Baghuz, Isis’s last remaining Syrian enclave. Even once they reached the camp the vulnerable young were still at risk, dying due to a lack of food, water and healthcare. Perhaps Jerah had a marginally better chance of survival than Begum’s other two babies; a daughter and a son who died of malnutrition and unspecified illness out on the bomb-blasted environs of Raqqa. But not by much.
Despite the murderous choices of his parents – Shamima and her Dutch jihadi husband, Yago Riedijk – it is still possible to feel sympathy and despair for the death of this blameless mite.
Yet the blame for his untimely death lies with Isis and with the misbegotten path in life his parents took. It is not our fault, it is not Sajid Javid’s fault and it is certainly not the fault of the British Government.
It gets exhausting sometimes. No matter what atrocity is wreaked upon our shores, and despite the indignity and hurt heaped upon our citizens, somehow we are always to blame. It is always up to us to make amends and forgive – never the other side.
WHILE I have sympathy for this misguided young woman who has lost her way so comprehensively, the truth is that terrible actions have terrible consequences. It is desperately sad for a young woman of 19 to have lost three babies, yet her relative youth is no excuse for her taking part in and supporting a brutal regime.
Shamima Begum chose the wrong side, which is why she is now stuck in a refugee camp a long way from home. Yet so many refugees languish in camps around the world having had no choice at all.
She did – and she made the worst possible one available. Not just for herself, but for her three dead children, too. Poor little Jerah. He didn’t stand a chance.