The child who sees through a jihadi’s lie

SO Jihadi John is unmasked – as Mohammed Emwazi, a 26-yearold Londoner who has beheaded a number of western journalists and aid workers including the Scot David Haines in the name of Islamic State.

In most people’s books, those actions would make him a brutal, bloodthirsty murderer – an utter monster capable of true evil. But to members of Cage, a human rights group that campaigns on behalf of Muslim prisoners, Emwazi is a ‘ beautiful’ young man who is also gentle and humble.

Cage would like us to believe that Emwazi was radicalised, not by Muslim clerics and foreign training camps, but by the British security services, who harassed and alienated the young man and made him feel like an ‘outsider’. Aw, diddums.

Poor Emwazi is, according to his defenders, simply misunderstood. He was pushed into all this beheading and murdering by the nasty security services, who had the audacity to prioritise the safety of the British public over the feelings of such a delicate little flower.

Cage’s argument is nonsense, of course. Apart from anything else, it is offensive to the millions of moderate Muslims who live in this country to say that because British authorities treated Emwazi like an ‘outsider’ he was turned i nto a bloodthirsty monster.

Radicalisation and the road to becoming a murderous extremist is complex and individual. It does not begin, or end, with a question-andanswer session with MI6. Emwazi would no more have changed his tune had he not been monitored by the security services than a great white shark would have planted a kiss on your cheek if you sat it down, told it how much it was loved and patted it on the nose. There is no way back now for Jihadi John – and I’m not sure there ever was.

How remarkable, then, that it took a 17-year-old teenager from Scotland to cut through all the drivel and say what so many of us were really thinking about Emwazi.

Murdered David Haines’s daughter Bethany said this week that she will only feel closure ‘when there’s a bullet between his eyes’.

Such simple words, yet enormously powerful.

There was a power, too, in the words of James Foley’s mother Diane, who said that she forgave Emwazi. I hope her words utterly shame him.

Mr Haines’s wife, Dragana, takes a different view to her stepdaughter, saying i nstead that she wished Emwazi were captured and put on trial.

I feel that this may be a mistake – a show trial of such a visible member of IS would serve only to turn him in to a martyr. The world would be a better place without Jihadi John in it. He is better off dead.

How extraordinary that it took a grieving 17-year-old who misses her daddy to point that out.