This is not her home. She is a traitor who allied herself with unspeakable evil

Under normal circumstances, a young mother who has lost two children and is heavily pregnant with a third in traumatic circumstances would command enormous sympathy. The fact that Shamima Begum, 19, provokes quite different emotions, many the opposite of pity, is because she left this country to join Isil.

Millions of us will recoil at the notion of Begum being allowed to “come home” as she now says she wants to do. Although she claims she has no regrets about joining Isil, Begum’s lawyers will no doubt be delighted to exploit the very freedoms and human rights that Isil exists to wipe out. This makes otherwise compassionate people very cross.

As is so often the case, the view of the liberal establishment is at odds with the much more sensible general public. Back in October, the terror laws watchdog said that authorities should look to “reintegrate” the “young” and “naive” jihadists like Begum who had travelled to war zones, rather than prosecute them upon their return to this country. An alternative view, of course, is that you don’t let them back in the first place. If you’ve made your bed with a jihadist fighter whose day job includes beheading aid workers and throwing gay people off tall buildings, then you lie in it.

On their February half-term break, exactly four years ago, Begum and her two friends, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana, flew from Gatwick to Istanbul and then on to Syria. Airport cameras captured the girls wearing trousers and colourful sweatshirts, the sweetly casual uniform of any 15-year-old. But their adventure would take them to Raqqa, a place of blood-curdling brutality. “When I saw my first severed head in a bin, it didn’t faze me at all,” she says.

Such chilling insouciance about experiences that would traumatise any normal teenager is explained away as a consequence of indoctrination. Girls like Begum, their apologists argue,

‘You, my heartless little jihadist bride, are a security threat for the United Kingdom’

were “radicalised”. You know, there is a young woman I do feel sorry for. Lucy Henning. Lucy was just 17 in 2014 when her lovely taxi driver dad went to Syria to help deliver aid after being deeply affected by the plight of orphans. Alan Henning was captured and held hostage by Isil for 10 frightful months before they took him into the desert, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, and beheaded him. Lucy prayed her father would survive.

Until she saw a picture of his headless corpse.

Make no mistake, those three Bethnal Green schoolgirls were fully aware of what had happened to Alan Henning and other Isil captives before they set off to marry the fiends who slaughtered them. Talking about videos she had seen of beheaded hostages, Begum says: “Journalists can be spies too, entering Syria illegally. They are a security threat for the caliphate.”

And you, my heartless little jihadist bride, are a security threat for the UK. Thus far, only one returning woman, Tareena Shakil, has been jailed for being a member of Isil, after allowing her toddler to pose next to an AK-47 in Raqqa. The rest are at liberty to raise their children with whatever wicked anti-western beliefs they choose. Other countries are unwilling to countenance that risk. France, which always unashamedly puts its own interests first, has allowed in 150 French jihadists’ children, but not their parents.

Here in the UK, the PC crowd lines up to defend everyone’s rights except our own. Sir Peter Fahy, former chief constable of Greater Manchester police, told Today: “The biggest challenge if she [Begum] did come back will be how the police will keep her safe, and how she wouldn’t be some sort of lightning rod for Islamic and far-right extremists.” Wrong. The biggest challenge will be keeping the public safe. Remember us?

In four years, Begum has supp’d full with horrors, becoming a mother twice when she should have been in the sixth form, enjoying the benefits of the country she was lucky enough to be born in. Now, showing no remorse, she expects to resume those benefits, have her baby delivered by the NHS and accommodation provided for her in the place she suddenly chooses to call home.

It’s not her home. She has betrayed it. She has allied herself with unspeakable evil. It’s quite simple: we don’t want people who think like her living among us. Such sympathy as we have belongs to Lucy Henning, to all the victims of Isil. Not to a girl who betrayed her country and chose a life of sleeping with the enemy.