ISIS Bride Shamima Begum, who had once fled her homeland in the UK to join ISIS, has now come up with a reason to defend why she had joined the terror group six years ago. Shamima Begum, currently fighting a legal battle to enter her erstwhile country, the United Kingdom, said the difficult relationship with her mother “who did not make her feel loved” pushed her to join the Islamic terror group, reports Daily Mail.
In the documentary ‘The Return: Life After ISIS’ which premiered in the US, Shamima Begum described herself as the ‘black sheep of the family’ growing up and claimed that the difficult relationship with her mother, who did not make her feel loved, was one of the reasons for her to join the ISIS. Essentially, Begum held her mother and her ‘lack of love’ responsible for her decision to join the terror group ISIS.
Narrating her story, Begum said that she started watching videos of Syrians being bombed, which made her feel ‘guilty’ and want to defend Muslims. Shamima Begum, infamously referred to as ISIS Bride, revealed, “It just made me sick to my stomach that this was going on in the world and no one is doing anything about it.” Interestingly, while she talks about how she wanted to “defend Muslims”, she seems to momentarily forget that she had earlier said that she joined ISIS because she felt unloved and gives us a window into her radicalisation.
She said that she always wanted to be part of a Muslim community because when she was young, however, she always felt like an outsider in her community.
“So I just wanted to be a part of something my friends started practising (Islam), and they helped me come into the religion as well, and it just started with like learning my religion,” she said.
“And then it turned into wanting to come into Syria, wanting to help the Syrians,” Shamima said in the 90-minute documentary that premiered this week.
Six years back, Shamima Begum ran away from her east London home and went to Syria to join ISIS. Within days of arriving in Syria, Begum was married to Dutch-born jihadist Yago Riedijk, a convert to Islam.
In Syria, she gave birth to three children, all of whom died eventually, and later was locked up in two Kurdish-run detention camps in north-east Syria, following the defeat of ISIS.
Her citizenship was revoked by the UK government on national security grounds after she was found in a Syrian refugee camp in February 2019. Last month, the Supreme Court blocked her return to the UK to appeal against the loss of her citizenship.
Shamima Begum does a better job than Barkha Dutt in whitewashing terror crimes
Interestingly, Begum’s justification for fleeing her homeland and joining Jihadi-terror group ISIS seems to far more innovative than what some ideologies in India seem to peddle.
Amusingly, in India, the ‘secular liberal’ champions and far-left media outlets have unsuccessfully tried to push similar, but far less imaginative theories by eulogising and humanising terrorists to whitewash the crimes they commit. Perhaps, the most brazen attempt to whitewash the crimes committed by a terrorist was done by none other than ‘illustrious journalist’ Barkha Dutt.
Soon after terrorist Burhan Wani, then Hizbul Commander in Kashmir was neutralised by the Armed Forces in an encounter in 2016, Dutt lost no time in putting out a tweet describing Wani as a “headmaster’s son” instead of referring to him as a Jihadi terrorist. The murderous Islamist tendencies exhibited by Wani had no significance, however, by plugging his father’s profession as a headmaster of a school, Barkha Dutt had tried to show the “human” face of the terrorist to portray that he was like any commoner after all.
Not just this, there have been several attempts by the left-wing media outlets to humanise terrorists and white-wash their crimes so that it is convenient for them to blame the Indian Armed Forces and depict them as some “cold-blooded murderers”. It is also worth mentioning that Barkha Dutt had gone a step ahead to blame the Kashmiri Pandits, who are themselves the victims of Jihadi terrorism, for their genocide and the subsequent exodus of the remaining population from their homeland in Kashmir.
Barkha Dutt had also once tried very hard to peddle the “secessionist” narrative even when the Kashmiris themselves proclaimed that they were doing it for “Islam”. Instead of confronting him, Barkha Dutt steered him to say that he was doing it for Kashmir.
ISIS bride Begum has certainly trumped homegrown ideologues like Barkha Dutt in at least coming up with a far more imaginative excuse for becoming a Jihadi. At least Shamima Begum seems to have made an attempt, even if it is laughable and unbelievable to come up with a sob story that is not already done and dusted. Barkha Dutt on the other hand simply took a page of the Nazi playbook and peddled the ‘economic disparity’ theory while whitewashing the crimes of Kashmiri Jihadis.
One recalls how in a 2004 video, Barkha Dutt proceeded to contextualise the heinous genocide of Hindus. She asserted that one of the reasons for the genocide of Hindus by religious fanatics was because of the economic disparity.
As we had demonstrated in this article, a similar rationale was given by the Nazis of Germany to justify their anti-Semitism and genocide of Jews. Clearly, while Barkha Dutt resorts to plagiarising from the Nazis, Shamima Begum has managed to be original, as far as whitewashing Jihad is concerned. At least on that front, the ISIS bride wins.
