Some interesting ideas buried amongst the chaff, but I am with Ellipsis. Somebody (sorry, I am winding down after a long day and I have read the thread but didn't take notes and I'm not going to spend my last hour scrolling backwards and forwards), somebody said there are 15-year olds who act 18 and Shamima is one of them. Really? She is 19 but sounds immature for 12.
I realise that there are some very brave people sitting between a keyboard and a bottle of wine, but I think she could well have damned herself even with her mild concerns about the changes she has seen in Da'esh. In a camp of 36-39,000, including unknowable numbers of fighters and sympathisers, the journalist was extremely irresponsible to identify her so clearly, way up there with Boris Johnson in throwing. Women under the bus to further their own careers. Ms Begum, knew she could be killed for what she said, but there are posters here suggesting we send people to interrogate her in a country with no diplomatic representation.
Begum was groomed in this country, as Ellipsis pointed out, and trafficked to Syria to be sexually abused and used as a baby farm. That is uncomfortable, but the alternative even more so. Was a child able to leave the country without authorisation through Heathrow without adult help or connivance? If so, who was the Home Secretary at the time? Oh. Messy.
Anybody who thinks there is a world of difference between vulnerable girls groomed for sexual abuse and trafficked within this country and those groomed here but trafficked to another country for the same purpose possibly needs to look at their own morality. Predatory adults; vulnerable children; grooming; isolation from support; trafficking for sex. The difference is the bait: drink and drugs in one case, religion and politics in the other.
She has been in Syria for four years but suddenly we discover she might be eligible for dual nationality. Why did we not check this four years ago? Who was Home Secretary in 2015? Oh, yeah, sorry.
I saw today that her initial response to the Manchester Arena bomb was shock, but she was persuaded it was revenge for Syrian children killed in western air raids. Again she had risked her life for saying the wrong thing but being brainwashed afterwards. Ki
I am going to bed now, but consider the: the BBC have interviewed at least two men who volunteered as adults to go and kill in Syria. They are both back in UK now, one seemingly cross he was not given a medal, the other, the City banker, thinks being arrested for going to act as a hostile fighter in somebody else's country has stopped him getting a new job. My heart bleeds. They went to kill and they managed just fine.