Wednesday 25 February 2015

British Muslim girls who run away to be brides of ISIS fighters are certainly brave

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According to Scotland Yard, nearly 20 young British Muslim girls have gone to Syria to join ISIS in the past year. They are brave girls, warlike perhaps, who want adventure and want, like many stroppy teenage girls, to rebel against their families and schoolteachers. 
Some British Muslim girls do this just by wearing a full veil. These have gone much further. Most are under eighteen, in some cases only fifteen, and the BBC and the papers want to stop them going or bring them back. Some kind people are worried for them, others hope that they never return.

The girls should obey their parents, but I don't think we can bring them back. (By the way they are all much older than Muhammed's youngest wife, Ayisha, who is said to have been six or seven when they married and nine when she went to live with him, but this is a digression). 

The girls might find fulfilment with ISIS, perhaps. ISIS fighters are genuine Muslims who take the Koran very seriously, even though their interpretation of it is not the only one. 

I don't agree with those who say good riddance to them - they, after all, are very young. Their behaviour is probably symptomatic of a huge dissatisfaction on the part of young British Muslims with British society. I can offer no suggestion as to what we can do about that.

They presumably see ISIS building an ideal Islamic society. Whether they are sadists, as some teenage girls are, and find the thought of beheading Christians or killing infidels exciting, who can say? No doubt warriors appeal to them and rejecting the country whose passport they carry. 

What I do know is that British subjects should be free to fight in foreign wars, as Orwell and Laurie Lee did in Spain. Or free to go abroad to marry foreign fighters, though only when they reach the age of consent. 

ISIS, by the way, are no worse than the Spanish Republicans, for whom Orwell, Laurie Lee, etc fought, dominated as they were by Stalinists. The Spanish Reds killed countless priests and raped countless nuns. The Spanish Civil War was for Communists a dress rehearsal for the takeover of Eastern Europe after 1945. (Walter Roman, Petre Roman's father and 500 other Romanian Communists took part.) ISIS have not committed as many atrocities as the Spanish Reds, though admittedly it is early days so far.

Some people, like Orwell, left Spain disillusioned with Communism but many others remained Communists all their lives. Some went on to tyrannise Eastern Europe or, in the case of Jack Jones, undermine Britain as a Communist trade union leader who took his orders from Moscow. i remember the BBC sentimentally televising his reunions after his retirement with the other veterans of the Spanish Civil War, no doubt many of them card carrying party members and enemies of their country.

So it will be with people who join ISIS - some will die, some will be wounded, some will return disillusioned, some hardened in their faith. Some will never return.

The girls, despite what so many people, including Julie Burchill, Rod Liddle and others, ​ are saying, have to be free to return too. The great issue is not whether to let them go or let them come back but whether we want more Muslim immigrants in the future in the UK.



29 comments:

  1. Orwell started by highlighting what really were appalling conditions for working people (Down and Out...Wigan Pier) to understanding the corrupting totalitarian nature of socialism during the Spanish Civil War (Homage to Catalonia) and opposed the totalitarian tendencies of Socialism IngSoc in 1984 refers to "English Socialism" I doubt many Jihadists will return and speak out against Islamic terrorism.

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    1. I don't see why British jihadists might not see through jihads out there.

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  2. Ernest Hemingway made similar observations about some of the more brutal strands of socialism at play in the Spanish Civil War in For Whom the Bells Toll. Not that this makes Franco the good guy, but the Spanish were caught between a rock and a hard place.

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  3. Their health and welfare is at risk. They might also have been brainwashed into going. Society is caring of its youngsters whatever their religion or creed (or that of their parents).

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  4. "ISIS, by the way, are no worse than the Spanish Republicans." The game has shifted; modern media has sharpened the stick. The Spanish Republicans could not have posted a video of themselves gleefully burning a caged young man alive for the whole world to see. These women are young, but the grisly evidence is out there for them to know what kind of adventure they are getting into.

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  5. I know teenage girls can be cruel, but these girls are an example of depravity at its most glaring. They need a good talking to and grounding for several years.
    On a more technical matter, I don't understand is how they were able, as miinors, to board a plane in the UK without parental consent.
    marc

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    1. Women are the cruel sex, especially teenage girls, but I don't imagine cruelty has anything to do with their reasons for going. The reasons instead are more likely religion, rebelling against the non-Muslim society in which they have grown up, adventure...all the reasons why teenage boys lied about their age to sign up in the first and second world wars, desire for sex with some bloodstained warrior.

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  6. I agree that the Spanish Republicans were not the angels often portrayed by the left, but I think they fall well short of ISIS in the barbarity stakes..

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    1. The Red Terror in Spain was worse than what ISIS have so far achieved, though it is of course early days. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror_%28Spain%29

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  7. I have to admit that these girls' decision seems strange. But against that, the very existence of a philosophy resembling "Islam" in a modern functioning world full of the sheer wonders of science and engineering, modern medicine, the possibility at least of some kind of freedom mostly most of the time, and all underpinned by the Gospels and the Mosaic Decalogue, is also rather curious. You'd have thought that the FemiNazis would be trashing its name right left and centre.
    David

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  8. (And Orwell fought for the Trots, not the Stalinists. Insofar as it makes a difference)

    Rod Liddle via Facebook

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    1. I know but the Stalinists would have taken power had the Republicans won, I imagine.

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  9. Yes, sure. The point, I suppose, is that the likes of Orwell and the (fantasist) Lee came back and joined the ILP, or the LP. Or indeed the CP. And if they joined the latter then, during the war, they were banged up. And if they joined the two former they contributed to undoubtedly fascinating debates on the BBC. They did not, as a rule, try to blow us all up, or chop our heads off.

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    1. Agreed, but some of them went on to become hugely influential Soviet agents like Jack Jones. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/.../How-Kremlin-hijacked...

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  10. I agree that the Spanish Republicans have been whitewashed by history, but how many Brits who left the UK to fight with them would have known the full picture BEFOREHAND?
    W.H.

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  11. I woukd think that British Muslims who truly dislike British society would be welcomed in any number of dominant Muslim countries,

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  12. Sadly they are not rebelling against their partents - their parents taught them that Islam is good and that they should read the Koran and the Hadiths and follow the teachings and the life example of Mohammed. And that is exactly what these three girls ("straight A students") have done.

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  13. I am not sure there is such a thing as "moderate" Islam. you either believe in the stuff they preach or not. To me as an outspoken gay person, I have good reason to fear this (hence not a phobia) since they, by definition, wish to torture me to death. If the state is not prepared to defend me against the likes of Choudary, then they have breached their side of the social contract and then some.

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    1. Sodomy was a hanging matter in England till 1861, of course. Frank Gelli wrote recently that homosexuality has become a sacred thing in the West nowadays and I think he is right.

      I agree with some of the Muslim critique of Western life and once hoped Muslims and Christians would be allies.

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    2. Fat chance, Sundance.

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  14. Joining ISIS (or any terrorist organization of equal fervor) regardless if your 10 or a 100 years old needs to be the end of the line. The stakes are too high for humanity to take a chance and until the people who go off to join the ISIS cause understand that, there is no hope of stemming the tide. As I have said before in other posts it needs to be a one way ticket to paradise. It needs to be viewed as ridding society of a cancer.

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  15. and when these girls come back as full-fledged terrorists?

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  16. They need to be stripped of their citizenship

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  17. Times are different today and their target is the existence of life as we know it and our society, it is horrible that they should have to go away and die but truly needed to stem the tide of more going.

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  18. interesting perspective, I thought, and some good comments too

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  19. “Why more British Muslims are fighting for ISIL than the Army”, By Zeeshan Hashmi, Telegraph, February 28, 2015 http://bit.ly/1E7gavW

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  20. This is almost cloyingly cringey, but it's true. The British girls might find fulfilment with ISIS. ISIS fighters are genuine Muslims who take the Koran very seriously, even though their interpretation of it is not the only one.

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