The most severe critics of Sajid Javid’s decision to revoke Shamima Begum’s UK citizenship say that he effectively killed her baby. Anyone who saw her TV interviews will have found her hard to like. Some of her comments supporting terrorist attacks were monstrous. But people who have been recruited into cults believe and say monstrous things. It does not make them monsters – the real versions of themselves and everything they may have believed were destroyed when they were radicalised or, to use an old-fashioned term, brainwashed.
Four years after Begum was indoctrinated into Islamic State, the teenager showed all the signs during her recent interviews of having been under cultic influence. Her head was tilted down, she used monotone speech conveying no emotion and her manner was detached and cold. When she did eventually look directly at the interviewer, it was clear that the windows to Begum’s soul were long closed. The most damaging thing she said that secured her banishment from her homeland was that she “wasn’t bothered” by the sight of severed heads in bins in Syria. She spoke as if what she was saying was totally normal, as if expecting sympathy.
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