The Unreasonableness of Douglas Murray
In a recent article Douglas Murray berates people like Shamima Begum who want to play for the Away and the Home team and, when the Away team loses, unreasonably wants the benefits of being a member of the Home Team. In doing so he doesn’t appreciate that he crystallises the British problem. He goes on to give away the fact that he is almost aware of its nature by adding “True there is one complicating factor, which is that she was 15 when she left the UK and headed to join the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria.”
This reveals an unreasonableness in Murray. He is part of the baying Home crowd that demands that children make decisions in impossible dilemmas he never had to face. The very fact of Begum’s crimes having been initially committed by someone who is technically a child and that we are arguing about degrees of responsibility she had reveals the precise nature of the problem.
Let’s wind back to anatomise the problem that Begum is. The Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim communities are not here by accident. They (rather than, say, Vietnamese or Algerians in France) are here as a direct result of the British Empire ruling India. When partition came and grizzly bloodshed between Hindus and minority Muslims the latter fled centrifugally to East and West Pakistan and to Britain. This meant that religionists of a religion which defines itself by its adherents' primary loyalty being to the nation of Islam rather than to any geographical and cultural nation were welcomed here. This was probably right as we had some responsibility for the problem. It should, however, have been recognised as a problem at the outset as it was bound to result in divided loyalties, Home and Away team mentalities and a sundering psychological schizophrenia awaiting all those born on these shores within its influence. A properly conservative and confident United Kingdom should have challenged and tested this problem uncompromisingly (there are resonances here of the things for which Enoch Powell took the country to task at the time when many of the Pakistani Muslims were first arriving). Forcing people to swear oaths of first allegiance to the Crown or leave to pursue other allegiances elsewhere sounds medieval or, perish the thought, American. However, it is what we should have done as the problem is precisely one of divided allegiance and its awful consequences.
Instead Labour governments and weak Conservative ones preferred the virtue-signalling fudge of multi-culturalism. What do we expect of Shamima Begum, born here by our permission and who grew up straight into a family where her father had militant jihadi sympathies? Do we expect that child to have the Olympian moral discernment of Douglas Murray at the age of 15 that would have allowed her to reject her father and all his works (having known nothing else), run away and set herself up as a nice little English girl in a bedsit? Instead of that there was a seamless transition from the impossible dilemma she grew up with into the horror story of seeing the products of beheadings in bins (and being obliged to give unequivocal opinions on them), being married to a Dutch terrorist at 15 and giving birth to three children who all died. I’d say she is the British failure of grip and responsibility personified. She is the product we made. In addition to the other horrors further ones are added. A frightened, onside Muslim Home Secretary publicly tries to wash his hands of her by forcing her back to where she never came from – Bangladesh, and a British public which wants to concentrate all punishment for a very British failure in her person in a way which will do nothing to solve a problem which is bound to continue repeating itself.
In a recent article Douglas Murray berates people like Shamima Begum who want to play for the Away and the Home team and, when the Away team loses, unreasonably wants the benefits of being a member of the Home Team. In doing so he doesn’t appreciate that he crystallises the British problem. He goes on to give away the fact that he is almost aware of its nature by adding “True there is one complicating factor, which is that she was 15 when she left the UK and headed to join the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria.”
This reveals an unreasonableness in Murray. He is part of the baying Home crowd that demands that children make decisions in impossible dilemmas he never had to face. The very fact of Begum’s crimes having been initially committed by someone who is technically a child and that we are arguing about degrees of responsibility she had reveals the precise nature of the problem.
Let’s wind back to anatomise the problem that Begum is. The Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim communities are not here by accident. They (rather than, say, Vietnamese or Algerians in France) are here as a direct result of the British Empire ruling India. When partition came and grizzly bloodshed between Hindus and minority Muslims the latter fled centrifugally to East and West Pakistan and to Britain. This meant that religionists of a religion which defines itself by its adherents' primary loyalty being to the nation of Islam rather than to any geographical and cultural nation were welcomed here. This was probably right as we had some responsibility for the problem. It should, however, have been recognised as a problem at the outset as it was bound to result in divided loyalties, Home and Away team mentalities and a sundering psychological schizophrenia awaiting all those born on these shores within its influence. A properly conservative and confident United Kingdom should have challenged and tested this problem uncompromisingly (there are resonances here of the things for which Enoch Powell took the country to task at the time when many of the Pakistani Muslims were first arriving). Forcing people to swear oaths of first allegiance to the Crown or leave to pursue other allegiances elsewhere sounds medieval or, perish the thought, American. However, it is what we should have done as the problem is precisely one of divided allegiance and its awful consequences.
Instead Labour governments and weak Conservative ones preferred the virtue-signalling fudge of multi-culturalism. What do we expect of Shamima Begum, born here by our permission and who grew up straight into a family where her father had militant jihadi sympathies? Do we expect that child to have the Olympian moral discernment of Douglas Murray at the age of 15 that would have allowed her to reject her father and all his works (having known nothing else), run away and set herself up as a nice little English girl in a bedsit? Instead of that there was a seamless transition from the impossible dilemma she grew up with into the horror story of seeing the products of beheadings in bins (and being obliged to give unequivocal opinions on them), being married to a Dutch terrorist at 15 and giving birth to three children who all died. I’d say she is the British failure of grip and responsibility personified. She is the product we made. In addition to the other horrors further ones are added. A frightened, onside Muslim Home Secretary publicly tries to wash his hands of her by forcing her back to where she never came from – Bangladesh, and a British public which wants to concentrate all punishment for a very British failure in her person in a way which will do nothing to solve a problem which is bound to continue repeating itself.
My views on this derive from the fact that our failure to be strict and conservative enough in addressing this problem has human consequences. One can say that children like Shamima Begum who make these disastrous errors are just Muslims and so we can dispense with them because Islam is not a very attractive religion. Or, in the western Christian tradition we are supposed to champion and which is supposed to value human life higher than that we can say that she is a British human being first born into a Muslim household on British soil. What we consider her to be, indeed, is the very dilemma we created by accepting Pakistanis in this country. Doesn’t her simple humanity qualify her for our imaginative sympathy? The fact that this is a real human problem is born out by my own experience. I taught a delightful British Muslim boy who was a peer and friend of my son at school. A few years after leaving school he made disastrous choices and was killed in Syria. Presumably the seeds of his catastrophe were already present when he was a sweet-natured and popular classmate. His life had all the ingredients of tragedy.
It is the responsibility of the British state to be more uncompromising with Islam for the sake of truly innocent Muslim children I see playing every day on the Common. For the sake of such children, born and unborn, we should step in and oblige their parents to make a definitive choice; proper allegiance to the Crown here or allegiance to the nation of Islam in an Islamic country. Full-on Islam and all it entails simply should not be allowed here. So integrate or leave. Otherwise we simply stand by and watch the creation of a generation of hopelessly conflicted time bombs and wring our hands or even raise our fists when they go off. We can’t accept that they are born in such circumstances and then blame them for being born in such circumstances.
Shamima Begum should come *home* and be properly and comprehensively owned as the embodiment (complete with stretch-marks and, I’d guess, awful mental health) of a very British problem. We should punish her sins, look after her body and mind, deal with all of the fallout of, and truly own what she is.
It is the responsibility of the British state to be more uncompromising with Islam for the sake of truly innocent Muslim children I see playing every day on the Common. For the sake of such children, born and unborn, we should step in and oblige their parents to make a definitive choice; proper allegiance to the Crown here or allegiance to the nation of Islam in an Islamic country. Full-on Islam and all it entails simply should not be allowed here. So integrate or leave. Otherwise we simply stand by and watch the creation of a generation of hopelessly conflicted time bombs and wring our hands or even raise our fists when they go off. We can’t accept that they are born in such circumstances and then blame them for being born in such circumstances.
Shamima Begum should come *home* and be properly and comprehensively owned as the embodiment (complete with stretch-marks and, I’d guess, awful mental health) of a very British problem. We should punish her sins, look after her body and mind, deal with all of the fallout of, and truly own what she is.
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