Thread by @JewhadiTM

Shamima Begum and the Myth of Islamic Deradicalization frontpagemag.com/fpm/272916/sha…

Shamima Begum is not a traitor to be burned at stake, but a victim perched high on the greasy totem pole of intersectionality. She’s a Muslim, brown-skinned woman of Bangladeshi-origin.

She’s just had a baby in a Syrian refugee camp, as she couldn’t get to a state-funded NHS convenience clinic, so the needle of sympathy on the liberal Richter scale has jumped even higher.

Shamima’s no bleeding-heart Leftie; in fact, she’s remorseless and unrepentant: “When I saw my first severed head in a bin it didn’t faze me at all. It was from a captured fighter seized on the battlefield, an enemy of Islam.”

“I thought only of what he would have done to a Muslim woman if he had the chance,” she told The Times. She has compared the Manchester Arena bombing, which killed girlie fans of Ariana Grande, to airstrikes by the western allies that killed non-combatants in ISIS-held areas.

Unlike libbies who believe in global warming and veganism, Begum believes in Allah and she’s prepared to die as a martyr. She stakes her life on the Koran and Hadith. She is convinced they are divinely-inspired sources of authority.

She believes in Islamic supremacy, in her vocation as a jihadi, and in a country; even better, a Caliphate. This explains why at the age of 15 she slipped out of her London home and hopped on a plane to ISIS Disneyland in Syria.

Begum’s lawyer is playing the victim card, claiming she’s a victim of “grooming and ISIS propaganda.” Predictably, the leftwing Guardian’s editorial is calling her “undoubtedly vulnerable” because “she was groomed online at the age of 15.”

Her family has even suggested that Begum’s reluctance to denounce ISIS may be because of “Stockholm syndrome.” But even by the wildest stretches of semantic elasticity, Begum isn’t a victim.

A victim isn’t free to choose. Morally equating Begum’s free choice to join ISIS with the helplessness of underage victims of sexual violence who were groomed on an industrial scale in England by Muslim men or to ISIS’s Yazidi victims forced into sex-slavery is abhorrent.

She made a free choice to join a group of well-publicized genocidal monsters.

To call Begum a victim is a moral outrage that degrades the entire reality of victimhood.

To label Begum a victim is to rob her of agency and instrumentality, as well as of her faculty to act as a foot soldier for Islam.

The staple answer to the question of solving the problem of returning jihadis is the magic mantra of deradicalization.

Deradicalization is now a cash-fueled industry with its gravy train university departments, academics, social workers, journals and conferences.

It helps politicians to say they are doing something. But where’s the evidence that deradicalization works? In fact deradicalization “is practically impossible” says Prof Boaz Ganor of the Int’l Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism. It only works in a minority of cases, he says

Such programs have been tried with little success in Egypt, Pakistan, Singapore, Yemen, Indonesia, the USA, and European nations. In 2016, two-thirds of jihadis released from British prisons simply refused to engage with prison deradicalization programs.

Despite the billions of dollars spent all over the world on such programs, the success rate of intervention and prevention in decriminalization schemes remains vastly underexplored, the Journal for Deradicalization reports.

Many studies, for fear of being labeled Islamophobic, commit a serious category error and make little distinction between Islamic jihadists, white supremacists, the alt-Right, the Far Right, and neo-Nazi radicalization.

Deradicalization has more chance of success with neo-Nazis than with Islamic extremists. Why? Jihadis use the appeal to authority. Their authority—the Koran—is infallible because (unlike Mein Kampf) it’s dictated from heaven.

Deradicalization is based on the wishful thinking of Western liberalism: humans are basically good; evil is a myth; tolerance, pluralism and co-existence are universal values shared by jihadis;

Islamic extremists are closet secularists and scientific materialists and once we show them the glories of Western liberalism they will beat their AK-47s into ploughshares and their suicide bomb vests into Greenpeace T-shirts.

Deradicalization also assumes the bias of Western progressivism: punishment doesn’t work, Muslims are victims of colonialism and racism, jihadis are victims of brainwashing and can be re-programmed to accept the superior virtues of religious relativism.