James Delingpole James Delingpole

Straight to hell

Plus: why Channel 4 was right – the main players on Bake Off, even the mighty Mary, were expendable

No, The State (Channel 4) wasn’t a recruiting manual for the Islamic State, though I did feel uneasy about it throughout the four episodes. The fundamental problem is this: if you’re going to make a watchable drama about bad people doing terrible things, you inevitably have to humanise them. And from there it’s just a short step to making them sympathetic.

Peter Kosminsky’s drama followed four British Muslims to Syria to join IS. Shakira, a black convert with a nearly-ten-year-old son, wanted to apply her skills as a doctor; Ushna was a teenager seeking to be a ‘lioness for lions’; Ziyaad was an amiable lunk looking for adventure; and his mate Jalal was a ‘hafiz’ — someone who has memorised the entire Koran — who wanted to follow in the footsteps of his dead brother and witness the Sharia in its purest form.

Needless to say, each was horribly, brutally disabused. But already you see the problem: here were some quite likeable characters — kind, sensitive Jalal, especially — a million miles from the hopped-up, insensate, savage killers we now see roughly once a fortnight bombing, shooting, slashing, van-murdering innocents for the crime of living a normal western life.

Ushna became a revolving bride/brood mare for a succession of martyrs in whose deaths she was supposed to rejoice. Shakira was first forbidden from working (being a mere woman), then asked to do hideous things like remove both kidneys from wounded enemy soldiers for use in transplants, and also had her son snatched for training by IS’s youth terror division, where he and his mates played football with severed heads. Ziyaad, never quite sure what he was doing there in the first place, ended up driving a suicide truck.

Jalal, however, had perhaps the biggest awakening — trying and failing to reconcile the noble, merciful religion he thought he knew with the hellish one before him that endorsed the beheading of captives and the enslavement and rape of Yazidi women.

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