The shame of those siding with Shamima Begum

At last, having kept pretty shtum about it for the past few years, the virtue-signalling set has mustered up some sympathy for women caught up in the horrific Isis vortex.

Unfortunately, though, their sympathy isn’t for the Yazidi women who were burned alive after refusing to become sex slaves for Isis jihadists. Or the Kurdish women who found themselves living under the brutal misogynistic yoke of the Isis empire. Or the Syrian and Iraqi women whose husbands and sons were beheaded for adhering to the wrong branch of Islam. No, their sympathy is for a woman who supported the movement that did all those things. Who provided moral succour to the Isis barbarians. Who rejected her nation, her community and her family to throw her lot in with the Islamist death cult that gleefully slaughtered women and girls, including here in the UK.

Yes, they are sympathising with Shamima Begum. The 19-year-old Isis supporter. The woman who says the mass murder at the Manchester Arena, one of whose victims was an eight-year-old girl, was ‘retaliation’ for Western attacks on Isis and was justifiable on that basis. The woman who said she wasn’t fazed by the sight of severed heads in dustbins because the people who those heads belonged to had sinned against Islam and therefore deserved to die. The woman who stayed in Raqqa, and said it was a good place to live, even as the rulers of Raqqa were enslaving Yazidi women, putting dissenters’ heads on spikes, and executing barbaric attacks everywhere from Mosul to Nice to London Bridge. That woman — that’s the one they feel compassion for.

Actual compassion too. Treat Begum ‘with compassion’, says a Guardian headline. Across the broadsheet media and in leftish political circles, Begum is being talked up as a victim.