It is indeed good news that the jihadi savage Shamima Begum is to be subjected to the process of removing her British citizenship, a process that HM Government are starting to set in motion. Neither Britain nor its peoples need or want Begum back in the UK. She is an unrepentant ISIS supporter and definitely not a person who would be conducive to the public good.
Begum is not only likely to be a security risk herself if she came back to the UK, but is also likely to be an inspiration to other Muslims who are radicalising. If brought back to the United Kingdom it is quite possible that she would end up as some form of seed crystal for greater and more damaging local Islamic savagery. There would in addition be massive and wasteful costs involved in bringing her to the UK. She would have to be constantly monitored by the security force and her child would have to be paid for and cared for by the taxpayer. As it is unlikely that she would ever be in a position to contribute to the country, we would face paying Begum a lifetime of welfare and housing her.
HM Government is very lucky that in this case Begum is likely to be classified as a dual national with rights of citizenship in both the UK and in Bangladesh, a country that both her and her equally dubious family hail from. If she was merely a citizen of the UK and not a dual national then we would be stuck with her as it is forbidden under international law, namely the 1954 and 1961 Statelessness Conventions, to remove someone’s citizenship and render them stateless. There are exceptions to this iron rule, but they apply in such narrow areas such as the person being involved in a provable war crime, that to all intents and purposes it would be impossible to exclude Begum from the UK if she only possessed British citizenship.
Although like many I am celebrating this morning that the Government has decided that Begum is too dangerous to return, I know that this decision by the Government is only the start of a very long process to keep Begum out. I have little doubt that the decision by the Government will be challenged in the courts and in the Special Immigration Tribunal. It is also likely that a whole tribe of lawyers who believe in human rights for inhuman savages will be offering their services to the Begum family, either on a pro bono basis or funded by the taxpayer or by wealthy leftist and Islamic organisations.
In my view the Government has made the correct moral, political and security decision in the case of Begum but months or even years may go by until all appeal avenues are exhausted and we can be truly free of this jihadi savage. We still face the possibility, and not a small one either, that legal machinations will end up allowing Begum back into Britain once the public fuss has died down. We who are opposed to Begum and her ilk need to be on our guard about this sadly very strong possibility. I also hope that the exclusion of Begum sets a precedent. It would be good to see other dual nationals who have been involved in Islamic terror overseas also barred from returning to a country that they hate everything about, apart that is the welfare payments that are showered on these unwanted savages.
If there is one thing that this case has brought to the public’s attention, apart that is from the favourable view that some Islamic communities in the West have for violent religious extremism, it is the deficiencies of the Statelessness Conventions. These Conventions were formulated for a very different time and to counter very different problems from those we face today. The 54 Convention in particular was put together in the face of ongoing refugee and statelessness problems left over from World War II and at a time when the arbitrary removal of citizenship by tyrants like Hitler from Germany’s Jewish population was fresh in the minds of politicians. Prior to the Statelessness conventions people could find that the country that they used to belong to, for example the Baltic States, had disappeared and been subsumed into Stalin’s Soviet Union. People in targetted groups could also find themselves without citizenship in a Western European nation that was overrun by the Nazis. Belgium is a case in point here as people fled Germany to what they thought was safety in Belgium, only to find that Belgium ended up occupied by the Nazis and trapped by them unable to claim citizenship of anywhere. I know of people who lost their lives because they were stateless in a land occupied by a genocidal enemy.
I can understand why the Statelessness Conventions were brought in but I also cannot shake the feeling that they are unfit for purpose in the 21st century and need to be revised and reformed. There are people living today who are protected from Statelessness and exile by the Conventions and that is a good thing. There are after all probably people in Government in the UK at the moment who would love the power to be able to strip Tommy Robinson of his citizenship and exile him from the UK. It’s good that those of such mind do not have this power. However, we cannot ignore the fact that many of the provisions of the Statelessness Conventions prevent us in the West from properly defending ourselves when facing dire threats to our security. I’m not talking about peaceful dissidents in the Tommy Robinson mould, but of those who join violent terror groups such as ISIS or who travel overseas to take part in Islamic terrorist activities.
The Statelessness Conventions were starting to be negotiated at a time when the ‘Red Tsar’ Stalin was still sitting on his blood soaked throne in Moscow and when millions of displaced persons uprooted by war were sitting in camps across Europe in a form of citizenship limbo. The horror of the industrialised mass murder of the Shoah was fresh in the minds of politicians who believed that such horrors could be prevented from repetition by international law and international bodies. Sadly none of the international conventions either on Human Rights nor Statelessness prevented Communist tyrants like Mao killing up to 45 million people. But the sort of problems that drove the creation of the Statelessness conventions no longer exist. There are no genocidal tyrants residing in Berlin or Moscow like there were in the past although Chinese Communism is still a world-threatening problem. The problems the world faces today are very different from those that drove the formulation of various UN Conventions concerning human rights and statelessness.
Those who negotiated and put together the various Statelessness Conventions were not having to deal with massive levels of Islamic terrorism. The framers of these Conventions may not have imagined a situation where a nation had a significant minority of individuals who are technically citizens of a nation but who show zero loyalty to it and go out of their way to destroy the country of which they are citizens.
In the West we do not face the calamity of national governments capriciously deciding to remove the citizenship of those they consider as ‘other’ or as irritants, we face the completely opposite problem. In the West especially there are Islamic communities that due to religious views and theology, actively hate and despise the countries that they live in and in some cases take financial support from. Often this hatred takes the form of the creation of hostile Islamised ghettos, but it is increasingly being the case that the hatred that too many Muslims feel towards the West propels some to take up arms against the nation, either as terrorists on UK soil or the joining of overseas terrorist groups.
Because of the threat that Islamic terrorism and other forms of Jihad pose to Western nations, I believe that it is now long past the time that the international conventions that govern human rights and in particular Statelessness need to be both revisited and reformed. In order to defend ourselves. certain provisions such as preventing the creation of statelessness in cases where people have gone to fight for terrorist entities such as ISIS, need to be liberalised in order to give nation states much more room to manoeuvrer when it comes to stripping Islamic terrorists of citizenship. This leeway should apply not just to dual nationals but to full citizens of a Western nation. It is reasonable to assume that those who have chosen to join ISIS are no longer loyal in any real sense of the world to the nation of which these people have legal citizenship.
I would also like to see some of the provisions regarding freedom of religion for those in danger of being classified as Stateless reformed as well. When these provisions were enacted,the idea that members of one particular faith would take up arms against those of other faiths would have been unthinkable. At the time of the 1954 Convention especially the world was reeling from the mass murder of those with a peaceful faith and of peaceful intent. That is not the situation that we have today.
In our current time we have all too many members of one particular religion, Islam, that are not peaceful and are not of peaceful intent. The various Statelessness and Human Rights conventions prevent countries like the United Kingdom from using the big stick of citizenship removal on those Muslims who are a danger to the rest of us and who it would be better to exile. We cannot for example say to British Muslims in danger of radicalisation that if they associate with certain groups or certain individuals then they can kiss goodbye to their British citizenship. This would be a useful power, subject to due process and right of appeal of course, for governments to reduce the problem of Islamic radicalisation and Islamic violence.
The International Conventions on Statelessness are not bad laws and they were not brought in for bad reasons. However, the world has changed, the threats to freedom and democracy and security are not those that existed when these conventions were negotiated. There is no Cold War today, there are few, if any, sailors on ships who suddenly find themselves without a homeland. There is no Hitler and there is no Stalin and there are not millions of people in citizenship limbo as there were in the immediate decade following the Second World War. I strongly believe that many of the international conventions that were brought into being in the middle years of the 20th century are now unfit for purpose when it comes to countering the threat from radical Islam. It is vital that these conventions are reformed to enable Western governments to properly tackle a vile form of Islam that does not wish to coexist peacefully with other groups, but instead wishes to dominate or destroy these other groups. Reforming international law to recognise that fact would be a useful weapon against an ideology that is as dedicated to destroying the West as Soviet Communism once was.
HM Government has at last grown some balls and taken the steps to prevent Shamima Begum from re-entering the United Kingdom, but it is only by sheer chance, the fact that this savage has dual citizenship, that they are able to do this. There are many many more ISIS supporting savages who have been spawned by Britain’s Islamic communities for whom this factor does not apply. They are full British citizens and we are obligated to take them back under international law. This is despite the fact that these ISIS types are unlikely to be reformed or be able to be reformed. If allowed to return, those who have thrown in their lot with ISIS will continue to be a security threat and along with posing the risk that they could radicalise other more peaceful Muslims or create front groups to push more Islam onto a British population that is increasingly disturbed and disgusted by this violent, disloyal and disgraceful ideology. British governments, an indeed all Western governments, need to be able to exclude and exile those Muslims who have chosen to ally themselves with Islamic terror groups no matter what their citizenship status may be. Shamima Begum is now a problem for Bangladesh, but there are many more Muslims who’ve chosen the route of terror who are still an ongoing problem for the UK as we cannot exile them, cannot get rid of them and are forced to take them back to a country that they hate and where they are plainly not wanted.
