In my recent post on rent control, I quoted approvingly a comment from someone who said he had come round to our point of view on the harmfulness of rent control while still claiming to be a lefty. “You are not there yet, my friend,” I murmured. “But does not every journey begin with one step? Let us encourage this partial recantation, that it may be reproduced.” Perry de Havilland took a less tolerant view, while still encouraging reproduction. Niall Kilmartin took the middle road:
The naive young lefty, partly idealistic and partly enjoying the ego rush of being the good guy fighting the bad guys, gets successive hints from reality as they grow older. Over time, the accumulating hints force a choice: the idealism _or_ the ego rush; it can no longer be both. The more they shouted their hatred of the bad guys when they were young, the more dubious deeds they did “for the cause”, the harder it is for them to choose the idealism rather than the ego rush (as some college professors well know when they make activism part of the curriculum), but becoming “an apostate” is emotionally hard in any case. It can be a slow process. It can take years. From Robert Conquest to Thomas Sowell, some quite effective people were marxists when they were youngsters. So I’m sufficiently with Natalie to say that signs of doubt should not be discouraged (though I do understand why actual encouragement of those who are still fighting to retain their ego rush even as they admit doubt can sometimes stick in the throat).
If it sticks in the throat to welcome an incompletely-converted convert from an opinion we oppose, how much more so when the defector has joined and then abandoned a literal enemy.
Mother of five begs for rescue from Isis
THE British wife of an Isis fighter stranded in Syria with her five children is appealing for help to return home to Manchester.
In a video passed to The Sunday Times, Shukee Begum, who is of Bangladeshi origin, is heard repudiating Isis as “not Islamic” and telling how she had spent 10 months with her young children in the northern Syrian town of al-Bab, where she taught English to the children of foreign fighters.
She said the final straw was when the US-led coalition bombed the house where they were living, killing seven Isis commanders and members of their families.
While her husband, Muftah el-Deen, was away fighting, she escaped and was given shelter by members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a moderate group opposed to Isis.
Begum, filmed with her three girls and two boys on what appears to be a low-quality video phone, said she left Britain and was smuggled through Turkey into Syria late last year. She claimed her aim was to persuade Deen, who had joined Isis three months earlier, to come home.
This view is typical of the most popular comments to the story:
She ran off with five children to join her jihadi husband and now she says ISIS / Daesh are not Islamic? I might have a bit of sympathy if she said she completely rejected this cult of death, but she’s just saying that now she believes that sadistic slaughter, beheading and crucifixion is going a bit too far.
She wants to come back “home” and no doubt be quite Islamic, but eschew the mindless slaughter of unbelievers. Why should we believe a single word she says?
To which my reply would be that answering exactly that question is the job of the intelligence services to whom this lady will sing like a bird as a condition of being allowed to return. I hope and trust it does work that way and the local consular staff haven’t gone completely softheaded. We want defections and should make them easy but not cheap. It is painful to see crimes go unpunished – and I consider joining a group that boasts of its murders, enslavements and rapes to be a crime in itself – but renegades can help to stop the murders, enslavements and rapes, not to mention prevent the attacks here in the West that ISIS has promised. We have long allowed known criminals to turn Queen’s evidence / State’s evidence for very similar reasons. And her children are innocent.
If she were childless I’d be less sympathetic. I don’t believe her, she took her kids into a war zone! She should be allowed, back then promptly arrested and her kids put in care. Child endangerment is the least of it.
…or sent for adoption by a nice Jewish family!
The intelligence services have neither the right nor the power to prevent her return. She might lose some benefits if not actively seeking gainful employment (were she claiming such benefits) but nothing more. The lady has the right to a family life, and National Assistance. If her return were impeded, she would be likely to win compensation, with Legal Aid. What else are taxpayers for, if not to fund this sort of thing?
I’m with Mr Ed on this one.
IF (and it is a BIG if) the Intelligence Services attempted to pump her for information then it is a pointless exercise. The Politicians have neither the courage or the will to do anything with the information. besides, as a woman in a Muslim environment, she would be kept very much in the dark about anything useful.
her “this isn’t Islam” remark is chickenshit (it’s not even good enough to be bullshit). It IS Islam. Read the Koran and look at the history of Mohammeds life. It is EXACTLY how Muhammed would behave. It is like an SS Concentration Camp guard objecting to working at Maidanek (an extermination camp) but being perfectly OK to work at Belsen (a concentration camp).
She will be a burden oon the taxpayer and is unlikely to bring her children up to reject Islam and its creed.
The contrast between how the UK Government and Diplomatic Service is totally indifferent to white, Christian British people in trouble in other countries and the sainted Muslims is remarkable.
No – she made her bed. let her lie in it and if she wants out, she can return to bangladesh.
Good posting, Natalie, food for thought.
In the case of the bleeding lefty, I’ve already remarked that I think it unwise to take his “lefty” self-description, etc., at face value.
I do think Mr. Kilmartin as quoted has it quite right, in general (not necessarily with the “lefty” in question, of course; that, we cannot know). To me that’s by far the most important point in the quoted material.
And with the caveat that it’s unclear from material presented whether this woman had any real idea of what ISIS is doing and what its actual defining beliefs are, and that we don’t know whether she has any useful info or not, –> I do agree with Natalie’s concluding paragraph.
. . .
Related:
Did anybody see the 1991 American movie Not without My Daughter, starring Sally Field as Betty Mahmoody? This is the story of an American woman who married an Iranian Muslim for love, with no idea of what Muslimism meant in his native Iranian State. It is based on her book about her experience.
Together with her daughter they went to Iran “to meet his family,” etc. (She was reluctant to do this, given the recent behavior of Iran.) There she discovered that she would not be allowed to leave, being the wife of a Muslim, nor would her daughter, over whom, in Iran, she had no parental rights.
I thought it was a good movie. Apparently the viewing public on the whole disagreed.
For rundowns of the plot, reviews and public reception, and claims that it was all “American lies” (you knew that was coming!), see The Foot of All Knowledge:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Without_My_Daughter
Different from the case above, of course, but still it is difficult to know how much either the woman (or her husband?) knew about the reality of ISIS when they left to join up. It is also difficult to know how much, if any, pressure she was under from her husband and, I might conjecture, her (assumed) Bangladeshi Muslim community.
I should also note that the WikiFootia article doesn’t much emphasise the Muslim bit; the focus seems to be on the nature of Iranian law. After at least 20 years since, I have to say that might be correct.
But whether or no, the point is that people do get themselves into messes and also take positions or join movements when they have no idea of what the actual facts are. Sometimes it’s willful blindness, or “evasion”; sometimes it’s having bought snake oil, or it’s for various other reasons.
Not intended as a defense; merely, again, my own reluctance to rush to judgment where the facts as reported are sparse.
Forgiving those who _truly_ repent is moral in my code. How much should be forgiven those who are just beginning to have doubts, or are simply noticing it hasn’t worked out for themselves as well as they hoped, is much more debatable. Adam Smith was right to say that “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent”. Natalie is also right that “King’s evidence” is an old method for getting one guilty person at the price of mercy to another. Sometimes, not doing so would be net “cruelty to the innocent”.
However all this may be little more than a thought experiment, since Mr Ed above has a point: the human wrongs act may mean she has all sorts of ‘rights’ to merciful services at our expense (both of money and of increased risk). Statistically, that does seem to be the side on which error will more often fall these days, though I’m sure there will be many exceptions when the quality of mercy is more strained than it needs to be.
Natalie’s earlier post was about the kind of person who may have done little more than vote for statist policies and advocate them to their friends; how charitably should we discuss their first reluctant noticing of reality? This post is about someone who joined ISIS, did her (minor, language-teaching) bit for it, then found that an airstrike is no fun, plus she claims to doubt the orthodoxy of their views. Assuming this is not a way to reinsert a sleeper (my guess: it isn’t), how should we balance encouraging defectors against condemning evil? A UK without the human wrongs act could have several rights regarding this woman’s liberty, citizenship, access to her children and/or whatever, plus the pragmatic right to waive exercising these for the sake of information. There would also be a moral right to assess her degree of real repentance (if any) and offer or refuse forgiveness. Once you’ve joined ISIS (and taken your children there) my standards for this last get a bit tough. But maybe it’s all just a thought experiment at the moment: the human “rights” act means we have no actual right to decide on that.
Im afraid Im more of the “gibbet’s deter pirates” mindset.
The more miserable examples there are crying about where they are the more the “cause” should lose its appeal.
If it becomes a case of “jihad tourism” where a ticket home is pretending you have quit then you would have the opposite to what you would want.
While I respect your position, and it does contain some logic, Id be more in favour of stripping citizenship the moment they announce their allegiance to ISIS.
Oh, and allowing unfettered migration into western countries will kill them as viable entities. You now have an EU which has abandoned all border controls by irregular migrants, this will not end well.
Well, perhaps I should clarify. I wasn’t discussing what it would be best for the British polity (the British, as a people) or the British State to do about this particular woman, and by “best” I mean best for the British polity specifically. If the woman is “guilty,” as the comments, at least, presuppose, then the Brits must punish her according to their laws. But if she is NOT guilty of anything other than stupidity, naïveté, ignorance, or allowing herself to buy her life or those of her children by going along with demands of her community (see the Mahmoody story), one gets into deep water; because there is a moral effect on the way Britishers see their country, and if they act so as to diminish their moral self-confidence, they find themselves having a harder time drumming up the will to to fight their enemies.
This is an old and very well-known issue, it turns up again and again, the Marxists and anti-Westerners are perfectly well aware of it, and they have used it against the Anglospheric countries (at least) unremittingly since at least the 1920’s.
There is another deterrent to a healthy self-image and the moral self-confidence that accompanies it, and that is the knowledge that oneself or one’s country does not shrink from acting justly, which among other things means exonerating the innocent, punishing the guilty, and trying to find the just thing to do in ambiguous cases.
Partly because of this, we have the principle of “guilty until proven innocent” as one of our fundamental rules in trying to find justice.
In other words, no rush to judgment; to know what is just we must first know what the facts of the particular case are, and until we have those, we have no basis for decision.
So the first point is that as presented here, the facts are really not known. We can say that this is likelier than that, but the observation proves nothing.
But what about our thinking, as individuals? Well, the healthy and not unduly delusional among us do see the creed of “Islamicism” as a real and present danger, since its followers have said and shown over and over that they mean what they say. They do propose to do us in, forthwith. They act on this with violence and with “lawfare” and with shaming. And that quite rightly calls sensible people to fight back.
But given any particular fish that we have caught in the net, such as this woman, we really should ask ourselves what, exactly, do we KNOW?
There are various kinds of reasons for asking ourselves this, but one of them is the purely practical fact that if we make a serious mistake because it was easier and more satisfying to go with the narrative than to find out the hard facts, that also gives our enemies, Islamic and Other, ammunition to use against us.
And it’s harder to think up unequivocal defenses of our actions or our judgments when we’ve acted without due diligence. And we need to have unequivocal defenses in our own minds as individuals judging our own acts, even if other people denigrate them or even keep telling lies about us.
. . .
By the way, I don’t really see “forgiveness” as at issue here. But then, I’ve never understood what “forgiveness” is supposed to mean.
In any case, whether one is in the real situation of sitting on the bench or in a jury, or only conducting court in his own head, the woman’s act as being judged is against a group–a society, a nation, a bunch of societies (Western civ in general). Naturally in principle it affects each individual, but it never occurred to me that the Court has any business issuing or withholding Forgiveness. It’s only about, did the accused do that of which he’s accused, if so are there any mitigating circumstances, and given the answers, what’s to be done about him in terms of justice?
@Julie near Chicago,
As she seems committed to Islam, just not a hot war environment to practice it in, then as she is of Bangladeshi origin, she can return to Bangladesh and live in a Muslim environment which is not currently engaged in a shooting war. She will be happy and so will the majority of British people.
If her allegiance is to Islam and/or Bangladesh, then Britain has no obligation to accept her back or tolerate her creed and the inevitable support via benefits and welfare.
Isn’t it interesting how we are told that someone can simply “self-identify” as a different gender, regardless of chromosomes and genitalia, and yet when a bunch of Muslims decide to follow the Koran exactly, people say they “aren’t really Muslims”? Why can’t ISIS self-identify as Islamic? They have a stronger case for being “real” Muslims than Caitlin Jenner has for being a “real” woman.
If it were up to me, I’d never let any Muslim return from ISIS without denouncing Islam entirely, and I doubt if she has any intelligence of value.
Well, but Phil — Zuhdi Jasser and Irshad Manji and some few relatively vocal Muslims are also committed to Islam, but if you believe them at all, they are not about imposing Islam of any sort on anybody, let alone by the sword or encroaching Shari’ah or misrepresenting history.
Myself, I don’t think it particularly likely that this woman is that far from extreme Islamicism, but the point is that we simply don’t know the circumstances (or if anyone does, there’s been no description of them given here). She asked the “moderate” FSA for help, and got it. I don’t suppose the FSA are MY idea of “moderate,” but then again as quotedit’s the reporter who used the word, not what’s-her-name.
You say she “seems committed to Islam”; my questions are, first, why do you think so; and second, if she is, just what form of Islam is she committed to?
Any number of Political Pilgrims went over to the U.S.S.R and came back to report how wonderful it all was. A few, like Camus, like Muggeridge, came back to report that contrary to expections, it was awful. Should we have lumped Camus and Muggeridge in with the Webbs, Robeson, et al. and ad nauseum? The cases are not entirely similar, but they do bear some similarity.
Perhaps this woman deserves a stretch in Purgatory, not immediate and automatic sentencing to eternal damnation.
We just don’t know.
Meanwhile, again, the British authorities should do whatever the British law demands, assuming it’s not completely cockeyed. I am talking about what we, as private individuals, might consider as we think about the case in our own heads.
Jesus, in the parable of the sheep and goats, and in the parable of the good Samaritan, shows that good deeds will be enough to get into heaven, even if you don’t know any theology, or have heretical theological beliefs. And he pointed out an instance of reincarnation- Elijah had been reborn as John the Baptist, if you decide to believe Jesus.
I see no reason to allow this woman to return. For years I have read the endless excuse making about how this Moslem or that did not understand the realities of life under Islamic radicalism. This is complete rubbish! The facts have been well known for years. The truth is that those of the Moslem faith in general wilfully avoid facing up to their own failings, instead they continually want someone else to bail them out. The Middle East is a disaster thanks to this attitude, one it appears the Turkish leader Erdogan wants to emulate.
To all muslims travelling to join a destructive and murderous regime, please rearrange the following words into well-known phrase or saying:
Your. Make. Lie. Bed. In it.
Even a partial victory of reason over intellectual (and moral) error, should be welcomed.
As long as it is genuine.
If only she and not her children could be the one to pay the consequences of her idiocy.
We indeed do not know, but I’m not willing to take the risk, nor am I prepared for my government to take the risk at my expense.
Two contrasting historical anecdotes from WWII may be of interest.
1) Towards the end of the war in Europe, the allies tried hard (and mostly unsuccessfully) to get German soldiers to surrender (i.e. individually). The US technique of dropping an official-looking pass for the surrendering soldier to present to the allied infantry proved the most effective (i.e. least ineffective) approach. Some of these soldiers may have been less Nazi than their fellows. Others may just have been more cowardly. Surely some were guilty of cruel deeds in earlier years.
2) Before attacking German pillboxes or similar positions, the British army would invite the occupants to surrender if the circumstances allowed. Sometimes, the German defenders would pick off a few of the advancing infantry but then, if the latter worked round behind the bunker into grenade range, realise their defence had failed,. drop their weapons, raise their hands and shout ‘Kamerad’. The traditional British soldier’s reply to them was “Too late, chum!”. The common rule was: if the defenders of a house or pillbox don’t surrender before the assault starts, they never get the chance afterwards.
The common feature is the demand: what does your offer of surrender offer to me, your enemy?
As the woman this post is about speaks English well enough to teach it and lived in Manchester, I’m very doubtful she could truly deserve the excuse of “I was coerced/fooled – I did not know how easily I could have appealed to airport security on the flight out or on many earlier occasions have kept me and my children from this.” (With eager PC help, some immigrant women here are kept ignorant of English and in such cases the excuse is more worth considering.) Natalie and some posters have suggested values (practical and moral) that her surrender/return could be worth to us and these are worth thinking about – cautiously!
Can you, Niall, or anyone else reading tell me whether military law obliges one to accept a surrender? I know that one has to honour a surrender once taken, but does one have to take it in the first place? I once tried to research this question and got contradictory results. Perhaps the legal situation has changed in recent years. Having read many similar accounts to your second anecdote I have no doubt that during WWII the rule of thumb you describe was in place for most belligerents in the West – but were they acting legally?
It’s very easy to find statements that to give an order that no quarter is to be given is illegal under the Hague Convention, but that’s not quite the same thing. I’m thinking of soldiers declining to accept surrenders in the heat of battle.
Yes, I have derailed my own thread.
Natalie, Hague IV 1907 Art 23, it is especially forbidden:
To kill or wound an enemy who, having laid down his arms, or having no longer means of defence, has surrendered at discretion;
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hague04.asp#art23
How it works out in the heat of battle strikes me as imponderable.
Mr Ed, that seems pretty definitive. Er, unless it’s contradicted by something else. It certainly is frequently contradicted in practice. The common opinion seems to be that an enemy raising his hands counts for nothing in the heat of combat.
The laws of war seem oddly vague given how much talk there is about them. Just above the line you quote from Article 23 we have: “To kill or wound treacherously individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army” and yet Article 24 says, “Ruses of war and the employment of measures necessary for obtaining information about the enemy and the country are considered permissible”, which weakens the former line to meaninglessness (and could be read as allowing torture besides). And, oh boy, Article 25 has been honoured more in the breach than the observance: “The attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited.”
(Answering Natalie’s question): a surrender _once_ _accepted_ must be honoured; the status of the former enemy is now that of prisoner and a prisoner must not be shot without cause (e.g. trying to escape). The British Army has certainly always been clear on that.
In WWI, the official British Army’s written order distributed to the troops was (I quote from memory) that “the obligation is upon the surrendering enemy soldier to show beyond doubt that he truly and sincerely intends to surrender” which effectively allowed (and was intended to allow and was well understood to allow) a practically unlimited discretion as to whether to accept an apparent offer of surrender at the moment it was made. This was the British Army’s way of clarifying (or nullifying, if one prefers) the Hague convention (Mr Ed quotes relevant text above) which could otherwise have been misinterpreted (or interpreted, if one prefers) to mean that even German soldiers who were not offering to surrender but were out of ammunition (“… or having no longer means of defence …”) could no longer be shot at.
When it became clear that some soldiers had misinterpreted this order as meaning “the commanding general doesn’t want prisoners” that particular misinterpretation was corrected. Further, from time to time, in WWI and WWII, officers and NCOs exerted themselves to maintain customary unit behaviour of the kind I describe in my post above (not least because it was in a unit’s interests to encourage surrenders) by either exhortation, a quiet post-action chat with a private who’d gotten ‘overeager’ in the recent assault, or by imposing field punishment, as seemed appropriate. I don’t know of a case in either world war where a soldier was formally charged with failing to accept a surrender offered in heat of battle, as opposed to maltreating a prisoner after surrender was accepted (which does’t mean there were none, but I’ve never come across one and suspect there were none).
In WWII, it’s a matter of record that the commander of the British Army’s Jewish Brigade found it advisable late in the war to issue an order saying (I quote bits from an imperfect memory) that “… Experience shows prisoners can be useful in the gathering of intelligence and in other ways …. The taking of prisoners should be regarded as legitimate …”. Other British units had much higher rates of prisoner-taking, but with the customs I note above.
(In the years since, British rules of engagement proclaimed by politicians have sometimes been as absurd as PC can get but i have a strong impression that, in teeth units, unit cohesion rules.)
Niall, if you could find chapter and verse for that WWI written order you mention, and its WWII equivalents, I’d be interested to read it.
A general observation, and one that might help pull the topic back towards my original post, is that laws that are too idealistic for the real world are less effective in mitigating barbarism than more limited ones would be.
Im WW1 Australian units were pretty notorious for showing no mercy to late surrenders.
If a German machine gun squad was firing then tried to surrender near their gun the general attitude was “you killed my mates, screw you” and a bayonet or grenade.
There were also accusations of German prisoners being sent back unescorted during some of the late war advances who were seen/accused of picking up rifles and taking a few shots at the backs of the advancing troops. Might be true, or it might be excusing killing POWs.
In essence i think a surrender has to be early to guarantee the safety of the prisoners.
One of the issues is that in small-l liberal societies, we have a core belief that all religions should be equal before the law. Unfortunately, that leads people to believe that all religions are more or less equal in beliefs and behavior. But when one has a central belief that it is not just superior to others, but is destined to conquer them by force on the way to establishing a worldwide theocratic totalitarian state, well, things get complicated.
So when a Muslim decides she doesn’t like ISIS, it’s not necessarily “coming over from enemy lines” in the sense of surrender. It could well be “I don’t like that incarnation of your enemy, but I am still your enemy.” Even worse, she is very likely either raising her kids to be your enemies, or even if she isn’t, their religion might well lead them to become your enemies sooner or later.
I do not see a simple libertarian solution to this conundrum.
Natalie, where are you going with this? So are quite a few hundreds of million more children in Africa, South America, Asia. Why are hers special? Are you implying we have some special obligation towards them? How is a world in which she stays right where she is (with her children), and, say, a Yazidi widow and her children make into the UK not more just and better?
I agree with Plamus there, and I also reject the suggestion made above that her children should be taken into care. The children have nothing to do with any of this – they are hers, she took them there, and she should now face the consequences of the decision she made, for herself and for her children.
Tough. Darwin’s law sucks when you’re delusional.
Natalie:
Here are a couple of relevant passages from the Canadian army’s study guide for officers. There will be similar passages in the equivalent manuals of the armies of other NATO countries.
But:
As always, military thinking is pragmatic.
Surrender has to actually mean surrender!
More pragmatism.
As always, the distinction between law and statutory law is crucial. It’s unlawful to fire upon someone who has surrendered, but the individual officer or member has to determine the genuineness of the surrender in that particular situation. Legality is determined after the fact by whatever appropriate authority adjudicates the case, and very much hinges on whether the alleged surrender was genuine.
Tedd, thanks for providing those excerpts from the guidance provided to Canadian officers. Are they current?
Plamus, you write, “Natalie, where are you going with this? So are quite a few hundreds of million more children in Africa, South America, Asia. Why are hers special? Are you implying we have some special obligation towards them?” Yes, I am. The children, like their mother, are British. This does oblige the British government to provide consular assistance to them as it would to any British subject accused of a crime abroad, guilty or innocent. The mother might be argued, morally if not legally, to have renounced her British nationality by joining ISIS. That wouldn’t apply to the children. Consider those cases where one parent has gone to join ISIS taking the children against the wishes of the other parent.
Yes, Natalie, that’s another very good point you’re raising.
I phrase it that way because I’m interested in just what British law does say about revoking citizenship, deporting citizens or former citizens, or perhaps not revoking citizenship but revoking some citizens’ “rights” (i.e., legal/statutory rights) to various welfare benefits.
The issue exists here too. Some are all for revoking citizenship for people who go abroad to fight with terrorists, some say U.S. citizenship cannot legally be revoked, and I don’t know. Laird? RRS?
“Denaturalization” is rare, but it can happen.
Natalie:
It’s from my copy, which is about 20 years old now, but I expect that section is still roughly the same. The section on unlawful combatants has probably since been expanded.
Natalie:
It may not according to the current laws (no idea), but it should, in my opinion.
That should be a matter of custody dispute, not of the children’s nationality.
Natalie, I found the actual text of the order I remembered. It was issued by British Army GCHQ in France, signed by the chief of the general staff, on 28th June (just before the start of the Somme battle). After a couple of paragraphs warning that Germans used ruses, that their machine guns on sledges could resemble stretchers and the like, it stated:
“3. It is the duty of all ranks to continue to use their weapons against the enemy’s fighting troops unless and until it is beyond all doubt that those have not only ceased all resistance but that, whether through having voluntarily thrown down their weapons or otherwise, they have definitely and finally abandoned all hope or intention of resisting further. It lies with the enemy to prove his intention beyond the possibility of misunderstanding, before the surrender can be accepted as genuine.” (Army Order Number W.19.A.16 O.A. 104.)
This order was passed to every battalion with instructions to communicate it verbally to all ranks. It was never rescinded and remained in effect throughout the war.
(An easily-accessible source for this is Lyn Macdonald’s book “Somme” where it is quoted at the start of Chapter 22. Lyn discusses that it was at first taken by some soldiers to mean the high command did not want prisoners, and this was corrected while the battle progressed, but she does not discuss the context of wishing to clarify the Hague convention.)
A commenter above mentioned the Australians. A WWI communique issued after a successful 1917 battle stated that one Australian division had taken a sizeable number of prisoners (3200 IIRC). The next sentence stated that the neighbouring Australian division of the corps “met the Berlin Guards, whom they had previously met at Pozieres on the Somme [i.e. in 1916]; this division took no prisoners”. This is the only case I have come across where an official communique of a “British” (OK, Australian) headquarters in effect affirms a policy of not taking prisoners. I’ve never researched exactly what the Berlin Guards did on the Somme to annoy the Australians – the clear implication of the communique was that everyone (everyone in the corps at least) already knew why they were displeased with the Berlin Guards. (Order quoted from memory.)
My source for the Jewish brigade WWII order is the books on it owned by our mutual friend whose father, though not Jewish, was assigned to the corps as a specialist handling captured Italian 75mm artillery to provide them with mobile fire support. At least two books listed that order. (Ask him direct if you need a more precise text than my imperfect memory. He also has his father’s daily operations log for the unit.)
If she can prove she is genuine, then we should let her back.
If she turns out to be a double agent, then we could use the new slave market options that Daesh is starting, and make something from her actions by selling her back to them.
Natalie, when I said “we”, I meant those of us you were addressing, not the British government – as I have never been nor intend to be part any government. The British government is of course legally obligated to do a whole lot of unsavory things, and you don’t usually nod approvingly saying “yes, they have an obligation”. You do in this case, which tells me you actually prefer them to favor the children of this woman over other children, i.e. you think they have a moral, rather than merely a legal, obligation? Am I wrong?
As far as gov’t assistance (I cannot read the full article without subscribing – haha, sure! – so I cannot tell what help exactly the woman is asking for): this document says “We cannot ‘rescue’ a child, help to remove them
illegally from where they are staying, or illegally facilitate their return to the UK.”
Julie, I claim no expertise in this area (and certainly none with regard to UK law, which is what is at issue in this case), but it is my understanding that a naturalized US citizen can have that citizenship revoked (via “denaturalization”) for a few very limited reasons. Naturally, there is a lengthy process for this, and the standard of proof is very high. Other than lying about relevant facts in your naturalization application, the principal basis for denaturalization is joining a subversive group (such as al Qaeda or ISIS) within 5 years of being granted citizenship. Presumably after that period even ISIS membership would not be grounds for citizenship revocation.
And a natural-born US citizen cannot have his citizenship revoked at all. The only way for such a person to lose his US citizenship is to affirmatively renounce it.
Interestingly, under US law children granted citizenship based on their parent’s status can also lose it if the parent is denaturalized. So if UK law is similar, it is possible that this woman could lose her citizenship and her children could thereby lose theirs, too. Whether this could be achieved while she remains in Syria I don’t know.
For anyone interested, ‘The Economist’ has an article on the Quranic justification for slavery. They do not take the side of freedom to carry out religious injunctions, but take a snide tone suggestive of condemnation of the whole subject! If we can’t allow a convert the right to obey his religion and catch as many slaves as his right hand can gain for himself, then what sort of Islamophobic condition are we coming to, or might have already arrived at!?
I found this article saying that 37 persons have been deprived of British citizenship since January 2013. It says,
Plamus, your question is difficult to answer. The world we live in has nations, governments, laws. Whatever you think of these things in the abstract their existence has built up a net of obligations. I frequently do nod approvingly when people, including government people, fulfil the obligations they are agreed to have. I certainly disapprove when governments fail to fulfil their agreed obligations. In a different imagined world there might be no reason to aid Shukee Begum’s children in preference to equally unfortunate children worldwide.