No, Shamima Begum isn’t the victim

The headlines in the Left-wing press in the past few days could not have been more virtuesignalling. “Police should have helped Shamima Begum return to the UK, court told; “Shamima Begum may have been a victim of child trafficking, court told”; “Our shameful betrayal of Shamima Begum”.

Yet the only “shameful betrayal” here is the idea that this former Islamic State bride who travelled to Syria as a teenager in 2015, right, and became a member of a terrorist death cult, is somehow the victim here.

Swapping the burka for a pair of yoga leggings doesn’t change the fact that she hooked up with a gang of medieval mass murderers.

This is a woman, let’s not forget, who described the 2017 Manchester Arena bombings, which killed 22 people, including an eight-year-old child, as “retaliation”.

Journalist Andrew Drury, who has interviewed Begum in Syria six times and says he knows her well, told LBC yesterday: “She wanted to go there ... She was clearly not sex trafficked ... She went to get married. She wasn’t coerced into it ... She wasn’t radicalised.

“There was a group of four girls, together in a playground, who put this up together. I thought she had this radicalisation from an early age – [but] she started searching to go there only a few months before she left.

“She is a narcissist who wanted to be a somebody ... She has no sorrow for what she’s done.”

By all means, argue over her stripped citizenship and debate whether she should return to Britain – but as for her being a “victim”, there is no case to answer.