It may sound like inviting the fox into the henhouse, but some Westerners want to welcome returning Islamic State (IS) fighters and brides into their countries. This problem is so bad in Sweden, in fact, that one politician just said that the nation has become for jihadis “what Argentina was for Nazis.”
As Sputnik reports:
During a televised debate on jihadis retuning to Sweden, Moderate MP Hanif Bali has lashed out against the government’s passive attitude toward extremism and the lax laws allowing terrorists to go unpunished.
“These [jihadist] trips have been happening for several years now, but you haven’t done anything”, Bali told Green Party spokesman Rasmus Ling, whose party has been part of the Swedish government during Europe’s migrant crisis and enacted laws that led to the current situation.
Bali called it offensive that there are people whose parents have been slaughtered by terrorists and who are stuck in refugee camps in Syria, and Sweden chooses to take care of terrorists instead.
“I believe we should make it as difficult as possible for them to come here. They have actually lost of the right to call themselves Swedes”, Bali told national broadcaster SVT.
As a reminder, IS is a group that engaged in mass murder, torture, and beheading; that burned people alive and drowned them in cages; and that reportedly even fed 250 Christian children into an industrial dough-kneading machine. That its members and enablers should be kept out of the West is a no-brainer.
Despite this, these people who stained deserts red sometimes have advocates who would almost roll out a red carpet for them. A current case involves unrepentant IS bride Shamima Begum, who said she had no regrets and “was not fazed by seeing ‘beheaded heads’ in bins,” reports the BBC.
Yet she still wants to return to the United Kingdom, which she left in 2015 to join IS.
Begum is like many Western-born IS jihadis: She wants to return not because she had a change of heart, but because IS had a change in fortune. Having lost virtually all its territory, its short-lived caliphate is dead.
Whether Begum will be allowed to live in Britain is a question. But enough IS jihadis have returned so that the high cost of monitoring them ensures, unbelievably, that most roam free, reports Breitbart.
Then there’s IS bride Hoda Muthana, who not only wants to “come home” to Alabama and has the Hamas-linked Council of American-Islamic Relations and others advocating her, but also wants American taxpayers to foot the bill for her “therapy.” So, ironically, this Muslim jihadist epitomizes a Jewish word: chutzpah.
Next is Jack “Jihadi Jack” Letts, who admitted that at the time of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, he thought they were “a good thing.” He now says he has had a change of heart and wants to return to Britain or Canada (he has dual citizenship).
But Sweden, once known for Vikings but now for Viqueens, takes the cake. One of its ministers, Alice Bah Kuhnke, said in 2017 that returning IS fighters should be “integrated” into the country. In fact, the Swedish city of Lund had announced already in 2016 that it would do just that, with a program offering jihadis housing, employment, education, and financial support.
Officials likened it to rehabilitating those leaving neo-Nazi groups or organized crime. This ignores, however, a profound difference: These people traveled to a foreign land to fight for/enable a group bent on the conquest of all — including their nation of birth.
Nonetheless, “‘Sweden has become what Argentina was for the Nazis,’” Sputnik reports Bali as saying. “‘Only, after World War II, they actually introduced retroactive legislation and got the Nazis sentenced. Had [the Swedish government] been in power then, no Nazis would have been convicted,’ Bali stressed, highlighting the absence of convictions despite the ongoing return of Daesh* [IS] renegades from the Middle East.”
Bali also tweeted February 16 that the “IS females who are now begging to be retrieved should be left there to rot. Completely irrelevant is whether their jihadi children are ‘innocent’. If you want to still your conscience, you can adopt one of the thousands of Yazidi orphaned war children instead.”
This is a good point. With limited resources available for charity and a world of needy people, we should consider that the “hand that rocks the cradle rules the world,” as poet William Ross Wallace wrote. Do we really want IS jihadis rocking cradles in the West?
Yet, unsurprisingly, some Swedish leftists have responded to Bali by doubling down, with Aftonbladet columnist Jonna Sima calling his comments “unethical” and advocating an increase of “support to foreign fighters,” Sputnik tells us.
This is despite warnings from experts. As Sputnik also relates, jihadis who have traveled to the Mideast “‘from the West are the most dangerous, [sic] they are the ones you should beware of. They are the most radical, the most brainwashed and they have no limits’, former intelligence officer Jesper Söder told TV4.”
This isn’t surprising. Western-origination jihadis are usually converts, either in the traditional sense or in that of finally getting serious about their birth faith. This explains why they, driven by conviction, willingly travel thousands of miles to fight in a war.
But not all convictions are equal, as evidenced by a comprehensive German study of 45,000 immigrant youths that was reported in 2010. It found that while increasing religiosity among the Christian youths made them less violent, increasing religiosity among the Muslim youths actually made them more violent.
Then there are leftist convictions. As philosopher G. K. Chesterton wrote, the Christian “virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.” What group does the last sentence describe?
Some of the (ex?) jihadis, such as Jack Letts, are actually pitiable. Yet pity and charity must be balanced with the virtues of justice and prudence. Moreover, some humility is in order, too. If the leftists possessed it and did some honest soul-searching, they might realize that their culturally suicidal calls, cloaked as pity, are perhaps just the exercise of their own vanity.
Photo: Jan-Schneckenhaus/iStock/Getty Images Plus
