The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is infamous for openly showing bias towards anti-Semitic elements and radical Islamic jihadists. Now it has found a new hero in Islamic State (ISIS) bride Shamima Begum, who during her days with those ISIS thugs was enjoying beheading of innocent people as well as rape, cruelty and destruction on “enemies of Allah”. Through this, the BBC has exposed its rotten culture of always aligning with rogue agendas.

It may be mentioned here that the BBC has rolled out a prime-time documentary as well as a superabundantly detailed ten-part podcast series on the story of ISIS bride Shamima Begum, whose path to celebrity has been unconventional. She has become the object of the BBC’s lavish affections by fleeing Britain to join the Islamic State (ISIS) at age fifteen, becoming a jihadist bride, showing no remorse for the atrocities of her jihadists darlings and colleagues, and being consequently denied the right to return to Britain.

As Rolling Stone magazine did with Boston Marathon jihadist bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, The Times’ Saturday magazine has published a glamor shot of Shamima Begum on its cover to help publicize the BBC series.

In the twisted culture of the far Left of which the BBC and Rolling Stone are foremost exponents, an Islamic jihadist who hates his or her home country is a hero, and any action law enforcement authorities take against the jihadist only enhances the “warrior of Allah’s” victimhood status, and thus in turn only magnifies the jihadist’s celebrity status in the West.

Commenting on BBC’s massive coverage to Shamima Begum, Neil Davenport in an article titled ‘The grotesque rehabilitation of Shamima Begum’ wrote in ‘Spiked’:

Anyone following the past week’s coverage could be forgiven for thinking that Shamima is the victim, rather than the villain of her story. The fact that Begum was a footsoldier of a movement responsible for unspeakable carnage and suffering is treated almost as a footnote. No space, it seems, could be found to give voice to the families whose lives have been destroyed by ISIS killers.

In this round of interviews, Begum’s answers are noticeably more practised than they were in 2019, when she was first discovered by journalists in a Syrian refugee camp. Back then, Begum showed no remorse for joining ISIS. Speaking to The Times, she even declared her support for Islamic State’s 2017 bombing of the Manchester Arena, arguing that it was a retaliatory attack against the enemies of Islam.

Now Begum’s story is that she was ‘groomed’ to join ISIS. She claims she was totally unaware of its atrocities before she arrived in Syria in 2015 and that she played no role in its barbarism in her time there. She also claims she has given up on Islamism and wants to return to a normal life. The media have presented these recent claims in a largely sympathetic light and with remarkably little pushback. However, she has made the odd unguarded comment, giving us a glimpse of the zealotry still lurking beneath the surface.

According to counterterrorism expert and write Robert Spencer: “The BBC insisted that it was not simply offering up a puff piece on Shamima Begum, and would look at her critically, but the very fact that the documentary and podcast series exist at all demonstrates the BBC’s intention: to make British people think positively of Shamima Begum, and get her back into the country. Consider, for comparison’s sake, the fact that the BBC wouldn’t be caught dead featuring a foe of jihad terror in a 10-part podcast or in any sort of treatment at all except an attack piece full of critical quotes from Leftist jihad enablers and Islamic supremacists”.

Journalist Zoe Strimpel wrote in The Telegraph:

Shamima Begum – the schoolgirl who, aged 15, left her East London home in 2015 for Syria to become an Isis bride – is thin, young, and has striking features. I can see no other reason why she has now become something of a cover star, gracing the front page of a magazine and looking sultry on the BBC website, which is now promoting a new documentary about her: The Shamima Begum Story.

British journalist Brittany Chain wrote in The Daily Mail:

[Shamima] Begum, now 23, has made several highly publicized attempts to return to the UK andrestore her reputation after the Home Secretary stripped her of her British citizenship in 2019.

But critics say the BBC has been ‘parading her as if she is some sort of celebrity’ for views. Viewers of The Shamima Begum Story last night accused the broadcaster of presenting the jihadi bride as a ‘vulnerable young girl’ with ‘beautifully staged, moody shots, ominous back track and tearful pieces to camera’.

Journalist Aliki Kraterou wrote in The Sun:

Former Brit ISIS bride Shamima Begum has been slammed for faking remorse as her controversial podcast has sparked fury.

… But journalist and filmmaker Andrew Drury who met Begum seven times over the course of a year doubts her show of remorse is genuine.

Despite initially believing she was a trafficking victim, he described her as manipulative” and said she has “no remorse”.

Andrew Drury told the Times: “She sees herself as a victim now but she told me quite clearly it was her choice to go [to Syria] and she went of her own free will.

“She is a narcissist. She wants to be a somebody. Now she sees herself as a celebrity”.

Josh Salisbury wrote in the Evening Standard:

ISIS bride Shamima Begum has been accused of false remorse by a documentary filmmaker who travelled to meet her.

Ms Begum, originally from Bethnal Green, left the UK as a schoolgirl to join Islamic State in Syria and was later stripped of her British citizenship by the British government.

She is fighting to have it reinstated, claiming she was trafficked.

Documentary-maker Andrew Drury, who has spoken to the 23-year-old on several occasions, claimed Begum was a “narcissist” and questioned her remorse.

… She told the podcast that she accepts she is viewed “as a danger, as a risk”, but blamed her portrayal in the media.

She said: “I’m just so much more than ISIS and I’m so much more than everything I’ve been through”.

Frank Haviland, a regular columnist for various UK publications wrote in The European Conservative:

… If Begum has fallen off your radar, allow me to jog your memory. This is the woman who “wasn’t fazed” by the sight of severed heads in bins, nor suffered any pangs of remorse when interviewed four years on. She claimed the Manchester Arena bombing was “justified”, and that she was not aware ISIS was a death cult. She claims she never did anything “dangerous” in Syria, although witnesses confirm she was a cruel enforcer for the morality police, who also sewed men into suicide vests. 

It is of course impossible to gauge what proportion of the BBC’s diversity quota is allocated for returning jihadis, but what is clear is that the current thinking at Broadcasting House is that it’s “best to be ahead of the game”. 

While BBC Sounds has quite understandably drawn widespread public condemnation for handing Begum a platform, on a personal note I consider her story to be unquestionably of public interest. A gritty, unadorned exposé of precisely who her contacts were, how she found them, and most crucially, why she decided to join ISIS in the first place, would go a long way to connecting the dots our politicians seem incapable of. It could also serve to ensure such tragedies are less likely in future. Indeed, the BBC alludes to this in response to such criticism: “This is not a platform for Shamima Begum to give her unchallenged story. This is a robust, public interest investigation into who she really is and what she really did”.

So, does the podcast live up to its promise? In a word, no. The first clue is the subtitle: “Seeking to separate fact from fiction, the multi award-winning series returns to investigate the divisive story of Shamima Begum”.

The story of Shamima Begum is not divisive in any sense of the word. Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Farage are divisive; ISIS is not. If anything, Begum is a unifying figure: eight out of ten Brits support the revocation of her citizenship, and have no desire to ever see her back upon our shores.

Journalist Richard Ashmore wrote in The Express:

… In those first interviews with Loyd, Begum infamously said “when I saw my first severed head in a bin it didn’t faze me at all” and how the gruesome trophy was from “an enemy of Islam”. Just days later in an interview with the BBC Begum went on to say there was “justification” for the Manchester Bombings because of ISIS losses in Syria and Iraq, calling it a “a two-way thing”.

Interviews with Begum grew in short supply from this point as she appeared to lose trust in the media.

Despite such criticism and condemnation, BBC remains unapologetic. It does not want to accept and admit its rogue decision of spending UK tax-payer’s money towards giving propaganda to a notorious jihadist bride. Similarly, BBC has no shame in showing its nefarious bias towards Islamist jihadists, while it has recently also played a nasty trick of defaming Bharatiya Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The above circumstances evidently prove – BBC has gone rogue!