Mick Hartley

Oh dear.

The former BBC journalist Mishal Husain has questioned whether Shamima Begum would have been treated differently by the media if she were not Muslim.

Husain voiced concerns about the portrayal of Muslims as she delivered the 2025 Romanes Lecture at the University of Oxford in a speech titled “Empire, Identity and the Search for Reason”.

The former Today programme presenter, 52, criticised the BBC and Sky for a lack of duty of care surrounding Begum, who lost her UK citizenship after travelling to Syria in 2015 to support the Islamic State terrorist group.

If she were not Muslim none of this would have happened. If she were not Muslim she wouldn’t have flown to Syria to join ISIS – a vicious death cult inspired by Islamic teaching to behead infidels, take sex slaves, and destroy anything and everything not connected to Islam. It’s possible to have some sympathy for Begum – she was only 15 years old – but being a Muslim is absolutely central to her story.

And the horrors experienced by Yazidi women at the hands of ISIS dwarf anything that Begum went through.