The Shamima Begum Story, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, Director Joshua Baker.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001j079/the-shamima-begum-story

Elie Wiesel:

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”

Near the end of The Shamima Begum Story, Josh Baker asked her a question we often hear: ‘What would you tell your fifteen-year-old self?’

Shamima’s answer is as you’d expect. ‘Don’t go.’ But the honesty many of us would recognise comes with the afterthought. ‘I probably wouldn’t have listened.’

Ought never is in our fifteen-year-old lives. Not even maybe. I should do more. Be more. But I am indifferent. I am not she-made-her-bed-and-should- lie-in-it school of thought. That would be a hectoring step beyond indifference.

Rationality v Irrationality.

Allow Begum home. If she has committed crimes, she should face trial. The Nuremberg Trials, for example, were a collective response to genocide. They did not include the curious case of a teenage guard at Auschwitz, who fled to America after the war. She married a German Jew. Not surprisingly, telling him little of her past. I’m sick enough to find that quite funny. She later was tried for war crimes in Austria.

The Begum affair is, of course, follows a familiar pattern of how moral outrage becomes moral panic. Like all witch hunts her presence would rot children’s bones.  Her threat is dressed in the modern clothes of an ongoing security crisis. She belonged to ISIS. She will always belong to ISIS. And is likely to commit a terrorist outrage when allowed back into England. This is the ongoing narrative used to exclude refugees. Women and children fleeing war in Ukraine, for example, were classified as a security threat. The Polish government, who took millions of refugees, urged Boris Johnston’s government to help more. Not to take as many women and children as Germany, because that wouldn’t happen, but as many as say a comparable nation, France. In the scramble to deny entry because of paperwork and apparent security issues, government ministers lied and lied again. A Ukrainian family in Paris, for example, hoping to come to London were told to contact government officials in a Paris office that didn’t exist. Passing the buck didn’t work because of media attention.

Begum, born and raised in Bethnal Green, has her right of British Citizenship revoked. An outraged reporter asked if she felt responsible for the children killed at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester Arena. By then Begum was in a refugee camp in the Syrian desert, bordering Turkey. Her guard were Kurds. The Turkish President, Erdogan classifies Kurds as an ongoing threat to Turkish security and terrorists. Begum was no longer stalked by paparazzi and photographed in a hijab. She wore a baseball cap and white t-shirt with a hint of breast. With her long hair and full lips, she looked like a teenager that could have attended the Ariana Grande concert. But she was no longer a teenager. She was pregnant at sixteen and lost five children. Two before birth and three toddlers afterwards. Her son died of pneumonia in a Turkish hospital. She had to have special permission to take her dying child outside the camp to try and save him.

Yes or No questions are a way of shutting down debate. You’re black or white, yes or no? No blacks. No Irish. No dogs. That well-known message scrawled on rooms for rent in London suburbs in the sixties and early seventies. I qualify on the Irish side of things. Perhaps even the dog side. I didn’t get a vote on this. As a non-practicing Catholic, are you responsible for the decades of child abuse perpetuated by members of your clergy? As a Jew, are you responsible for the oppression of Palestine nationals?  Do you feel responsible for children murdered in the Manchester Arena at the Ariana Grande concert?

I can answer no here. I didn’t know who the singer was before the killing of 22 people and the injury of hundreds at the Manchester Arena by a suicide bomber. I was in Scotland. Begum in Syria. With moral outrage few dare to ask questions about the government’s duty of care. Prevention being better than cure. We don’t live in America and allow children handguns.

The bungling by MI5 and MI6.  When three children show up at Gatwick Airport and purchase one-way tickets to Turkey, shouldn’t someone ask questions about security, or even common decency? When three girls spend several days in a bus station in Turkey waiting to meet child smugglers, known to the Canadian secret service, and presumably, therefore, the British intelligence service, shouldn’t they have stopped him? Arrested him?

What if fifteen-year-old Shane MacGowan joined the IRA and hadn’t swapped his white England—until I die—shirt with the three lions for the green of Ireland, and instead of wailing about the New York drunk tank with national treasure Kirsty MacColl?

Every Celtic match supporters sings pro-IRA songs. Listen in.  Every Rangers’ match, until they were repeatedly fined by UEFA on an escalating scale they’d be ‘Up to their knees in Fenian blood. Surrender or you die’. Historically, they favoured the die option.  When I heard about the Brighton bombing, my only regret was they didn’t get Thatcher. ‘Ding-Dong the witch is dead,’ was a tweet when she died. By then I felt sorry for her, she’d Alzheimer’s disease. I could change my mind. But I was largely indifferent. The damage was done. I’d new hate figures in the Laurel and Hardy of British politics, Cameron and Osborne. The moron’s moron and 45^th American President. Boris Johnston and all his lies and likes.

Shamima Begum is not allowed to change her mind, or that shows she’s lying. Even changing her clothes makes her suspect. I feel sorry for her. She wants to come back and live in Great Britain, where she was born. I’d let her, but I’m indifferent. If you want to get worked up about that I don’t really care about that either. As a rule of thumb, whatever position the moron’s moron and Nigel Farage unofficial leader of the Tory Party takes, I take the opposite view. What about you?

Notes: 

At 15, Shamima Begum left London to join the terror group Islamic State. It made global headlines. She and her two friends became known as the Bethnal Green Girls. Four years later, pregnant with her third child, Begum emerged from the ashes of the so-called caliphate, desperate to come home. But she showed little remorse for her time with the group. The British government decided she was a threat and took away her citizenship, leaving her in a Syrian prison camp. Her lawyers claim she is a victim of trafficking and should be allowed to return to the UK.

For the first time, she’s given her account of what happened since 2014 to investigative journalist Josh Baker. He’s been following her story since the day she left, trying to understand what really happened. For more than a year, he’s retraced her journey, piecing together where she went, who she met and what she did while she was living with IS to try and find out the truth about Shamima Begum’s story.

Vice, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, Writer and Director Adam McKay.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0011p18/vice

Described as comedy-drama, a biographical film about former US vice-president Dick Cheney. Christian Bale won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of the most powerful vice-president in modern history. There is a contemporary joke that nobody is ever called Dick, but that’s about it.

There is nothing funny about Vice. At a push, I could probably name most of the President since the first wold war since it mostly involves saying Roosevelt over and over.

Vice President can become Presidents. General Eisenhower and Harry Truman spring to mind. And if you take a circular route, Republican, Vice President Richard Nixon finally got his feet under the desk at the Oval Office. Most were in agreement Vice was no more than a token job. A bit like being the President’s wife. Good for photoshoots and opening fetes.

Kamala Harris’s power, in contrast, lies her ability to cast a tie-breaking vote in a split Senate. But really, she’s waiting for Joe Biden to die so she can step into a real job.

Robert A. Caro shows how Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) spiralled into depression when his attempts to control the Senate were rebuffed and his attempt to manipulate the new American President, and darling of the media, John F. Kennedy were swatted aside with a smile. The man that had once controlled Congress and Senate reduced to a comic figure that was left out of briefings in the new Camelot.

Vice follows the path of an American boy made good. Lynne Cheney (Amy Adams) telling him after a couple of drink driving convictions and barroom fights he was on the road to nowhere. He better ship up or ship out. He did both, while staying out of Vietnam and the armed forces on deferments.

Like LBJ, Cheney had a talent for politics. In one scene, he asks another intern what party  guest-speaker Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell) belongs to. When told he’s a Republican, he says he’s a Republican too.

When working for Rumsfeld as an intern he asks him Cheney what he believes in. Here’s the joke part of the film. Rumsfeld slaps him on the back and laughs so long and hard, the viewer knows it’s a joke. The purpose of power is power.

https://odonnellgrunting.wordpress.com/2020/11/02/greg-palast-how-to-steal-the-presidency-and-get-away-with-it-scorecard-2000-1/

Realpolitik. Rumsfeld points to a closed door. He tells Cheney behind it is Nixon and Defense Secretary Henry Kissinger are having an unofficial meeting. When the meeting was finished tens of thousands of Vietnamese would die. Subtext. They are plotting mass murderer.

Drawing a line in the sand, Cheney gave his support to gay marriages since one of his two daughters, Mary (Alison Pill) came out as gay.  

There were other shifting lines in the sand. He was a hawkish Secretary of Defense (1989–1993) following the precepts of the Eisenhower Doctrine—any (oil rich) Middle Eastern country could request American economic assistance or aid from U.S. military forces if it was being threatened by armed aggression. 1^st August 1990, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein sent Iraqi forces into neighbouring oil-rich Kuwait.

President George W Bush (senior) unleashed coalition (mainly US) forces in Desert Storm under the command of General Norman Schwarzkopf. February 24. Within 100 hours, Iraqi forces had been expelled from Kuwait in the ground war. With aerial dominance, they were sitting ducks.

[Not in the film, but worth quoting Cheney’s perceptive response to the invasion of Baghdad, in the first Gulf War: how many American dead is Saddam worth?]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney

 ‘Because if we’d gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it – eastern Iraq – the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq. The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families – it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.’

Vice Presidency (2001–2009).

We all know about what’s now called 9/11.

https://odonnellgrunting.wordpress.com/2021/09/05/9-11-inside-the-presidents-war-room-bbc-1-bbc-iplayer-produced-and-directed-by-adam-wishart/

But if you asked me who the Vice President was at the time, I couldn’t have answered. The tone of the film is set early. George W. Bush (junior) (Sam Rockwell) is in the air metaphorically and literally when the planes hit The Twin Towers. Dick Cheney takes charge of the 9/11 fallout.  

But Dick Cheney had always been—more of less—in charge. The coup that LBJ had attempted had failed, but Cheney was the real power in American politics. The dithering George W Bush President, but the Vice President pulling the strings. Ironically, the power grab going in the other direction. The American President grabbing more executive power as the Twin Towers fell. Extra-ordinary rendition. Repealing the Geneva Convension. Spying on American citizens.

The invasion of Afghanistan was payback for 9/11.

Payback for his old bosses at Halliburton Corporation by adding billions of dollars to shareholder value. The invasion of Iraq’s oil-rich fields with evidence from a list drawn up before Saddam Hussein was found to have mass weapons of destruction—he didn’t have and links to Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaida hidden network in the paperwork with the weapons of mass destruction.  

Cheney, a hawk abroad, and conservative at home. No surprise with his fortune coming from a fossil fuel, Times 500 Company, he helped in the pushback for the ideas of global warming. He helped reframe the debate, through think-tanks sponsored by Times 500 companies as simply climate change, which sound much more palatable and less threatening. The kind of idea picked up the moron’s moron.

Cheney endorsed Trump in the 2016 Presidential election, but didn’t shut his eyes to how he got elected. Russian interference, or what he moron’s moron would call Russian help from their cyber networks, Cheney classified as ‘an act of war’. But he’d also have to have declared war on that American institution Facebook that cashed the cyber cheques made in Russia and created the images of hate that polluted politics (from a very low base which Cheney’s think-tanks helped fuel) and still does.

The film ends with the viewer finding out the narrator of the film is the man that provided Cheney with a new heart after his failed. I guess they should have saved it and given it to someone more deserving. But money talks loudest. Worth a look, but don’t expect to giggle.  

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