What's the difference between Shamima Begum and Unity Mitford?

The debate sparked by Josh Baker’s BBC podcast on Shamima Begum, and her teenage flight to join Isis, has divided opinion sharply into two camps. According to one, she was a naive 15-year-old cynically groomed by hardened operatives in the most feared terror organisation in the world. No, says the other, she was a capable girl who – knowing of Isis atrocities – made a highly determined decision to join them. But can’t both things be true at once, as they are for so many young recruits to extremism?

From another era, class and race, we might remember Unity Mitford, who flaunted her admiration of Hitler

Listening, one is immersed in the surreal mix of mundanity and horror which defined Begum’s world after leaving home in London’s Bethnal Green. When interviewed now by Baker, she still reveals a stubborn difficulty in distributing moral weight to the expected places. Among the things she packed for Syria, she recalls, were favourite ‘candies’, because there ‘you cannot find mint chocolate, and that’s tragedy’.