BY MANDY BALDWIN

Nobody should be surprised at the reaction of Jeremy Corbyn to the announcement that Sally Jones, aka ‘The White Widow’, has been killed in a CIA drone strike. As ever, Corbyn is unable to wholeheartedly condemn terrorists, or terrorism. He seems dimly aware that by not doing so he offends people who he may have to impress in order to gain power, so he wriggles on the hook, vaguely condemning all violence, in such broad terms as to be meaningless.

Killing terrorists is not the same as terrorists killing, just as a surgeon with a scalpel is not the same as a lunatic with a machete. By equating the act of killing mass killers, with the actions of the mass killers themselves, he makes plain where his loyalty actually lies – and it isn’t with liberal western democracy.

Corbyn may feel a certain affinity with Jones. A rich man in his sixties who is still playing at being a revolutionary has much in common with a middle-aged woman who played at being an IS bride to some psychopath twenty-six years her junior: there is the same immature narcissistic personality, a life-long disconnect from reality, a psychotic disregard for the lives of others, a need to shock which would be tragi-comic if it were not so dangerous.

I wouldn’t be wholly surprised if the Double Date from Hell – Corbyn and Abbott, McDonnell and Thornberry – had privately held a two-minute silence for her. Minutes of silence for terrorists are not such distant realities for at least three of them.

While most people rejoiced at the death of Jones, because the world became a little cleaner for her having been removed from it, Corbyn focused on her son, Jojo, thought to have been killed alongside her, in a classic attempt to neuter the armed forces of democracy.

What Corbyn actually wants, of course, is for the society he hates – ours – to be reduced to powerlessness so that the people he hates – us – can simply provide helpless targets for his terrorist friends. In this way, our decency can be our undoing.

Using children as a human shield is a method tried and tested by Corbyn’s Hamas mates, who fire rockets from schools and hospitals, just as Jones and her IS operative husband Junaid Hussein used Jojo. Hussein took care to keep Jojo with him at all times, during two years in which he went about the business of exhorting lunatics in Europe and America to kill ‘infidels’. He was finally ‘got’ by a drone when leaving an internet café in Raqqa, without his step-son.

Jones then continued her work of recruiting female killers, again keeping her son close to hand, believing that the people she despised would allow her to live rather than risk killing him.

How many thousands of lives have been destroyed, in every sense of the word, for the sake of preserving that one child?

Jones spent five years of Jojo’s life – almost half of it – training him to be a monster. He took part in executions. He was indoctrinated into the sick beliefs of the savages who Sally Jones found so exciting.  Pre-pubescent boys are strongly attached to their mothers – and Jojo’s mother was monstrous.

In all honesty, what would have been the outcome, had Jojo been saved while Jones died? Those who think it preferable that Jones survived, rather than risk killing Jojo, what do they think the future would have held for Jojo and those around him, if, say, he could have been brought back alive to the UK after his mother was killed?

Do they imagine he would have settled contentedly into a foster-home, perhaps? Grief-stricken, deliberately warped by the woman he would be grieving, hating his foster parents and everyone he encountered, seeing them all as being responsible for her death, how would he have benefited from going through the ‘care’ system – and at what cost to the carers, and the vulnerable children he would have encountered? And where would he have been educated?

I don’t for one moment imagine that those who wring their hands over the fate of Jojo envisage sending their own children to any school he would be likely to have attended. These people who take pride in the mercy they show, almost invariably expect others to pay the price of that mercy.

An adolescent who has howled to allah before shooting men in the back of the head would not suddenly take an interest in selecting his GCSE subjects. Most likely he would have killed or maimed fellow pupils (or teachers) and, brainwashed into rabid hatred, would at best have presented a moral danger to everyone around him, destroying the peace of mind – and educational opportunities – of kids who, without his permanent excuse for being miserable and disruptive, would simply slide quietly into unhappy failure.

There would have been no welcome mat put out for Jojo because he was of an age to be legally culpable. But let’s assume a clever lawyer managed to get Jojo off the hook, leaving him free to recover from what he had seen and inflicted, free to work through his feelings for his mother. Just how would he process the grief, and the shame?

If he felt true remorse or shame for his actions, then the likely outcome would be suicide at some point along the line.  If he felt no remorse, then he would have a long life ahead, a jihadi celebrity, with countless opportunities to harm others.

Those who posit Jojo as more valuable than all the thousands who Jones and Hussein destroyed, have a skewed morality. There can be no moral high-ground claimed, if saving one person involves destroying many.

We are at war with barbarians who, for the sake of civilisation, must not win.  And for the sake of our own survival, we have to hold ourselves and our culture as more precious than the enemy.