RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/01/save-us-from-secular-redeemers/

One of the most troubling aspects of what, as I write this, is the latest Islamist terrorist attack in London, is the reaction to it of Mr David Merritt, father of one of the murdered victims, a young man who believed that he was helping to “rehabilitate” his own murderer, and that he, or others like him, had succeeded in doing so. Mr Merritt said he hoped that his son’s death would not be used to promote more “draconian” sentences.

But what constitutes a draconian sentence for a man who plots seriously to blow up the stock exchange, assassinate a prominent politician, bomb synagogues and kill rabbis, and set up a training camp for terrorists to do more of the same? Such a man is a mass, and probably serial mass, killer in the making. By his remarks, therefore, Mr Merritt implied that freeing such a man after eight years in prison had been the right thing to do, even if it entailed the death of his own son.

Let us try for a moment to imagine what effect his remarks would have on an aspiring Muslim terrorist. This is difficult, of course, but it is one of the things that having an imagination is for: to see ourselves as others see us.

The aspiring Muslim terrorist, having usually participated in what he comes to regard as the Sodom and Gomorrah of Western life, suddenly comes to think that Islam at its most puritanical and uncompromising is the indubitable answer to life’s problems. This is a stupid thing to think, no doubt, but there is no doctrine so stupid that it is incapable of inspiring fanaticism. Our aspiring terrorist believes that it is his duty, as well as his pleasure, to impose his vision of virtue on the world, even to the point of martyrdom rewarded by the kind of genteel or cleaned-up Sodom and Gomorrah in the sky that is his conception of paradise.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15536/uk-jihadists-released-early

“We cannot have the situation…where an offender — a known risk to innocent members of the public — is released early by automatic process of law without any oversight by the Parole Board. — UK Secretary of State for Justice.

“When I was a constable, I could arrest and process a suspect in an hour, maximum. Today, it takes a day or more…. The police are mired in bureaucracy, while the judicial system has become an institutional cloud-cuckoo land.” — Philip Flower, former chief superintendent with the Metropolitan Police, Daily Mail.

“Bluntly, how would you feel if you were told to keep track of known terrorists who have been released from prison to satisfy the politically correct assumptions of our justice system?” — Philip Flower, former chief superintendent with the Metropolitan Police, Daily Mail.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has vowed to toughen sentencing guidelines for convicted terrorists after a newly-released prisoner carried out a jihadist attack in London.

On February 2, Sudesh Amman, a 20-year-old jihadist from Harrow in north-west London, stabbed two people in a knife rampage on Streatham High Road before he was shot dead by police. He had been released from prison just days earlier after serving less than half of his sentence for terrorism offenses.

Amman, who was carrying a 10-inch kitchen knife, wearing a fake suicide bomber vest, and shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the Greatest”), had been under active police surveillance at the time of the attack, which London police described as an “Islamist-related terrorist incident.”

In December 2018, Amman was sentenced to three years and four months in prison after pleading guilty to 13 counts of expressing support for Islamist terrorism and possessing and sharing Islamic State and al-Qaeda propaganda. He was 18 years old at the time.