Terror Recidivism

How, actually, to deal with sentencing people to long terms of imprisonment, knowing on the record that their criminal behaviour has become so ingrained, so deeply a part of their psyche through their deep belief that a higher order has instructed them to act as they do, that once no longer incarcerated they will turn again to their terrorist intent?

Imprisonment for people who have surrendered their humanity to the higher concept of fulfilling a theocratic command, becomes a hiatus in their search for fulfilment. They enter imprisonment and their hatred festers and grows, ensuring once they have paid their debt to the society they sought to harm, they will return remorselessly to their original purpose, doubly resolved.

People so immersed in the pathology of grievance that their beliefs are utterly impregnable. No amount of exposure to arguments that might belie the 'instructions' or interpretations of holy scripture they absorb will have any effect on them. They spurn all attempts at remediation, because their mental security in the belief of a holy spirit leading them to act on behalf of the greater good comforts them and confirms their instinct to strike.

Saudi Arabia has sought to give intensive anti-jihad instruction to terrorists in that country that they have identified and arrested. It most surely must be the humane thing to do, to attempt to counteract the effects of radicalism by re-introducing dedicated jihadists to the very hadiths that were used to convince them that Allah gave instruction to the faithful to attack and murder non-believers.

Yet it's that country's strict adherence to a fundamentalist strain of Islam that led in part to the situation now being faced across the world by Islamist jihadists determined to do their part to extend and enlarge the Ummah, to bring a universal caliphate as of yore to the larger world, under Sharia law. Their generous funding of madrassas from Pakistan to North America inspired the growth of violent jihad.

Perhaps that re-education coming from a strictly conforming Wahhabist form of Islam resonates with fundamentalist Muslims, who may allow themselves to be convinced and to relent in their determined onslaughts on Western and Muslim targets in the fulfilment of their jihadist threats. But those convicted in democratic countries of the West can be guaranteed to be incorrigible.

Rehabilitation is possible only when those attempting to reach the rational intelligence of a jihadist can persuade him that his violence isn't serving the cause of Islam. There is nothing rational in the passion of violent jihad. Is it likely that any source in the West would be successful in reaching a level of interior awareness attempting to rehabilitate a dedicated jihadist?

They can attain to their level of savage intent only by persuading themselves through the influence of those they trust, that their enemies are legion, intent on destroying them first, and they are, in any event, corrupt and inhuman. When their enmity can reach the fever pitch of roiling hatred by the example of Iran's supreme leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini's describing of non-Muslims as fecal matter, the dehumanization ritual is complete.

Bearing in mind that young men and women don't become raving hate-monsters out of the ether. They become steeped in the legends of ancient religious animosities and warfare, connect to the figures whose memory is venerated as a champion of their religion. Aided and abetted by a deeply abiding cultural tradition that families treasure in raising their young.

Insuring their initial vulnerability to later indoctrination through religious parochial schools, by rogue clerics on the search for converts to violent jihad, and through myriad links on Internet sites.