Sudesh Amman was singularly unsuccessful in his wish to kill kafirs, as he put it, and thereby find himself surrounded by the hoor al ayn — beautiful handmaidens who’ll do anything you want, frankly — in the afterlife. He had perhaps not followed the instructions in the book he had about how to stab people. Two were injured by the madman on Streatham High Road in south London; both, mercifully, should live.
However, Amman was shot dead by plain-clothes policemen before he could even scream out the old ‘Allahu Akbar’ thing. The cops were already there because Amman was known to them — known very well to them. I suppose, under British law, they were required to wait until he’d tried to stab somebody before they shot him. That is perhaps the first law that I would revisit when it comes to jihadi terrorists. I’d find it preferable if we dealt with them when they emerged from their homes. It would save a lot of time. I wonder how many policemen were tracking Amman? Bear in mind that they have at least another 3,000 known jihadis to keep an eye on and you have an indication of the enormous cost imposed on the taxpayer.
Amman was well-known to the security services because he had just been released from prison for terrorist offenses. He had been released, automatically, early — and it is this fact which seems to have caused most outrage. The government is now thinking of ceasing the automatic release of terrorists halfway through their sentences, mindful that some more of them are due for release this year. I am not sure that we are much better off if we simply let the likes of Amman wait another 14 months before enjoying a brief stabbing spree. It seems to me to be missing the point somewhat.
More has emerged about the stabber. He had apparently urged his girlfriend to decapitate his father- and mother-in-law — well, OK, we’ve all been there. He had expressed a wish to kill the ‘filthy kafirs’ and while in prison had voiced a desire to kill an MP. His mum, meanwhile, a lady called Haleema Faraz Khan, insisted that her offspring was a ‘nice polite boy’ who had been radicalized in Belmarsh prison. Given that he was sent to prison for possession of Isis material and the aforementioned book about how to stab people, you may think Mrs Khan a little wide of the mark, certainly on the ‘nice’ bit, although we cannot be certain that he did not wish his victims a cheery ‘good afternoon’ before he plunged the knife in.
Amman is the latest case of a terrorist released from prison, undergoing a spectacularly unsuccessful deradicalization program and then wandering off to murder, or try to murder, kafirs. Usman Khan, who killed two people near London Bridge in November, is perhaps the most infamous. Khan was actually engaged in a deradicalization conference when he decided to have a break and murder a few kafirs.
Have we not grasped that these programs are not terribly effective? Neither the ‘hard’ nor ‘soft’ programs, the latter of which attempt to divert their subjects into developing agreeable hobbies, such as ping-pong or basketry. Nor, pace Mrs Khan, is prison working terribly well. There is no doubt that many are radicalized in such places as Belmarsh. We are not helped by the fact that many imams we allow to minister to these maniacs are followers of the Deobandi sect, which is strictly opposed to integration.
We are also a little hamstrung by our liberalism, as ever. Ian Acheson, who led the independent review of Islamic extremism in our prisons, is opposed to the parole board assessing the threat value of prisoners about to be released and commented: ‘Cultural sensitivity among [prison] staff towards Muslim prisoners has extended beyond the basic requirements of faith observance and could inhibit the effective confrontation of extremist views.’
You would guess that’s about right. But there is another point to be made here. We insist, whenever such terrorist incidents occur, that the attack was ‘nothing to do with Islam’. And yet we are not consistent in this belief. The way in which we treat the perpetrators later always contains a genuflection toward the suggestion that these people are in some way enemy combatants on account of their faith. They are afforded imams, they are quartered with other Muslims, they are sent on deradicalization programs where Muslim community elders address their violent, er, shortcomings.
Why do any of this? If we are serious that these attacks have nothing to do with Islam then let us apply some consistency to this apparent conviction. If somebody wishes to kill as many people as possible because they do not believe precisely what that person believes, and further holds that their reward for doing so will be an endless succession of hoor al ayn, they are clearly mad and should be sectioned, incarcerated permanently as a consequence of their derangement. That is what we would do to someone possessed of similar narcissistic delusions who did not dignify them by recourse to the Qur’an. They are all simply psychopaths, not simple criminals, and should be treated as such.
Wanting to murder us all is surely a conviction rooted in insanity — and given that we have decided the likes of Amman are insane, we can hold them indefinitely and not let them out to be trailed across the country by plain-clothes policemen, waiting for them to stab someone. It would be hard for anyone to oppose such an approach, seeing as it also tidily removes Islam, and thus the wider and blameless Muslim population, from the equation.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the US edition here.
