Post by rmarks1 on Dec 3, 2019 0:46:11 GMT -5
If the most recent terrorist attack in London had been an episode in a satirical novel, it would have been dismissed as too crude or absurd to be plausible.
Last week, Usman Khan attended a conference at Fishmongers’ Hall, a grand location in Central London, marking the fifth anniversary of Learning Together, a rehabilitation program for prisoners run by Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology. Suddenly, Khan, wielding a knife and wearing an imitation suicide vest, went on a rampage, killing a graduate of the institute who helped run the conference and a volunteer worker, as well as injuring three people...
The public discussion in Britain in the wake of Khan’s terrorist attack reveals three superstitions that, thanks to the activities of criminologists, sociologists, psychologists and others, are now deeply ingrained in the minds of Western elites.
The first superstition is that terrorists are ill and are both in need of, and susceptible to, “rehabilitation” — as if there existed some kind of moral physiotherapy that would strengthen their moral fiber, or a psychological vaccine that would immunize them against terrorist inclinations.
The second is that, once terrorists have undergone these technical processes or treatments, it can be known for certain that the treatments have worked, and that it’s possible to assess whether the terrorists still harbor violent desires.
And the third is that there exists a way of monitoring terrorists after their release that will prevent them from carrying out attacks, should they somehow slip through the net.
All three superstitions are false, as the Khan case amply demonstrates, though they have provided much lucrative employment for the college-educated and have contributed greatly to Britain’s deterioration from a comparatively well-ordered society to a society with one of the West’s highest rates of serious crime.
Their broad public acceptance was evident in the remarks of Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who, after the attack, said that terrorists should undergo rehabilitation rather than serve full prison sentences. Meanwhile, the father of the slain young criminologist said that he would not want his son’s death to be “used as a pretext for more draconian sentences.”
The first superstition is that terrorists are ill and are both in need of, and susceptible to, “rehabilitation” — as if there existed some kind of moral physiotherapy that would strengthen their moral fiber, or a psychological vaccine that would immunize them against terrorist inclinations.
The second is that, once terrorists have undergone these technical processes or treatments, it can be known for certain that the treatments have worked, and that it’s possible to assess whether the terrorists still harbor violent desires.
And the third is that there exists a way of monitoring terrorists after their release that will prevent them from carrying out attacks, should they somehow slip through the net.
All three superstitions are false, as the Khan case amply demonstrates, though they have provided much lucrative employment for the college-educated and have contributed greatly to Britain’s deterioration from a comparatively well-ordered society to a society with one of the West’s highest rates of serious crime.
Their broad public acceptance was evident in the remarks of Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who, after the attack, said that terrorists should undergo rehabilitation rather than serve full prison sentences. Meanwhile, the father of the slain young criminologist said that he would not want his son’s death to be “used as a pretext for more draconian sentences.”
Bob