Jihadists must be kept in quarantine
WHAT is it with politicians? They hit upon a solution that is blazingly obvious and announce a breakthrough that compares with the invention of the wheel. Take terrorists and how to treat them.
The British have had to face and cope with terrorists and killers right across the globe and over centuries. Even in my lifetime we have faced the communists of Malaya (late 1940s), Kenya’s Mau Mau (1950s), EOKA in Cyprus (ditto), IRA (1970s and 1980s). The latest and maddest are the jihadist fanatics of IS.
These are special for two reasons. They want to die after committing mass murder. They never seek to disguise or to defend themselves or flee. They just seek their own death as well as that of their helpless and innocent victims.
And the virus of their bizarre, deranged, pseudo-religious fanaticism spreads through all our societies like a disease, with convert after convert springing seemingly from nowhere. When caught, tried and sentenced, either for committed murder or preparation for it, they go to jail. But in the confines of our prisons the truly fanatical can convert and brainwash those inside for other offences. Thus the prisons become hotbeds of this same deranged creed.
If a contagion appears in a closed environment, it is no more than basic common sense to create quarantine wings for the infected, separated and isolated from the mainstream. So Sam Gyimah, our Prisons Minister, has decided at last that this is what we must do. Well done… at last. But it really isn’t rocket science. Personally I would go further.
Re-converts from IS-worshipping fanaticism back to Muslim normality appear very rare. There are a few who discern the madness and cruelty of the pseudo-religion (not Islam) that demands endless death of every human being not themselves, but they are rare. So why not create entire prisons in which the maniacs can be sequestered, away from a society entitled to defend itself?
If the Black Death or the Great Plague of the Middle Ages reappeared, we would certainly create clinics of rigid quarantine to prevent the virus spreading, even if the sufferers could not be cured.
The madness that causes a petty criminal to drive a bus or truck into a crowd of pedestrians in the name of Allah is absolutely comparable to a transferable pathogen and isolation in a remote island jail may be our only logical response. But the IS-inspired killers should certainly not be allowed to use our prisons as pools of fresh converts.