Silence of imams won’t stop killing
IHAVE spent the last three weeks in Essex following the trial of Ali Harbi Ali, the terrorist who murdered my best friend, the late Sir David Amess, and who received a whole life sentence from the judge. Many have said that the death penalty would be more appropriate but, despite my support for capital punishment, I do not agree.
This man wanted to die in a hail of police bullets and thus, in his warped belief, secure himself a short cut to paradise. Had the State decided to take his life he would have been able to think of himself as a martyr, which is what he told police he wanted to be.
Instead, at the age of 26, he is facing half a century or more of incarceration. His life will be lived between a cell, an exercise yard and prison landings. He will never again walk free in a park or in the countryside, watch the sea, take a holiday, go shopping or enjoy any of the normal activities of the free citizen. He has no prospect of marriage, children or a career.
Daily, hourly, he will live out this punishment with no hope of an end but death itself.
Anybody suspecting that a friend or relative is becoming radicalised should consider that terrible punishment and report the suspicion to the authorities, knowing that it is not only potential victims who will be saved but the radicalised person as well.
SADLY, Ali was reported as a teenager but the follow-up was weak. Yet there were allegedly also later opportunities which were missed. Ali is clever, articulate, educated and well brought-up, but he is unlikely to deradicalise if he is shut up with other terrorists.Yet there is one group of people which really can have an effect: the hundreds of moderate imams in this country who should be shouting from the rooftops that such actions are not the will of Allah, that they do not offer a guarantee of paradise, and that deliberately creating widows and orphans is not the Muslim way.
Will they please speak a bit more loudly?