steampunk heart
Uncategorized

Beyond rehabilitation: Terrorists get a second chance, while their victims get none

28-year-old Usman Khan stabbed two people to death and injured three others on Friday, before he was wrestled to the ground by members of the public and shot dead at point-blank range by police on London Bridge. Khan was wearing a fake suicide vest, and the incident is being treated as a terrorist attack by investigators.

Khan was not the archetypal US-style lone-wolf attacker, the kind who one day snaps and opens up on the public with an AR-15. Instead, he was a hate preacher and hardened terrorist who should never have been allowed back on the streets.

Together with a band of jihadists from London, Cardiff and Stoke-on-Trent, Khan was sentenced in 2012 to an indeterminate stretch in prison for his role in a plot to bomb the London Stock Exchange. He had also preached radical Islam on the streets of Stoke,  planned to establish a terrorist training camp on family land in Kashmir, considered executing smaller attacks before the stock exchange hit and, though he was only 19 at the time of his arrest, was considered a “serious jihadi.”

In his sentencing remarks, Mr. Justice Wilkie said that the group were involved in a “serious, long-term venture in terrorism.” Wilkie noted that “these offenders would remain, even after a lengthy term of imprisonment, of such a significant risk that the public could not be adequately protected by their being managed on licence in the community.”

They’re also, in Khan’s case at least, proof that some criminals cannot be rehabilitated. Unlike a robber who, given the right opportunities, can be turned away from robbing, Khan viewed ordinary Britons as “kuffars” and “dogs,” and was bent on waging holy war against the country that gave his family a home, and him a shot at life in the civilized world.

Full article on RT