ArgumentLiberal Professors’ Deadly Delusions about Curing Terrorists
Last Friday, Usman Khan, a 28-year-old British national who was released from prison on parole in December 2018 after serving eight years for terrorism offenses, killed two people a machete near London Bridge. Earlier in the day, at the same site, he had attended an alumni celebration event hosted by the organizers of Cambridge University’s Learning Together program, having been invited to share his experiences as a former prisoner.Simon Cottee writes that the question raised by Khan, who was killed by police as he fled the scene of his attack, is about redemption and whether it’s either right or prudent to give convicted terrorists a second chance. “I have some degree of sympathy for this view [that everyone should be given second chance], but it needs to be massively tempered with a keen sense of not just what is right but also what is prudent” he writes.
The British filmmaker Chris Morris has made a career of depicting the inanities of jihadis or the agencies that try to track and ensnare them. Simon Cottee writes in Foreign Policy that if he wanted to depict the idiocies of the people who share his political views – those who belong to the liberal-left, broadly conceived—he could do worse than to set it in an academic institution run by “well-meaning progressives who believe that everyone, even convicted jihadis who once professed to love death more than life, can be reformed and brought back into the liberal fold.”
Cottee’s writes the question such depiction of well-meaning progressives in academia will never be made because of its politically incorrect plotline, but something resembling this idea occurred last Friday, when Usman Khan, a 28-year-old British national who was released from prison on parole in December 2018 after serving eight years for terrorism offenses, killed two people a machete near London Bridge. Earlier in the day, at the same site, he had attended an alumni celebration event hosted by the organizers of Cambridge University’s Learning Together program, having been invited to share his experiences as a former prisoner.
Cottee writes:
My own university at Kent, where I lecture in criminology, runs a similar course to the Learning Together one, titled Inside-Out. It is decent and popular and well run, and I know from direct experience just how beneficial such an initiative can be for everyone involved…. And some will no doubt be highly unsuitable: notably, pedophiles, rapists, and recently convicted terrorists. Quite what Khan was doing anywhere near the Learning Together program is unclear, and the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge will need to account for this and much else to do with their program.
The bigger question raised by Khan, who was killed by police as he fled the scene of his attack, is about redemption and whether it’s either right or prudent to give convicted terrorists a second chance. I do not think I’m exaggerating when I say that the consensus among my liberal criminology colleagues both in Britain and the United Sates is that everyone should be given a second chance, especially Muslim males who may have had limited life chances to begin with. I have some degree of sympathy for this view, but it needs to be massively tempered with a keen sense of not just what is right but also what is prudent.
