My latest in PJ Media:
London Bridge jihad murderer Usman Khan was at an event sponsored by Cambridge University Friday, a prisoner rehabilitation conference, when he suddenly decided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the “deradicalization” process: Khan stabbed Jack Merritt, 25, to death at what the Daily Mail called a “prisoner rehabilitation conference that paired jailed killers with students and held creative writing workshops.”
But there’s nothing to worry about here. Jack Merritt’s father, David Merritt, is still a true believer in Britain’s failed multiculturalist project: he wrote that Jack “would not wish his death to be used as the pretext for more draconian sentences or for detaining people unnecessarily.” Apparently, David Merritt would want jihadis in Britain today to be treated exactly the way Usman Khan was, that is, with credulous leniency. ITV News reported Saturday that Khan got onto the track that led him to the program where he killed Jack Merritt when he “penned a letter from his jail cell asking to take part in a deradicalisation course to become ‘a good British citizen.’”
Predictably, British authorities, ever anxious to avoid charges of “Islamophobia,” fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
Khan’s deceitful cry for help came in October 2012, “after his conviction for plotting to blow up the London Stock Exchange as a member of an al Qaida-inspired group.” While he was in prison, he wrote to British authorities, saying he wanted to “learn Islam and its teachings” through a “deradicalidation [sic] course.” Khan added: “I would like to do such a course so I can prove to the authorities, my family and soicity [sic] in general that I don’t carry the views I had before my arrest and also I can prove that at the time I was immature, and now I am much more mature and want to live my life as a good Muslim and also a good citizen of Britain.”
His request was granted. And Khan is no means the first “deradicalized” Muslim to return to the jihad. Deradicalization programs have been implemented elsewhere, notably in Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia’s deradicalization program is worse than a failure: terror analyst Paul Sperry wrote in the New York Post several years ago that “counterterrorism experts have long suspected Saudi Arabia’s ‘rehabilitation’ center for terrorists does a poor job of de-radicalizing jihadists. But a Saudi detainee at Guantanamo Bay now reveals it’s actually a recruiting and training factory for jihad.”
There is much more. Read the rest here.