It’s a bad idea to shoot terrorists

You know, people who are afraid will do pretty much anything. Morality goes out the window. It’s kinda the nature of fear – it shuts off all those higher brain functions that make us civilised. That’s how torture works, you know. It’s not the pain: it’s the fear. That’s what causes wartime atrocities. That, and the predator/prey circuitry in the brain, which is simply the flip side of fear. Every demagogue knows it. It’s a permanent truth of human affairs. The only thing more effective is hunger. Or being smothered.

I have an insight into Islamic extremists that most Australians simply don’t have. I was once sincerely religious. I believed in a literal, actual Hell where God would send people to be burned alive forever. I truly did, I thought it was a real thing.

The fear of that place is the bedrock of religious faith. When everything else is stripped away, all the clever arguments, all the chop-logic, it’s that terrifying thought “but what if it’s all true?” that brings the believer back. When you truly, deeply believe in the reality of hell, the one thing you want more than anything else is simply to not be condemned to go there. It’s a background, an undertone to your whole life. Subliminal. It conditions all your choices. Nothing else really matters, in comparison.

Christianity is a bit different from Islam in a couple of respects. In Christianity, everyone deserves to go to hell. Everyone. Deserves. Because Adam ate the apple. Everyone should go to hell, forever. The situation is so absolute that God had to pull some legal sleight-of-hand to make it possible for people to not go there.

But in Islam, Allah works on sort of a points system. Allah is merciful, Allah is forgiving. You can skip a few prayers and make it up later, no problem. All Allah wants is that you be Islamic enough. The problem being, of course, that you can never really know, never really be sure if you have been Islamic enough for Allah.

So you have these young men, and they have lived a western life – not taking the faith all that seriously, drinking occasionally, not being careful to eat hallal, maybe having sex with western whores, it’s no problem: they’ll make it up later.

And then one day they have a crisis of conscience. Maybe they hear a sermon. Maybe they read the Koran. And it all comes crashing back. Oh shit: I’m going to go to hell.

Happily, there’s one thing that makes up for any amount of sin: being killed while committing jihad.

Those terrorists, they want to die. It’s the whole point of the exercise. They want to get shot by the cops. And they are not doing it to spread Islam, they are not really doing it for ISIS, they are not doing it because it’s right, or holy. They are doing it purely and entirely to get their personal ticket to heaven, to avoid the other place. It’s a deeply selfish act, but that’s the nature of fear. Real, bone-deep, religious fear. They don’t care about anything but avoiding the other place.

Killing them is a bad idea. Because it will not deter the next one: it will encourage them. Nonreligious, or conventionally religious people just don’t get it.

Shoot ’em in the leg. Tase ’em. Tackle ’em. Absolutely do not kill them. No matter how much they deserve it. Lock ’em up for life, and never belive a word they say about promising not to do it again. The only thing that will deter these private acts of jihad will be if jihad doesn’t work.