Jordan's Execution of Radicals a Good Start

What do you call the two Islamic terrorists whom Jordan hanged on Wednesday? A good start. Wherever legally possible, radical Islamic terrorists currently imprisoned should be dispatched. Henceforth, every country on Earth should declare militant Islamic terrorism a capital crime and require prompt executions for anyone convicted of committing or enabling such butchery.

Radical Muslim terrorists should be killed in action. When they are captured, however, they should be interrogated. As soon as their intelligence value is depleted, they promptly should be tried. If convicted, they should be executed the next dawn.

Speeding such terrorist killers and their cadres onto the gallows and before firing squads would yield enormous benefits:

• First. Executing terrorists will remove them from battle — permanently. A malignant tumor that is excised and discarded as medical waste will menace its host no more. Agents of the virulent cancer called Islamic fundamentalism urgently deserve similar treatment.

Islamic terrorists repeatedly have escaped or been released from prison and then resumed jihad. The Center for Security Policy in 2006 helped me detail one dozen terrorist jail breaks after Sept. 11, 2001. In these cases, at least 138 suspected or convicted Islamic extremists fled incarceration in Afghanistan, Russia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Yemen. Collectively, these killers had murdered at least 328 individuals and wounded 518 others.


Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi departed U.S.-run Camp Bucca in Iraq in 2009. He supposedly was an unthreatening, low-level prisoner. Al-Baghdadi joined and now runs, ISIS — an operation whose child sex-slavery, live burials, crucifixions, beheadings, and other savagery inspire nostalgia for the relative restraint of al-Qaida.

Last July a French court convicted nine members of a local terror cell for aiding an Afghan jihadist network. “Some, however, were released due to time served while awaiting trial,” the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. “And some group members had logistical expertise that French police now suspect was put to use in helping” Amedy Coulibaly. Released last March, he killed four hostages at a kosher grocery in Paris on Jan. 8 of this year.

• Second. An executed terrorist is worthless in a hostage exchange. This should discourage Muslim extremists from nabbing people and trying to trade them for their radical comrades behind bars, as ISIS recently attempted with Sajida al-Rishawi. She was the female homicide bomber whom Jordan executed after ISIS burned Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasabeh alive inside a cage.

Israel, of all countries, never learned this lesson. Lacking a death penalty, Israel merely imprisons convicted terrorists. This creates abundant hostage bait. Between 2000 and 2011, the U.S.-Israeli Almagor Terror Victims Association estimates, “released terrorists have murdered over 180 Israeli civilians, while crippling or wounding many others.” In 2011, Israel foolishly traded 1,027 Palestinians for Israeli Sergeant Gilad Shalit. According to Almagor, at least 63 of these butchers subsequently have been arrested for terrorism.

• Third. Widespread — if not universal — executions of Muslim terrorists will demonstrate that Civilization recognizes this existential threat and is serious about annihilating it. Such clarity is needed badly amid Obama’s rhetorical fog. On Tuesday, Obama referred to “whatever ideology” drove ISIS to torch that Jordanian pilot. Perhaps ISIS was fueled by Utilitarianism. Or 19th Century Mercantilism. Or maybe militant Buddhism. As Obama said, “Whatever.”

Such moral obtuseness has become deadly. Routinely executing terrorists will display moral clarity as precisely as a laser slicing through steel. Some may argue that hanging Islamic terrorists will enrage those who survive. It is difficult to imagine these evildoers being further upset with Civilization. Those who, last December, machine-gunned 132 school kids in Pakistan and ignited one of their teachers cannot get any angrier.

In short: Capture, question, convict, kill, and cremate.

Dead terrorists never should go home. Instead, their ashes should be poured very publicly down open manholes. What a fitting resting place for this filth, and what an unmistakable message that Civilization finally will stop monkeying around, swiftly relegating militant Islam to the same sewer in which Nazism and Communism fester.