Originally a comment by Ben Finney on Maajid Nawaz takes this moment to salute Gita Sahgal.
zubanel, #4:
I’m saying disregard the religious element as essential and focus on murderers.
So, we focus on those who have already killed? We are to direct our attention away from the ideas that strongly compel them to premeditated murder of strangers?
That doesn’t do it for me. I want to detect potential murderers before they do murder, and obligate them to not murder.
For that, we need to focus on the ideas which compel some people to murder — and that inevitably requires that we spend a lot of attention on combating Islam, which is a set of ideas that explicitly and actively compels people to do murder.
There is no need to invoke “monster” for these people because they are all too human. They are simply, incurably, one-dimensionally uncivilized.
Again, I can only point out to you that there are many people – the person named in this piece being a prime example – who were devoted to religious ideas compelling premeditated murder of strangers, and yet they were cured and civilised to the point of not holding those ideas any more.
To write off such people as “simply, incurably, one-dimensionally uncivilized” and to advocate killing them, is to kill people like Maajid Nawaz before they have a chance to change.
That would be an unacceptable loss. Killing is only going to lead to more motivation for killing. Whereas counter-jihadi propaganda from organisations like Quilliam – which can only exist because we don’t apply your hopeless ideas – will prevent killing. I know which I would prefer.