FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 656 16 November 15 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

THE PARIS MASSACRE REQUIRES A PUNISHING RESPONSE BUT HOW?
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‘France is at war’ says newt-like President Hollande. 132 innocent dead plus sundry wounded provide a just cause for hitting back at ISIS. Punishment must follow crime, sure but…how so?

There are three key concepts of punishment. Reform, deterrence and retribution. To ‘reform’ Islamic State is unrealistic. Like trying to reform Satan – a no-no. Deterrence? You can deter by either rewards or threats. Making the Caliphate boys relent by bribing them with earthly delights won’t work. Threatening them with more lethal strikes, deaths galore, as France is doing by bombing Raqqa? But they don’t care about dying. ‘Martyrdom’ they welcome. A delusion, of course. Demons will torment them in the next world. The problem is here and now. What is to be done to deter men potentially ferocious enough to set off a nuclear bomb in London or Rome?

‘Kill them slowly. Make them feel they are dying’, a Roman ruler told the executioner. Even ruthless killers who don’t care about death may worry a tad about how they will die. In medieval England traitors were hung, drawn and quartered. Partial strangulation was followed by castration and disembowelling, the culprit still breathing and conscious. The punishment entailed horrible pain – indeed, the word ‘punishment’ is derived from ‘poena’, Latin meaning pain. Evil-doers must have dreaded the prospect. Be deterred, perhaps?

During the Mexican revolution Pancho Villa had the occasional miscreant stripped, smeared with honey and staked out near an ant-hill. A feast for the insects, infinite torture for the culprit. Chinese punishments were equally prolonged. Dying by one thousand cuts meant the live victim witnessing his own disintegration by a little scalpel over time…Barbarous? Indeed, but you could not underestimate the deterring effect.

Would-be terrorists could also be put off in another way. If the close relatives, the families were made liable to penalties for the actions of their kindred. In ancient Rome the children of Pretorian Guard chief Sejanus, guilty of conspiring against Emperor Tiberius, also suffered death, along with their father. Roman law forbidding the execution of a virgin, Sejanus’ youngest daughter was first deflowered and then strangled. Less horridly, Israelis demolish the house of the families of suicide bombers.

Gruesome and pointless stuff? Yes, because such measures today would be illegal. Collective punishments and torture are against national and international laws. Quite apart from being odious to liberal Western sentiment. Best to look at retribution. Its rationale is impeccable. A matter of strict justice. Philosopher Immanuel Kant, a champion of the Enlightenment, argued that retribution is the only just rationale for punishing a guilty man. Curiously, Kant claimed that punishment meant acknowledging the culprit’s essential humanity, his being, unlike an animal, a person endowed with rights and duties. Not a ‘right’ many offenders would have been eager to claim, I suppose.

The Old Testament demands just and proportionate retribution or retaliation for an offence (‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’) but that's archaic stuff. It is different with the topical, holy Law of Islam. Qasas, the law of equal retribution, protects human life. There are exceptions, however. A wonderful Qur’an verse cited almost ad nauseam these days is: ‘If someone kills a person it is as if he killed the whole mankind’ (5:32). It would more enlightening if people quoted the passage in its entirety: ‘except for someone guilty of murder or for spreading corruption in the land.’ Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Thus, the right to life is not absolute in Sharia. To elucidate, a criminal forfeits his right to life if strict conditions obtain: 1) he must have killed intentionally; 2) he is plotting to overthrow an Islamic government; 3) he/she is a married person who has committed adultery (there are qualifications to this); 4) he has engaged in armed robbery; 5) he has NOT killed someone in jihad, a war ‘fi sabil Allah’, in the way of God.

The slayers of the 132 innocent people would presumably invoke conditions 2 and 5 in justification. ‘We were fighting Jihad. Defending our Caliphate from infidel aggression’, they might claim. What is the legitimacy of the Islamic State in the Levant? I have no killer bullet but prestigious Turkish Imam Fethullah Gulen repudiates the idea that Islam demands believers they should found an Islamic state. Gulen also upholds the immunity of innocent civilians and rejects the notion that jihad can be proclaimed by individual groups. Instead, her stresses the priority of an inner, spiritual struggle over armed combat. Above all, he notes that ‘peace is the default position in Islam’. I fear Gulen would not be flavour of the month in dreary, head-chopping Raqqa, ISIS headquarters in poor Syria.

Some peculiar Western voices mutter that the Paris massacre was payback for ‘racism’. Similarly, extremist Israeli settler Rabbi Dov Lior affirmed that the innocent paid for what ‘Europeans did to our people 70 years ago’. Same warped mindset, I guess. Still, rational and fair people agree that Jihadis have committed a great crime. Justice requires punishment. What form should that take? Discuss!

Should Christians forgive? Irrelevant question. European states, with one or two exceptions, are not guided by Christian ethics. Individual Christians may forgive but ultimately only God can do that. Even Christ, about to be nailed to the Cross, did not say ‘I forgive you’ to his persecutors but prayed for his Father to do that – providing they did not know what they were doing. Something Jihadis know all too well.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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