Good for Jordan

Yesterday morning the news told me that (the country of) Jordan has sentenced seven people to death for the horrendous triple hotel bombings in the capital of Amman last November. Sixty people died in the blasts. One of the soon-to-be-executed is a 35-year-old Iraqi woman named Sajida al-Rishawi, who confessed on Jordanian television shortly afterward that it was (my words begin here) her full intention to annihilate as many unwitting humans as possible. The other six depraved lunatics, one a woman, were sentenced in absentia and remain at large. May karma strike them down where they roam!

The story brings me to my point, which the last sentence begins to illustrate: People who conspire to commit suicide bombings must die; I agree with Jordan on this point. Although I’m an ardent Liberal, I’m not one of the many bleeding hearts that seem to pervade Canadian public opinion.

It is wholly reasonable to think that anyone who is willing and fully prepared to blow up themselves, along with conceivably hundreds of others, has already written their own death sentence. All their country is doing is giving them what they want and had long planned for.

Let there be no mistake: there are countless numbers of offenders, some even hardened criminals, who can be rehabilitated and become contributing members of society. I like the example of TV’s Dog the Bounty Hunter, who was once a genuine American bad ass and now devotes himself to tracking down other hardened – and helpless – criminals. He is a humanist who genuinely tries to appeal to his captives’ better instincts and attempts to empathize with them: “I used to be where you are, brother, and look at me now.”

By the way, Dog never loaded himself with explosives and set about to destroy the lives of innocent bystanders in a marketplace somewhere.

Some – albeit few, I believe – criminals and would be evildoers are far beyond the best psychiatric help money can buy. They will continue to repeat the most heinous acts of recidivism imaginable. In other words, they are so deeply disturbed that no amount of rehabilitation of negative reinforcement will even begin to correct their behaviour. Think for instance of famed serial killer Gary Gilmore, who noted on death row that the only way to stop him from killing again was to kill him outright.

As for suicide bombers who failed to obliterate themselves on their first attempt, I say the faster we weed them out, the faster we can begin to help those who are truly deserving. I’m becoming increasingly convinced that there are people out there who simply need to be wiped off the face of the earth in order to preserve the rest, the best, of the species.

Now I don’t want to play God; nor do I feel I would ever be deserving of the honour. I do hope that something called karma will help us all out. I imagine that karma would see all the world’s suicide bombers-in-training die from strokes, heart attacks, aneurisms, self-inflicted gunshot wounds … alone and quickly, in other words; no time and resources wasted.

In conclusion, I hope all the decent, hard-working Jordanians now hopefully have one less thing to worry about as they leave their homes in the morning, after saying goodbye to their families and setting out to earn an honest day’s wage. I don’t know if they feel as I do on this issue, but nonetheless I wish them all the best. I know they live in a country laden with good people and I pray for their safe passage into each new day.