Criminal justice required

Reasonable people can agree to differ on capital punishment. Some see it as a throwback to a barbarism that makes the executioner as much an instrument of murder as the condemned, while others recognise eye-for-eye justice, which isn’t a hard argument to grasp. Some, a few, argue that investing the power of life and death in the state goes too far no matter how much the ultimate penalty is warranted, believing any such authority sooner or later will be abused and, therefore, it is better it not be granted at all. For what one man’s opinion is worth, I’m in that third camp. But not today.

No, definitely not today, when the news has broken that three 9/11 suspects held at Guantanamo have cut plea deals that will see them avoid the death penalty.

You see I was there, in New York and close to Ground Zero when 19 wicked men drove their hijacked planes into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and, thanks to a passenger revolt Allah must not have foreseen, a Pennsylvania paddock. I lost friends that day, killed by what the hate preachers in Lakemba praise as “good Muslims” for waging war on infidels exactly as the Koran’s later entries instruct. Before that, in the chronology of the Koran’s earlier admonitions, Mohammad was all for love and peace, but that lasted only until he had built his band of brigands into a religion, made himself a warlord and embarked on a course of violent conquest that has since seen many victories and defeats but never a renunciation of the admonition that the best means of persuasion is a knife to the throat.

I lost friends that day, killed by what the hate preachers in Lakemba praise as “good Muslims” for waging war on infidels exactly as the Koran’s later entries instruct.

When my son made his First Communion at the Epiphany Church in Grammercy Park, they had to move the coffins from apse to side chapel so the kids could walk to the altar. Those caskets were surprisingly easy to lift because there wasn’t much to be found of the firemen and cops, the fathers of my son’s classmates, after they were crushed, baked in a fire that smouldered for months and finally — a jawbone here, a finger with an engraved wedding ring there — identified and in their small pieces laid to rest.

In a park near the UN days after the massacres, I saw a middle-aged Hispanic woman sobbing and asked if I could help. Her son, she replied, was lost in the rubble and she would never get to wash his body. I wonder today how she has reacted to the news that three of her boy’s killers will spend their days safe, alive, reading their Korans and eating halal courtesy of Uncle Sam and his taxpayers.

Possibly she feels like me. Since Joe Biden’s administration has ruled out the rope, the hope now is that justice resides with members of the Criminal-American community.

Like the prisoner who did for fellow inmate Jeffry Dahmer, perhaps there are other public spirited felons who will, sooner or later, get around to paying down their debts to society by sinking the shiv.

— roger franklin