University of Terror
SOME DAYS ago, a man committed an act of terrorism in the center of London, a city I love.
He ran over several
persons on Westminster Bridge, stabbed a policeman to death and
approached the doors of Parliament, where he was shot dead. All this in
the shadow of the tower of Big Ben, an irresistible photographic target.
It was an
electrifying world-wide news item. Within minutes, Daesh was blamed. But
then the truth came out: the terrorist was a British citizen, a Muslim
convert born in England. From early youth he had committed a string of
petty crimes. He had been in and out of prison several times.
So how did this
individual, of all people, become a religious zealot, a Shahid – a
witness to the truth of Allah, who sacrificed his life for the greatness
of Islam? How had he become the perpetrator of an act that shook Europe
and the world?
BEFORE TRYING to answer this mystifying question, one remark about the effectiveness of "terrorism".
As the term implies, it is a matter of spreading fear. It is a method of achieving a political end by making people afraid.
But why are people
so afraid of terrorists? This has always puzzled me, even when as a boy I
belonged to an organization that was labeled by our British overlords
as "terrorist".
I don't know how
many people died in road accidents in the United Kingdom in the same
month as the Westminster killing. I surmise that the number was vastly
larger. Yet people do not greatly fear road accidents. They do not
refrain from walking out into the street. Dangerous drivers are not held
in preventive detention.
Yet a very small
number of "terrorists" suffices to create a climate of fear throughout
entire countries, entire continents, even the entire globe.
Great Britain should
be the last place in the world to succumb to this totally irrational
fear. In 1940, this small island stood against the colossus of
Nazi-conquered Europe. I remember a stirring poster that was pasted to
the walls in Palestine. It showed the head of Winston Churchill with the
slogan: "Alright Then, Alone!"
Could a lone terrorist with a car and a knife frighten such a country into submission?
To me this sounds
crazy, but this is only a side remark. My purpose here is to throw light
on an institution few people think about: prison.
THE WESTMINSTER
terrorist attack raises a simple question: how did a petty criminal
become a shahid who attracts world-wide attention?
There are many
theories, many of them raised by experts vastly more competent than I.
Religious experts. Cultural experts. Islamist experts. Criminologists.
My own answer is very simple: it's prison that did it.
LETS MOVE as far away from Britain and religion as possible. Let's come back to Israel and our local crime scene.
We often hear of major crimes being committed by people who started as juvenile delinquents.
How does an ordinary person become a chief of organized crime? Where does he study?
Well, in the same place as a British jihadist. Or an Israeli Muslim jihadist, for that matter.
A boy has trouble at
home. Perhaps his father regularly beats up his beloved mother. Perhaps
his mother is a prostitute. Perhaps he is a dumb pupil and his comrades
despise him. Any one of a hundred reasons.
At 14, the boy is
caught stealing. After being warned and released by the police, he
steals again. He is sent to prison. In prison, the most respected
criminals adopt him, perhaps even sexually. He is sent to prison again
and again, and slowly he rises in the invisible prison hierarchy.
He is respected by his fellow prisoners, he has authority. Prison becomes his world, he knows the rules. He feels good.
When he is released,
he returns to being a nobody. Correction personnel treat him as an
object. He longs to go back to his world, the place where he is known
and respected. He is not sent to prison because he has committed a
crime. He commits a crime in order to be sent to prison.
So he commits a
crime, more serious than all before. He becomes a crime boss himself.
When he returns to prison, even the chief warder treats him as an old
acquaintance.
Throughout the
years, prison has acted for this person as a university, a University of
Crime. It is there that he learned all the tricks of the trade, until
he himself becomes a professor.
The little Muslim
thief sent to prison may meet there an incarcerated Muslim preacher, who
convinces him that he is not a despised criminal but one of the few
selected by Allah to destroy the infidels
ALL THIS is old
stuff. I am not revealing anything new. Every inmate, criminologist,
senior police officer, chief prison warder or correction psychologist
knows it, far better than I.
If so, how come nobody does anything about it? Why does prison function today as it did centuries ago?
I suspect the simple answer is: Nobody knows what to do instead.
The British once had a good answer: they sent all criminals, even petty thieves, to Australia. If they did not hang them first.
But in modern times,
even these remedies were abandoned. Australia is now a strong nation,
that sends hapless refugees to remote Pacific islands.
The United States,
the world's foremost power, with some of the best universities, keeps
millions of its citizens in prison, where they turn into hardened
criminals.
Israeli prisons are
bursting with inmates, many of them "terrorists" sent there without
trial. This is euphemistically called "preventive detention" – an
oxymoron if ever there was one.
If one asks a police
officer about the logic of this entire system, he shrugs his shoulder
and answers – the Jewish way – with another question: What else can you
do with them?
So for year after
year, century after century, society has sent its criminals to Crime
University, where they learn to become better and more professional
criminals. Tuition with full board, all expenses paid by the state.
And, of course, a
huge army of prison personnel, policemen and women, experts and
academics depend on this system for their livelihood. Everybody happy.
Prison is not only
counterproductive. It is also inhuman. It turns human beings into zoo
animals. (And these should be liberated, too.)
CURIOUSLY ENOUGH, I was never in prison, though I came close to it several times.
As I have recounted
elsewhere, the chief of Israel's political police (sorry, I mean
"security agency") once proposed to the Prime Minister to put me in
"administrative detention", without involving a judge, as a foreign spy.
This was only prevented by Menachem Begin, the leader of the
opposition, who refused his assent.
Another time was
after my meeting with Yasser Arafat during the siege of Beirut, when the
government officially requested the attorney general to investigate me
for treason. The attorney, a nice person, decided I had committed no
crime. I did not illegally cross any border, since I was invited to
occupied East Beirut by the Israeli army as a newspaper editor. Also,
there was no suspicion that I had the intention of harming the security
of the state.
So I have no
personal experience of prison so far. But the absurdity of the entire
situation has occupied my mind for many years. I made several speeches
about it in the Knesset.
To no avail. No one knows of an alternative.
My late wife,
Rachel, was a teacher. She always refused to move up from the second
grade (age 8). She maintained that at that age the character of a human
being is already fully formed. After that, nothing can be done.
If so, perhaps all efforts should be concentrated on a very early age.
I am sure that
somewhere experiments with other answers are being carried out. Perhaps
in Scandinavia. Or on the island of Fiji.
Isn’t it about time?
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